When it comes to helping improve the activity levels, health and wellbeing for young people, we can often overthink things. Young people have strong ideas about what’s important to them. Fun, challenge and personal growth are top of the list.

They also show us all the time that there’s ways of moving and challenging themselves that they love. Tag is something that all kids (and most animals) will participate in, and we should pay attention to that! Tag is something which is coded into us growing up to help us practise important ways of moving, thinking and feeling which we’ll need throughout our lives.

From fear, to navigating high speeds and direction changes, young bodies benefit from participating in tag in many ways. Most importantly, kids love it and enjoy it, which should be the first sign it’s something we should pay attention to.

One of the reasons that tag is important for young people, and a reason they do it, is because it’s a risk taking activity. Young people are naturally driven to take risks because it helps them build confidence, judgement and expose themselves to fear and uncertainty. This builds a tolerance to it and resilience to face adversity throughout their lives. Young people who don’t get to participate in risk taking, or are constrained by adults, end up worse off with less resilience and success driven behaviour.

Tag lets young people take hundreds of risks in short amounts of time, navigating environments, anticipating another person’s thoughts or movements, speeding up, changing direction, all of it! Tag is a great way to build up risk intelligence and resilience in a way that young people understand and enjoy.

When young people are participating in tag, they’re also dealing with the consequences of it. Being chased, or chasing another person exposes us to anxiety in the form of thrilling excitement. This is the same mechanics as fear, and helps us to build up a tolerance to that feeling, as well as strategies to overcome it. There’s a neurological process that happens in our brains when we feel stress and fear which toughens us to future occurrences, and when we experience it when we’re young we become more resilient.

By providing an environment where we can help young people feel those feelings in a non-critical way, and guide them through it and teach them powerful strategies, we can harness all of the benefits of these moments, and avoid the negative side like unnecessary harm.

However there will always be spills alongside the thrills! You have to “pay to play” so they say! From the physical discomfort of putting your body on the line in a sport to the emotional experience of losing, there’s always a downside to getting into sport. But this is not only a price worth paying, but part of the lesson. Life isn’t always easy or fair, we can lose for reasons out of our control, and others can win when they don’t work as hard! Exploring all of this is just as important as the fun side of things.

Tag is also highly accessible. The very youngest of kids will participate in it quickly and easily, and that’s true for all young people even if disabled or with neurodiversity. It’s accessible because it’s simple, easy to understand and has very few arbitrary rules. It’s not open to interpretation or judgement, because when you’re tagged you’re tagged!

When you combine this with a community, and guidance you can create a powerful new way of doing sport which is easy to access, has few barriers to participation and can really create an inclusive environment, rather than simply creating “special” leagues where those who struggle with a sports many rules and requirements have to play away from others.

This is what Chase Tag seeks to do as a sport, be a place for everyone to challenge themselves, explore different ways of thinking and moving and promote a community of health, wellbeing, resilience and excellence.

Chase Tag lets us navigate the tough emotions around winning and losing. Powered by Risky Kids programming and science, we use the sport of Chase Tag to create opportunities to do just this, and teach young people different ways of thinking and feeling and help them build personal strategies around these moments.

Whether navigating the feeling of losing, understanding the nature of winning, avoiding washout and burnout and all of the emotions that come with setting and getting goals, at Chase Tag we build an important set of skills that won’t just help a young person be better at their sport, but better at life.

When we face tough emotions, we have the opportunity to develop tough skills. To become better, stronger versions of ourselves and then make our worlds a better place, as well as the lives of others. What more could we want from a sport?