As we anticipate what sport will bring us in 2025, we might be tempted to look ahead to the major international tournaments in rugby, cricket and football. But there’s another space to consider, less glamorous but absolutely vital, where sport is making an increasingly significant contribution to society – the growing cadre of sportsmen and women working as mentors in support of young people facing challenges and disadvantages.
Organisations such as the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust (DKHT), Dallaglio Rugbyworks, Football Beyond Borders and Streetgames use sportsmen and women to provide support, encouragement and a trusted connection for young people trapped in complex adverse situations around the country. Just turning up at a sports session isn’t enough; it’s about creating a relationship with a trusted mentor within that setting.
Successive governments constantly rediscover that there is no straightforward solution to support those “hardest to reach”. Disadvantage and inequality have many different faces. Solutions need to flex for each individual and address multiple issues over a sustained period of time. Sport is no panacea, but as the Centre for Social Justice’s 2023 report “Game Changer” demonstrated, sport’s power is that it can work on multiple levels and bring physical, mental, emotional and social benefits in a single setting. It’s time for current ministers to reread that report to see how sport offers an effective tool for social change.
Sports clubs and physical activity groups in many areas are becoming more than simply somewhere a child comes to have fun, get active and learn more about a sport. In many cases they offer a safe haven where children can connect and build relationships, find care and comfort, and a way to get back on track. It’s less about learning the finer points of a forehand or backhand and more about finding someone who will listen.
Coaches do increasingly important work in this area, often fulfilling more of a youth worker role than technical sports expert. And alongside them, a largely invisible but increasingly crucial army of sports mentors is growing around the country. Largely unsung heroes, scrappily funded, but using the valuable life skills and insights they gained from sport, they are reaching out to young people struggling to find their way.
The mentors themselves have often found their own path thanks to sport, whether involved at grassroots or elite levels. The Dame Kelly Holmes Trust trains athletes to bring their highly developed qualities of discipline, responsibility and perseverance to young people needing support (and help themselves find purpose beyond their own sporting careers). Other charities including the Youth Sport Trust, Greenhouse Sports, Sport4Life and Tackle London all realise the power of using sports mentors as one of the most effective ways to help support reach young people at risk.
Catherine Baker, vice-chair at DKHT, explained to me how sport reaches young people in ways that traditional methods can’t. “Sports people always seem ‘cool’, they have a status in the eyes of other young people and yet at the same time can be so much more approachable than other adults.” Baker emphasises the importance of matching athletes with similar backgrounds to those they are working with. Holmes herself is the ultimate role model in this space, experiencing care homes and periods of self-harm and now living proof of how athletes can make a broader contribution to society.
Pushed further on why sport can have so much impact, Baker highlighted how even in a single sports session, a young person can take part in an activity or learn a part of a sports skill that they think they can’t do and make tangible progress. Whether it’s rugby, parkour or tennis, this experience can be the catalyst to realising that this could happen in other parts of their lives. The mentors are then on hand to develop these beliefs and behaviours to apply to their everyday challenges. It’s the consistency of support that a mentoring relationship brings that enables a young person to raise their aspirations and create a path towards them. There is a golden opportunity for the government to challenge decades-old assumptions about sports’ contribution to society, largely focused on entertainment value, national pride in winning medals and profitability of the Premier League. Sport sits at the end of a row of issues brought together in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with what little time there is for sport seemingly sucked up in planning the football regulator.
But as ministers look for ways to make Whitehall become more effective and work better cross-departmentally to tackle pressing social challenges, sport is an area that could offer a meaningful way of testing how to work differently across remits for health, education and community building.
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Within sport, there is work for its leaders to integrate the deeper transformational potential of sport into the heart of the work they do. Traditionally, sports have counted numbers of members, commercial deals and medals or trophies, focusing on “inputs” and “outputs” in a narrow sporting context.
It’s time to think much more about “lasting outcomes” and define greater ambitions for sport. How could international success bring lasting benefits for struggling communities? How could successful athletes be set up to excel after their sporting careers? How will a new sponsorship deal increase the health of your sport at all levels? With your members, how could you understand and improve the impact of your sport on their lives to set up lifelong engagement? Perhaps most crucially, what could you do to open up your sport to others who would benefit from joining your community? In other words, start 2025 with the double-headed question: what can your sport do for society, and what does society need from your sport?
As you ponder who will be the greatest sporting heroes this year, look instead to consider which of our sports will use its strengths and values to contribute off the pitch too. Become curious about the growing group of sportsmen and women behind the scenes with the same tireless work ethic and commitment as those who’ll lift trophies in 2025, who are using the attitudes, behaviours and experiences gained from sport to empower young people facing disadvantages across our communities.
This might just be sport’s greatest contribution to the nation this year and one that will outlast the medal and league tables by some considerable way.
