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Abstract: Sport is critical to the health and well-being of youth, especially those who are socially vulnerable. COVID-19, however, brought challenges to the design and implementation of youth sport programs. The paper details the three adaptions of LiFEsports that ensured youth could continue to learn social skills through sport during the pandemic. In addition to describing how the programs were modified, we provide descriptive findings showing how youth participants responded to the adapted programs and compare participant responses to those from pre-pandemic versions of LiFEsports camps to illustrate the quality of the adapted programs were comparable. Efforts to improve implementation fidelity are needed, yet some innovations are important to leverage for virtual and at-home sport programming.
Keywords: COVID-19; youth sports; positive youth development
Participation in sport, recreation, and leisure activities contributes to the overall health and well-being of youth, especially those living in poverty and/or identify as people of color (Whitley et al., 2019). COVID-19 brought significant challenges in relation to the design and implementation of sport, recreation, and leisure programs. As a result, there has been a significant drop in the number of positive youth development (PYD) offerings available to youth, as well as declines in overall sport participation and physical activity since the onset of the pandemic (Dorsch et al., 2021). Additionally, COVID-19 caused many essential services such as schools, childcares, and food banks to be limited or even shut down. Socially vulnerable youth were exposed to increased risks, were disproportionately impacted by the closings, and yet were most in need of PYD programming (Duque, 2020; Gabrielli & Lund, 2020; Rosenthal et al., 2020; Sanderson & Brown, 2020). The goal of this paper was to demonstrate how one sport-based PYD program, called Learning in Fitness and Education through Sports (LiFEsports, www.lifesports.osu.edu), adapted its curriculum and programming during the pandemic. We include details on how the programs were modified, provide descriptive findings showing how participants responded to the adapted programs, and compare participant responses to those from pre-pandemic versions of LiFEsports camps to illustrate the quality of the adapted programs were comparable. Finally, lessons learned from adapting to the demands of the pandemic are shared, and implications for how some innovations resulting from the pandemic will continue at LiFEsports post-pandemic.
COVID-19 and Youth...