Digital represents a real challenge for the community sport core delivery model that is place-based and face-to-face. As 'Connected Fitness' and AI-powered experiences evolve, what does the digital future for community sport look like?
Community sport done right is almost 100% place-based and human-powered: Strategy, Funding, Programmes, Partners, Coaches (or Volunteers), Facilities, Participants, Sessions, Activity or Intervention, and Impact. The model is global, and proven to work, though inherently difficult to scale and pivoting on the ‘Coach’ as key human resources to be hired and nurtured.
Meanwhile ‘digital’ or connected fitness and health - whether represented by companies like Strava, Peloton, health and wellbeing ‘apps’, or gyms with monitors, screens and ‘digitally engaged' customers - is a growth sector; post-covid, AI-powered, with exemplary and expensive production values.
So what does ‘digital’ mean for Community Sport? This is not an easy question and we don't pretend to have an easy answer. Done right, digital must embody, enhance, augment but not replace the existing essence or DNA that makes community sport what it already is. It should take the ‘best’ from digital fitness and health, but make it into a ‘natural’ and complementary layer or experience for the regular, place-based, coach-delivered core experience. A kind of ‘Peloton for the People’, but also with elements of e-learning, wellbeing and ‘love’ thrown in, with social and human impact and evaluation built-in from the ground up.
As a data partner, we may not end up being responsible for all of this, but we are committed to being part of it.