Knowledge Nuggets

Canadian soccer superstar Alphonso Davies, who plays for FC Bayern Munich and Team Canada, arrived in Canada as a refugee when he was 5 years old. “Refugees need our support to survive, but also access to education and sports, so they can fulfil their potential and truly thrive,” says Davies, who was appointed as a...

Father’s Day is this Sunday! Although entering parenthood can be an exciting time, it comes with new challenges and responsibilities. This can often limit the amount of physical activity that fathers partake in. Research shows that fathers who maintain optimal physical activity levels have better physical and mental health, enhanced positive father-child bonding, and are...

With limited resources for research initiatives, partnering with external research or community groups can increase a sport organization’s capacity to conduct concussion injury prevention work. Developing initiatives with these partners, such as universities and hospitals, can help sport organizations gain access to trained staff capable of taking on some of the research burden.

To improve mental health, teens (13 to 15 years old) need more exercise and less screen time. New research shows that adolescents’ mental wellbeing declines with more than 1 hour of recreational screen time a day. On the other hand, daily exercise has been consistently shown to help improve teens’ mental health and life satisfaction.

Most triathletes use a “positive” pacing strategy, where they gradually decrease their speed as the race progresses. However, research shows that starting slower or staying at a constant speed leads to better results. By adopting a more conservative pacing strategy, triathletes and coaches can improve race performance.

Using an evidence-based approach, the Coaching Association of Canada (CAC) developed tools to improve the experiences of coaches in mentorship programs. Training for Effective Mentees is a free resource that equips mentees with the knowledge, connections, and tools to create a better mentorship experience.

Encouraging youth to try multiple sports increases their odds of staying active into adulthood and doesn’t interfere with their chances of reaching high levels of performance. But trying multiple sports means that youth will eventually drop out of at least some of these sports, and existing sport participation models rarely (if ever) discuss sport withdrawal...

“I think that sport has unique evaluation opportunities in that you can measure things like confidence. You might not spot that change in confidence unless you measure these skills at baseline and share that information with the kids.” In the SIRC blog, Chris Penrose, Director of Programs and Operations of Lay-Up Youth Basketball, discusses how...

The issues that face sport organizations are complex. A sport organization board needs to engage in dialogue, listen to its full spectrum of stakeholders, and be patient enough to transform its understanding of complicated issues. A steward-leader board is uniquely equipped to listen and lead to a desirable future.

Transformational allyship is activism, rather than just an awareness of systemic injustices. Researchers suggest that sport organizations can play an important role in transformational allyship at the institutional level. By being intentional, culturally conscious, and courageous, sport organizations can proactively address injustices in sport and society.