Self-competitive sports can make public play spaces truly inclusive
What would we wish for playgrounds—and recreation at large—to achieve for society in the 21st century?
This question is both complicated and simple because the objectives are clear: fostering creative play, creating playmates, including the differently able, offering non-aggressive activities with no body contact or bullying or intimidation, teaching non-aggression and civility, and keeping kids fit and healthy by getting them out of their chairs, away from screens, and into the outdoors.
Put simply, communities want children to move and to cultivate a high regard for a lifetime of movement. These are straightforward and uncomplicated objectives. But the best way to achieve them is another matter. It’s easy to understand why the term “inclusive playground” is at best a contradiction of terms because playgrounds with ramps and climbing exclude wheelchair users, the differently able, and soon enough, virtually all children who quickly outgrow “inclusive playgrounds” because there are often no challenging amenities. Tic-Tac-Toe lowered for a wheelchair—is that the appropriate exercise, the desired movement, and the feature that will convince families to return?
Beyond Ball-playing
There are important nuances and subtleties between the concept of play and the venues we call playgrounds. The concept of play evokes important distinctions such as purposeful play and spontaneous play, individual play and team play, competitive and noncompetitive play, self-competitive play and opponent-competitive play, as well as the critical distinctions between facilities and programs. These differentiators fall within the broader meaning of play.
It's also useful to observe what’s known about playgrounds, playcourts, and playfields. Playgrounds are intended for younger, preschool children. They are outfitted with ramps and platforms. Unfortunately, for a child in a wheelchair, there is not much to do—or to think about—except to be rolled in and rolled out. (And take part in a photo-op!) The crawling and climbing structures of a conventional playground, even if accessible, marginalize children who are differently able inside the playground as much as outside. Although children outgrow playgrounds rather quickly, they serve as a gathering point for neighborhood children and families, and many playgrounds are particularly attractive aesthetically, but perennially short on play and self-improvement.
Ball-playing playgrounds, and virtually any game with a ball, require movement—chasing a ball, throwing, rebounding, retrieving, shooting—and a play area for ball-playing generates many times more movement than playgrounds without a ball. But ball-playing sports such as baseball, football, soccer, and tennis are age-limited, restricted to a sliver of the population, and, perhaps worst of all, even potentially psychologically damaging, especially for perennial losers.
In his well-researched book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition, author and lecturer Alfie Kohn argues that competition creates more losers than winners. It does not create or advance non-aggressive, non-contact cooperation when there are opponents to defeat. Above all, that’s the rub. Losers walk away defeated. That is not what is intended with play or with a playground. Kohn shows this focus on competition is not life-enhancing but damaging instead.
Kohn is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of American society, drawing from social-science research.
He writes, “Thus, it is that Vince Lombardi is famous for his comment, ‘Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.' His conviction must be understood not merely as the expression of one football coach’s fanaticism, but as a capsule description of our entire culture. Our lives are not merely affected by, but structured upon, the need to be ‘better than.’”
He continues, “We seem to have reached a point where doing our jobs, educating our children, and even relaxing on the weekends have to take place in the context of a struggle where some must lose. That there might be other ways to do these things is difficult to imagine, or it would be if we were sufficiently reflective about our competitiveness to think of alternatives in the first place. Mostly, we just accept it as ‘the way of life.’ And, as expressed by social psychologist Elliott Aronson, ‘Competition is almost our state religion.’ Others have used similar expressions: Competition ‘is an American cultural addiction.’ Others have said, ‘Resistance to competition is viewed as suspiciously un-American.’”
Often enough, conventional as well as “inclusive” playgrounds segue into highly competitive “playfields.” Unfortunately, that reality conforms to “our way of life.” Our playfields are generally ball-playing facilities; most are well-established in the panoply of activities offered by a community: basketball, net sports, football, and soccer, for which budgets, space, and attention are generously allocated, many would say disproportionately.
Fast-moving sports and recreation are, by definition, discriminatory by marginalizing the differently able. These are sports that are opponent-based and competitive rather than non- or self-competitive. Often, they are body-banging! However, sports without brutal contact—that is, ball-playing sports based on self-competition, such as golf, bowling, and Bankshot, are intentionally and perceptibly being advanced in some enlightened quarters. As Kohn puts it, “Competition is a deeply ingrained, profoundly enduring part of our lives, and it is time to look more closely at what it does to us.”
Self-competitive sports—sports without opponents—enable mobility-impaired folks and individuals with developmental disabilities to participate with their families in a drop-in, walk-on facility that is accessible and inclusive anytime for all the members of a household.
There is finally recognition of the need for many other, and many more, playcourts, playfields, and playgrounds that are non-competitive, non–contact, and non-aggressive. What can convey inclusion better than that formula?