UK Coaching

The big question

How do you keep children active when coaching focuses on performance, rather than experience?

What we did

Children in the UK are increasingly dropping out of sport, with only 47.8% meeting the recommended 60 minutes of daily activity.

UK Coaching, on behalf of the Children’s Coaching Collaborative, wanted to change this by mobilising coaches to adopt a child-first approach — one that puts individual enjoyment at the foundation of a child’s development in sport.

Play Their Way was created to lead this shift, and we were tasked with creating a strategy and marketing content to mobilise coaches to join it.

How we did it

Centred on coaches, the audience we needed to mobilise, we identified the barriers to behaviour change:

• Misconceptions about what putting children first in sport actually meant
• Disconnect from what was being asked of them by their own governing bodies
• Time-poor coaches who are largely volunteers or working in multiple jobs.

To address this, using the COM-B model for behaviour change, we built a grassroots strategy focused on breaking down these barriers:

• Relatable content, easy to understand and apply
• Peer-to-peer communication rather than authority- or organisation-led messaging
• All brought together with a compelling reason why coaches should do this.

What we launched

Annually, from 2024, we created multiple pieces of content with coaches, explaining what child-first coaching meant and why it works, using relatable examples from their own practice.

With the AI boom in full swing, this was purposefully delivered in a human way, with coaches addressing the challenges they faced in being child-first, as well as how they overcame them.

By year three, we turned to play itself, the universal way we discover and learn, and asked why, as we grow, it pivots from being how we learn about the world as infants to simply a reward or a break.

Fundamentally, this framed why child-first matters in a way relatable to everyone, changing the way coaches think about their practice to the benefit of the children in their sessions, and keeping children happy and healthy in sport.

The result

Over three years of content, with growing results, we’ve established Play Their Way as a serious movement for the behaviour change needed to keep kids in sport.

The campaign drove:

• 23m impressions
• 160k clicks
• 13k + coaches signed up to the movement.

After the campaign, polling was conducted to understand attitude change in coaches. Results are drawn from an independent qualitative study commissioned by Play Their Way, with 500 coaches surveyed over three years (2023–2025).

The results showed:

• 4 in 5 surveyed coaches felt more confident in child-first practices (Oct 2025, up from 31% since Feb 2023)
• 17% rise in coaches reconsidering how they coach
• 89% of coaches claim to have taken an action as a result of the campaign
• 52% of coaches were reported to have been delivering child-first coaching behaviours after seeing the campaign
• Recall of the campaign increased year-on-year: 61% (2024) → 70% 2025 (target 60%).

The coaches represented a broad range of sports, experience levels, age groups of children and young people coached, backgrounds, and both paid and volunteer roles.