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If you’re reading this article, you likely want to start improving the diversity, equity, and inclusion on your team or at your school, but you’re simply not sure how or where to begin. There’s no better time than April, which is officially recognized as Celebrate Diversity Month.
Below, a trio of TrueSport experts share their best advice for leading effective DE&I efforts on your team.
1. Understand Your Role as a Team Leader
“If you are going to be a leader on your team, I think it's important to not avoid hard topics, and you need to have a social justice and a compassion-driven mentality,” says Kevin Chapman. “You also need to pay attention to what people are saying and whether people are being excluded. That could be in language, or it could be noticing the makeup of your team as a whole.
“As a team leader, you can also acknowledge and celebrate that you are all different,” Chapman said. “Everyone on a team is important and unique. As a leader, it's essential that you recognize that not everyone shares the same experience that you do. We all vary in our socialization, demographic, sexual orientation, spirituality, and race. We all come from different places, and many of us have multiple identities.”
2. Start With a Team Audit
“The team audit is a tool to help you get started,” Nadia Kyba said. “Look at your team as a whole and ask where there are issues that need to be addressed. Is there diversity on the team? If not, why not? Can that be addressed? Are you considering what barriers might exist to joining the team? Is the team hosting practices on days when certain religious groups can’t practice, or charging high prices for uniforms or extra training camps? What are the issues that could prevent the team from being a welcoming place for everyone?”
3. Remember, Nothing About Them Without Them
“When picking an area of focus, remember, nothing about them without them,” Kyba said. “For example, if you want to learn more about the Black Lives Matter movement, you need to go to the source and not just make up your own ideas.” Do you want to address the obstacles that make it hard for Black students to participate in school sports? Before you plan any specific actions, bring Black students to the table.
4. Identify One Area of Focus
“After a team audit, you may be feeling pulled in several different directions,” Kyba said. “That’s difficult to negotiate because each area is important. But if you try to focus on everything at once, you will likely not see much change." Instead, pick one area of focus, like bringing more women into the school's athletics program, for example, and choose activities that will directly impact that area.”
5. Identify Activities
It’s great to have a team with strong values around diversity, equity, and inclusion, but without action, those values can fall flat. Once you’ve selected an area of focus, now you can work with the team to come up with ideas for activities to improve the situation. To improve women’s participation, for instance, a team could do ‘recruitment’ in clubs and classes that tend to be more women-dominant, or host open practices for women to see how they like the sport before committing, or even add in field trips to professional women’s sporting events.
6. Start Small
Once again, it’s worth pointing out that you may come up with a list of 25 activities, but you don’t need to do them all at once. “You can't do 800 fundraisers,” Kyba said. “As a team, you may decide that there's one activity that you want to focus on first, such as adding land acknowledgments at the beginning of every competition.” After a few successful events, the team can pick the next activity to add.
7. Make it Fun
While some activities like land acknowledgements, reconciliation ceremonies, or protests are more serious in nature, remember that DE&I efforts can have elements of fun too. “Doing things that are tangentially sport-related like going to a college women’s lacrosse game together or making a list of podcasts or books that are written by women athletes can be fun team bonding activities in addition to helping make positive change,” Kyba said.
8. Push Against Pushback
While these efforts are obviously positive and necessary, there is a chance that some people may push back against your efforts and suggest focusing solely on practice and competition. “It is up to each person on the team whether they want to be involved, but hopefully you’ll be able to find something that resonates for everyone,” Kyba said. “If you do have members who are skeptical, it’s worth asking them what their concerns are and what’s giving them pause. They may simply be concerned that the team won’t be as focused on competing. In that case, you can remind them that a team that’s more inclusive and unified is going to play better.”
To that point, it is worth noting that while DE&I efforts are important from a human standpoint first and foremost, they truly do make teams stronger in competition as well. “Team cohesion leads to team success,” said Michele LaBotz. “If you’re not making an effort to make a team diverse and inclusive, you’ll likely end up with a team that has bullies and cliques, and that’s very destructive in terms of performance.”
Takeaway
Starting a DE&I effort on your team can feel overwhelming but there are ways to make it manageable and effect real change. And remember, in everything you do, nothing about them without them.
About TrueSport
TrueSport®, a movement powered by the experience and values of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, champions the positive values and life lessons learned through youth sport. TrueSport inspires athletes, coaches, parents, and administrators to change the culture of youth sport through active engagement and thoughtful curriculum based on cornerstone lessons of sportsmanship, character-building, and clean and healthy performance, while also creating leaders across communities through sport. For more expert-driven articles and materials, visit TrueSport’s comprehensive LEARN resource.
