Our mission
Not at a complex thirty minutes away. Not on a team you have to try out for. In the neighborhood, on the courts and fields and pools that are already there and mostly empty.
The problem
Daily PE participation among American high school students fell sharply between 1991 and 1995 and has been essentially flat ever since. Nothing replaced it. What grew instead was a paid youth-sports industry that sorts children early, charges more every year, and quietly leaves out the ones who cannot travel, cannot pay, or are not good enough yet.
Meanwhile childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes and adolescent anxiety all moved the other way.
A child should not need a car, a tryout, or a thousand dollars to be coached well.
What we do
The PLAY Standard — 36 character lessons across four pillars, each authored three times for three age bands, adapted to nine sports. Published in full, free, for anyone.
Background screening, safeguarding training, written escalation rules, and a handbook that tells a coach what to say and when to stop and call someone.
Underwrite programming at communities that could not otherwise pay for it, and measure whether it worked honestly enough to report to a funder.
How we are built
Play Academy Foundation, Inc. is a Florida nonprofit corporation. It writes the curriculum, trains to it, raises the money and reports the outcomes.
Programming is delivered under contract by Play Academy, a separate company whose certified coaches serve residential communities across thirteen states. Keeping delivery and funding in separate entities is deliberate: it means the Foundation can hold the standard without also being the employer, and a donor can see exactly what their gift bought.
How to hold us to it
Document 12 grades every claim behind this program as strong, mixed, or advocacy — and names four things we will not put in a grant application because the research does not support them. It is an unusual thing for an organization to publish about itself. It is also the fastest way for you to decide whether to trust the rest.
We are small enough that you will get one. Tell us what you need and we will write back within two business days.