Reimagining Youth Sports + National Sport Sampling Day #legacybuilding

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavloski. All right, welcome back to the Legacy All Stars podcast where we shine a light on those using their platform to uplift, transform and make the world a better place. Today's guests are Steve and Carrie Boyle. They are the visionary co founders behind 241Care Inc. And a global nonprofit on a mission to put play back into sports and make youth development more inclusive, joyful and impactful. Founded In West Hartford, Connecticut, 241 started as a local summer camp and has since grown into a year round movement reaching thousands of children annually across North America, Africa and beyond. At its core is the belief that life is too short for just one sport. Through award winning 2:4:1 sports programming and innovative top self platform, they use multi sports sampling to foster physical literacy, mental well being and social emotional growth, especially in underserved communities. Steve and Carey bring passion, purpose and partnership to everything they do. And just around the corner is a very exciting event. The national celebration. They helped launch National Sports Sampling Day. This is more than a conversation about athletics. It's about equity, access, joy and legacy. Let's dive right in and talk. You two have built this incredible movement together. But let's go back. How did the idea for 2:4:1 originally come about and how did you know it was more than just a summer camp?

Wow. Well, we share the origin story all the time, but we don't always do it together. So I never normally start with the origin story being that maybe it started with Carrie dad, who I'm sure she'll talk about at some point. I call him the original two four one er. But you know, we met and I was teaching in New York City and I was during the summer was running a camp for kids with cancer. And I actually asked Kerry to marry me at that camp in front of all the kids. Thankfully, she said yes over 32 years ago.

Did you get down on your knee? I mean, come on, let's see.

Oh, we did the whole thing. I had kids with roses. It was, it was pretty cool. But what really tied us together was our love of sports. And you know, Carrie will tell you that she would listen to reel to reel football tapes and stuff like that. But you fast forward to when we had our own children here in West Hartford. And we were just starting off as working parents who were trying to get their kids involved in sports because it was something that was really important to both of us. And our oldest daughter, who's 29 now, tried out for a local youth travel soccer team. And we get the call that night after the tryout, your daughter's our number one prospect. And we were like, she's eight years old, she's always prospect, you know. But he goes on about the Brazilian style of play and how she's going to fit into the system. And then all of a sudden I said, well, look, Carey played lacrosse in college and Atlanta's showing some interest in lacrosse. Can you tell us what the conflict will be like in the spring? Weird. Radio silence says to me, hold on a second, as if he's going to go talk to the guy in the back of the car dealership. And he comes back on and says, we're no longer interested in your daughter. So went from number one prospect to no longer interested simply because as an eight year old, she showed interest in a sport that her mother had grown up playing. And that night we came up with the tagline, life's too short for just one sport. And Carrie was an athletic director at a local school. We had daughters, we did it for girls. And that really how it started, it was just mom and pop summer camp. We were both working. We had no idea that almost 20 years later we'd be sitting on a podcast with someone like you talking about the work that's going on around the globe. But magic happens with moments of outrage.

You know, yeah, I'm going to go off script a little bit because not that we have a script, but I will say that, you know, there's a lot of major athletes talking about multi sports now, and, you know, LeBron James being one of them, really advocating for kids having a well rounded background. The name 241 is unique. Does that have something to do with the love of multiple opportunities or. Tell me about the significance of the 241 philosophy.

Yeah, I mean, I think what we're all about is depending on, you know, who we're working with, is giving kids an opportunity to try not only the sport that they may already love, but, but try something new. And we also found in our summer camps, we did attract early on some kids that were specializing in a sport, but their parents were like, I don't really feel comfortable about this. And what we found that those kids, those campers learned is it's great to be the best soccer player, but then when they moved to basketball, they were not the best. You know, they were struggling. And so it gave them an understanding of, wow, I know what it's like for some of my teammates who aren't as good as I am on my team because I feel that way right now. Even though I'm a decent athlete, I'm struggling here trying to make a basket. So I think, you know, it was eye opening even for the kids that came through the camp to really kind of walk in the shoes of others, you know, that they maybe hadn't as specialized athletes.

Yeah, I love that. That's great. What makes the 2:4:1 approach to youth sports so different than traditional models? I mean you mentioned about making sure kids have an opportunity to put themselves in other shoes and realize that maybe not being the best at everything gives them some chance to get more broadened in their approach. But what is it different about that? And also Steve, can you address the top self platform and what it does?

Sure. It's somewhat two parted but one of the things like, you know, the expression experience is the best teacher. Right. You know, so that's why we love talking to young parents at this point. Because believe me, if we had some do overs, we'd probably do some things that are different. But there's that whole fomo, right, of what if my kid doesn't make the B team or you know, whatever. So, you know, two, four one Life's too short for just one sport. We started out very much just around anti specialization. We started to creep into this concept of physical literacy because the concept was going on around the globe. It's basically the ability, confidence and desire to be active for life. Canada, the uk, Australia, everyone was doing research and work around it and we were like, you know, that was really fascinating to me. The whole idea of everybody focuses on skills, ability, right. Concept X's and O's. But what are we really doing around confidence and desire? Like why are we losing so many kids to sports? And I think it's like you talked about it in the opening, like we put playback into sports and it actually sort of. We got refocused during COVID because what had happened was we weren't becoming the enemy. Right. Because you know, kids would come to camp but they'd choose three sports to do. In many cases it was sports they were already familiar with. But like Kerry said, you might get some outliers who'd say, you know, I never done field hockey before, let me try that. Well, during COVID what happened is everybody had to be in a cohort. And so we had to design our camp in such a way that a kid showed up with baseball who had never played baseball before. And then we're like, oh, that kid doesn't even know where first base is. So then you got some kids who showed up with double barrel bats. And now how do you differentiate? So we started to go old school backyard pickup stickball games. We created a lot of games now called Radball, using a tennis racket. So really a differentiator for us is kids that normally we would program for would wait for us to pick sides, to organize the game, to do everything. Now it's more empowering to them to say, all right, let's go sandlot style. Let's go backyard. All right, we don't have any flags. We're going to do one or two finger touch, right? We're going to do instead of 11 volts, 11 soccer. We're going to do a 2v2 tournament. So more kids are getting more touches. We're going to use book bags as the goals. We're going to be creative. You don't know how to throw a Frisbee? We're going to play ultimate Frisbee with a ball. Like just really sort of thinking, what do we want the outcome of this to be? And ultimately it's just to play, to have some fun. The other thing is our staff always has to jump in. Like, we make it super important for our, the people in the program to jump into it. But, I mean, there's a lot of differentiators. I think I'll segue to topself. Unless you want to add something to that care.

Yeah, go ahead, Kerry.

We did run a camp this summer at Miss Porter School in Farmington where we kind of had a melding of what we're doing. We had, you know, some athletes from Farmington who do play a single sport, you know, maybe two sports, but are on travel teams and, you know, travel around and do all of that. And then we had some of our students who are in our Hartford schools came on a bus and they've never, you know, they may never have played in an organized soccer game. And they were together at camp and, you know, both groups had an amazing time together and singing and having fun and playing. And it wasn't about keeping score and it wasn't about who got the most of this or that. It was just about being together, having fun, learning. You know, we introduced some new things like team handball and our Radball game to some of the students that had never played it. And it was just fun. And. And that's really the bottom line for us is sports, especially at a young age, should be fun.

Yeah, definitely.

We talk all the time. I mean, I know our viewers are becoming in from all over the place, so we're like a lot of areas. So Carrie said Farmington, Ms. Porter's where Jack yo went. So that gives you a sense of the kind of school it is. And then Hartford is two and a half miles from there, one of the poorest cities in the country. And so we often will run camps where it's middle, upper middle class America or within two miles of extreme poverty. They don't know where they're getting from. And literally we would say, oh my God, I wish these kids had an opportunity to specialize while we're working with these kids. Not to. So when we integrate, it's really cool when we see the magic that Carrie described happens. But what we've realized is we're definitely recognizing kids are kids, no matter where they come from. And this is going to segue into the top self because even the affluent kids, they're anxious for different reasons. Right. Their anxiety might be around, did I get invited to the party? Or you know, the sort of social stuff that can happen where the kids we're dealing with over here, it's like, where's my next meal gonna come from? Are my parents get picked up by ice? You know, things like that that are just so different from the two mile away community. But both of them benefit from using sport to teach self regulation. So if I can. Let me, let me talk about top self sports.

Yeah, please do. I've been anxious to hear about that.

Yeah, well, by the end, if you're anxious to hear about it, I'll teach you how to not be anxious about it. All right, so. And I say it somewhat facetiously because Carrie lived through my panic attacks in my 30s, like literal, in the hospital, curled up in a, in a fetal position ball not knowing what was happening to me. And I needed to learn cognitive behavioral therapy skills in order for me to not get consumed by my anxiety and my panic. And it was hard because here I was, former Division 1 athlete. I'm coaching, I'm counselor, I'm known in the community. And here I am thinking I'm going crazy. Well, that led me to develop what's known as top self sports. Top stands for thinking on purpose. Basically what we do is we have an emoji based poster where we teach the kids how to identify the emotion they're feeling. And then we give them self regulation strategies on how to go from how they're feeling to how they want to feel. We call it going to home base. Keeping with the sports analogy, the reason it works so well is, you know, I was a school counselor, and they would often say to me, hey, can you go in and do a lesson on anxiety or on anger management? And I go and do a lesson. It was a good lesson, but that was it. Then it was gone. It was like watching a movie. And the movie might been like, got your emotions going and great, but didn't change your life. And it certainly wasn't sticky in a way to change behavior. Now, in sports, what happens every day with kids during recess, in PE at practice, they get anxious, they get angry, right? They get sad because they're not included. They get distracted. All those things happen in real time during sports. So it's the best place to teach self regulation. It really is. And we do it in a way that it's normalized, right? So we'll say something like, what does Messi do before he takes a penalty kick? What does Steph Curry do before he takes a foul shot? What does Caitlin Clark do before she gets hyped up for a big game? They're all doing self regulation. They're calming themselves down or they're hyping themselves up. They're getting focused. That's a sports skill that we've normalized for kids at an early age so that it feels just as basic as learning to dribble with my offhand, as learning how to calm myself down or get myself game ready for things. And it's really powerful. It's research now. We have great data on it. It's evidence back. We keep improving upon it, and it's why schools around the country and now in Africa are asking us to bring it to their communities.

Wow. I want to go to Kerry for a minute here, and I want to talk about how you've worked across education and politics. And what does that experience do to help shape your leadership style and advocacy with 2:4:1?

Well, I grew up. My dad was a coach and my mom was a teacher, and they were both heavily involved in politics. And it was a different time. Right, than it is today as far as politics is concerned. And I had opportunities because of Title IX that my mother didn't like. Her only opportunity was to be a cheerleader. Like that was it. And so I reaped the benefits of Title IX and all the women that came before me that worked for that. So, you know, obviously, athletics and sports shaped my life. So I was always thankful that someone fought to give me those opportunities. And then when I look at the opportunities my daughters have had, which are, you know, way more than mine. It was. I wanted to sort of pass it on, pass it forward to make sure that the next generation had it even better than I did. I think politics is different today than. Than it has, as I said. And it's all about staying local. That's what I've learned. Like, I think trying to say I'm going to, you know, pass a Title nine right now, it's not going to happen. But you can make change in your community. And that's, you know, where we've started and we've shown that that does work, right? Starting local and then, you know, it sort of can snowball from there. But not trying to change things in Washington necessarily, but change things. And that's in any. Whatever you're interested in as an activist is just stay local and make change for your neighbors and the people in your community.

Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about National Sports Sampling Day. What is it? How did it come to be and why is it so important?

You know, it's funny because you asked about 241-where- came from, and there are times where, like, oh, it's when people Google us, you know, they get an area code or a street address sometimes, you know, but if they do 241 in sport, whatever. When I think about the name, we love it because it's embedded in our tagline. Life's too short for just one sport. So I don't know. My best thinking either happens in the shower or on a run, right? And one day I'm on a run and I'm always running the numbers through our head. Like, you know, like maybe a fundraiser. 241 people give $241. I've had different one. We'll do 241 miles in a year. That would be a goal for a kid to be able to do and keep track of. Then I started, I asked Google, what's the 241st day of the year? And it said August 29th. I was like, wow, wouldn't it be cool if we could get a day named after 24 1, the 241st day, and we could do something around it. And I just started bouncing the idea around the team with Kerry. And, you know, on social media, you'll see these, like, weird days. It's National Yellow Pickle Day and it's, you know, national brush your dog Day. And, you know, sometimes it's like nine different days. So I'm like, well, how hard could it be to get a National Day? Well, There's a process and there's a cost, but you can get it as long as you make a good story behind it and a good case. We had no problem. Like, I think that people loved it, right? And so, and now look, there are, there are other days. There's National Youth Sport Day, there's National Play Day. I think what we want to do with Sports Sampling day is we really want to help people understand, like you don't have to specialize at age 7 in order to make the high school team. In fact, you're probably way less likely to still be playing if you do. And we wanted to celebrate those people that are out there that were multi sport athletes that to have like a Patrick Mahomes be able to say, the reason I'm playing in the NFL is because I didn't only play football. Right. You said Steve Nash, LeBron James, Steph Curry, they're all talking about it. There's great footage of Caitlin Clark when she's little where she's playing soccer and she's schooling everybody. She probably be on the, on a national soccer team if that's what she chose to do. But you can't tell me that she didn't get better at basketball by not playing soccer. You know what I'm saying? It's like for a lot of, we want to lift up the fact that sports is like, it's a global language. It's really unifying with everything going on in this crazy world. Sports is like, it's magic right now. Especially with the rise of women's sports. As a girl, dad, father of three daughters, I get goosebumps thinking about the fact that, you know, we took them to the World cup in France because two girls that came through 2, 4, 1, we representing Jamaica over in France and we went to the game, you know. Now eight years later, look at the rise of the sports. And I think for a little old mom and pop nonprofit to now have a national day and people doing proclamations around it, ESPN is going to hopefully do something around it because they recognized us as the model for multi sport. It's pretty cool, right? And so we love being able to talk about the fact that, hey, there's a national Day, national sports sampling day. 244 gets people talking about it. Right. That gets people changing culture to be, you know, maybe there is something to that.

Yeah.

And I just think that sometimes some parents who are kind of sucked into the vortex of, you know, I want my kid be the best they can be, think that's funneling them into that one sport that they were Good at at 8, right. Like our daughter. So this gives them the opportunity to push back to the travel soccer and say, you know what, there's a sports sampling day and there's this whole group of people that are going to be trying new things, trying new sports, that there's a lot out there and that's what we want to do, is just to give people permission to try something else that they haven't done.

Yeah. You know, it strikes me that getting educated often means getting well rounded. And people who are well rounded tend to be better from a perspective standpoint and understand things with other people in mind. I can't imagine that it wouldn't be the same for sports. And I know from as a dad, I have four, two girls, two boys. Our youngest was a college athlete and definitely experienced some burnout around specialization. And so I know from my perspective especially that if I had a do over on that, I would more strongly encourage multi sport participation. I really believe it's the right way. I'm thrilled to have you both on the show and I'm really loving the way the conversation is going. I think it's such an important message. I wanted to ask you another question about what you're doing globally and how you're expanding from North America to Africa. What does expansion look like for you and how do you ensure your model stays authentic across cultures?

It's a great question. And you know, again, our evolution to being mom and pop, kind of small business, if you will, to now being global nonprofit happened just before COVID I told Kerry I got a random email and it felt spammy. But then I looked into it. I don't think it's spam. I think I should reply. It said physical literacy in Kenya. That was the subject. You know, sometimes you get those emails that are like, help me help you, that sort of thing. So I contacted the organization Wellness for Greatness in Nairobi, Kenya, went on their website, knew some folks that were advising them and just had a conversation. And the initial conversation was really around how could we support the work they were doing for kids that were experiencing early diabetes, early pregnancy? You know, a lot of stuff that was happening as a result of a lack of participation in sport and access. So it got us thinking and talking with our network around. We have always looked and smelled like a nonprofit. We've always been mission driven. Why don't we look to see if whether or not we could go nonprofit? We just didn't think we could do it. We had both been career teachers and we didn't understand the revenue model about applying for grants, about foundations and all that. We ran some numbers, we got a board, we got a legal team, and we did it. The reason I share it in that context is that we've quadrupled our reach in a short period of time by doing what my friend John o' Sullivan said. He goes, sometimes you need to jump off the cliff and grow your wings while you're falling. And that's what we did is like, it was a leap of faith. But as a result, we've not only domestically reached way more kids in underserved communities than we thought. But now Carrie and I got a chance to go and do training in Nairobi, Kenya and in Kitway, Zambia, just based on those initial reach outs and being willing to just roll up our sleeves. There's a lot of people talk about doing stuff like, we love programming, we love getting into the community. You know, Kerry talked about it on the leadership side, we are global, but we're hyper local in the work that we do. We get fully embedded in the communities. The other thing we do is we partner with folks, right? So we know the only way we can grow is with other people. So we have a great partnership with the center for Healing and justice through Sports. So we're good at programming, they're really good at training. And so we've learned a lot alongside them in terms of how to very effectively train the folks that we're going to have deliver our program in the community.

So we were lucky enough to go to Nairobi and to Kitwe, Zambia, and, you know, we did the training and the teachers and the coaches had never had any kind of training. Like, you know, a lot of what we had learned from the center for Healing and justice through Sports, they just ate it all up. And then there is not a lot of talk around social, emotional learning or self regulation or, you know, and there needs to be. And as teachers and coaches, they were just so grateful to have tools to be able to use with, you know, the students that are in front of them, their athletes.

So we've brought on Teo Natwari, who is a graduate student from Columbia Teachers College. He's originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He has since gone and taken over our team to help us grow in Kenya and in Zambia and beyond. We haven't finalized an MOU with an organization that we're working with, but after the funding cuts of usaid, we were pretty close to being able to Start pilot in 50 communities in Kenya that just Got cut off almost immediately because of the funding cuts, but because of the relationships we built and Teo's work and the rest of our team's work, and because Kerry and I were there, like, they appreciated that we actually went there. We're close to being able to grow despite the challenging funding climate we're in. You know, look, we said it before, Kids are kids no matter where you go, and sports are a universal language. So we feel very blessed to be able to again have our mission reach kids, not only in the greater Hartford area, but across North America and now in Zambia and in Kenya.

Yeah, I love to ask this question of everybody, and I especially love to ask it from my husband and wife team. When you think about your legacy, both personal and professional, what do you want to leave behind.

You first?

I don't know. I mean, I would say, for me personally, is accessible. You know, I mean, I'm very much about giving every young person access to sports, to leadership opportunities, to being the best they can be, whether that's emotionally, physically, because everyone deserves that. And I was lucky enough to have people in my life that did that for me. I think my father especially modeled that for many people I'm still friends with who still talk about, you know, the things that he did to elevate them. So I think what I would say would be the legacy for me.

Beautiful.

I had the benefit of going second, so I would want the.

Always a good opportunity, right.

Necessarily. She might kick me later tonight for this one, but is that I also really like. We do this work together, Right. I think it's something that is. There's. Sometimes people are like, that's weird. And then there's other times, like, no, that's special. Right. That's important. So I think our legacy is that, you know, I married a really strong woman, right. And I want to be able to lift her up in the work that she does. But I also, you know, when I look at our collective work is like. And we talk about this a lot, is, what impact are we having? Well, I'm telling you right now, like, I get emotional talking about this stuff because it happens one kid at a time, right? And I remember talking to Kerry's dad about this. I was teaching on the Lower east side of Manhattan. I was a kind of relatively new teacher, and he was teaching at an affluent school in Baltimore. And I remember saying to him, like, you started out very much the way that I did. I said, how do you wrap your head around the fact that you're serving kids of influence and that I'm serving these kids. I feel like I'm running into the wind. I don't know if I'm making a difference. And he said, you are making a difference. He goes, at this point now, though, what I'm doing is I'm influencing the influencers. And so what we want to be able to do through this work, and this is hard, right, because as the executive director and chief operating officer, we're growing, we're scaling. We just want to go and be with the kids. We just want a program. But our legacy is such that we got to go influence the influencers. Right. We got to continue to do the local work, but we got to get onto these national platforms. We got to be able to talk to these people that are making policy decisions, that are deciding to cut usaid, who are deciding to throw a lot more money into wealthy communities as opposed to underserved communities. That's where our legacy. We may never see it, but we just got to trust process and that the work we do is really important around shifting culture and about making change in local communities. We used to be very much just bottom up and we used to think top down is not the way to go. We're doing a little bit of both now. Right. Because we've been around a while, people are paying attention. We've earned the right to have conversations top down. Is it making a big difference? Sometimes, no. Right. But other times we find out three years later, conversation we had with an influencer changed their perspective on things. That's legacy right there, I think. And hopefully we can continue to do that.

Yeah. You know, following convictions and continuing to spread really good information and good programming. You just never know when that tipping point hits where you're going to influence somebody that's going to make a difference. And like you said, you don't know whether it's going to happen in our lifetimes. But making an impact on people may have generational impact and that we don't know what the difference is going to be. So focusing on just doing the right thing for the right purposes is super important. So I'm really glad you shared that.

Thank you.

Let's talk about how our listeners can support or partner with 241-care. Give me some information about how people can reach you.

On social, we're pretty much known as sports on everything. We're on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn. We don't live on X very much, to be honest, but we're there if people want to reach out. You know, a year ago. My answer to how you could help us might have been different. There was a lot of federal funding, a lot of state funding. We wouldn't have asked for money like right now, operating costs, like in order for us to do some of the things that we need to be able to do, which is to just have meetings to try to get into new places. And that all costs money. We started out pretty small, but now we have a fairly large team. And last year we employed almost 300 people part time. And with all the funding cuts, it's really hard. We'd love to be able to grow or funding specific programs, you know, folks to say, hey, I want to adopt a school. I love the work you're doing in Africa. I'd love to be able to contribute to that. And so our website is241play.org there's an opportunity to donate on there. Local folks. We do have a fundraiser that's coming up here in the Hartford area called Play It Forward. It'll be kind of a 241 camp with cocktails for adults. And then around National Sports Sampling Day, there's a lot of noise sometimes around giving Tuesday. Everybody's asking, right? We're hoping to have National Sports Sampling Day be an annual opportunity for folks that want to give to organizations like ours. And if it's not us, that's fine. But supporting nonprofits that are doing this kind of work is really important. You know, certainly we partner with Fight for Children out of Washington, D.C. we partner with the center for Healing and Justice Through Sports. We partner with Active City here in Hartford. And that's just to name a few of the organizations that folks could support.

I would just add that especially in our school based programs in D.C. and in Hartford, the next few years are going to be really tough for those kids. And we've been running some programming that was funded by the Department of Education that is no longer available. And those kids are counting on having something to do before school or after school. You know, we have all kinds of testimonials about attendance and kids coming to school because they want to do our morning program and then they're in school so they of course stay. We have kids from homeless shelters. We have kids from everywhere. And you know, it is heartbreaking to think they're just counting on that being there next year and we can't count on that for sure.

Yeah. Listen, you've both been very sharing and you've been vulnerable and I think vulnerability is a superpower. So I just really want to thank you both for the work you're doing and for sharing your story with us today. You're not just changing the way kids play. You're helping them grow into stronger, kinder, more resilient people. And I think that's what it's all about. That's a legacy worth celebrating to our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to check out National Sports Sampling Day follows and look for ways to bring the spirit of play and inclusion into your own communities. Until next time, keep leading with purpose. And remember, legacy isn't just what you leave behind, it's what you build. Today, I'm Alan Pavloski signing off for Legacy All Stars.