MSU institute promotes love for fitness and works to reduce professionalization of youth sports

<p>Dan Gould has recently retired as director of the institute. He’s a professor of kinesiology and the emeritus Gwendolyn Norrell Professor of Youth Sport and Student Athlete Well Being. Karin Pfeiffer is also a professor of kinesiology and is assuming the role of director from Dan.</p><p>Gould talks about the institute being born out of the state legislature in 1978.</p><p>“The <a href="https://edwp.educ.msu.edu/youth-sports/">Institute for the Study of Youth Sports</a> was started by the state legislature,” says Gould. “Our mission is to scientifically study sport for children and youth and then to disseminate that information to the larger sporting public to make sports better for kids.”</p><p>Pfeiffer is an exercise physiologist.</p><p>“My research has focused on two major lines,” Pfeiffer says. “One is how we assess how physically active people are, and the other is interventions to increase physical activity. Most of my work has been done with children and adolescents.”</p><p>“A lot of my research is in the area of sports psychology and the psychology of coaching,” Gould continues. “I have done a lot of programmatic work on what makes an effective coach. We've really focused on life skills like psychosocial skills and characteristics like teamwork, goal setting, and work ethic that kids can learn through sport and then hopefully - they're called life skills - transfer those skills to other aspects of their life. I was a wrestler through high school and college, and I learned to work hard. Did that transfer to other avenues like being a professor?”</p><p>What are some of the key and current topics that the institute grapples with?</p><p>“One is the equity issue,” says Gould. “There are really two youth sports in America. There are the middle-class youth sports where the kids go to sports camps or they're on travel teams and pay for play, and then there's either rural kids or urban kids who have fewer opportunities. How do we bridge that divide? That's one. How do we further increase quality coachin