Belonging is Impact

The workshop ran twice in parallel at the Sport x Impact Forum ’26 in Hamburg. Each session brought together two groups that rarely work side by side: people who run youth sport clubs, and people who measure social impact. The two sessions developed quite differently, which is itself an indication of how complex the subject is. Both began from the same observation. A coach sees a great deal during a training session, but little of it is the kind of thing an organisation can record or report.

The discussion opened with two examples from Citizens Rugby Brussels, described as they happened, without interpretation.

I. Definition — What we mean by belonging

Belonging is not the same as attendance, and it is not signalled by wearing the club shirt. It is the sense that the group would notice your absence, that you hold a recognised place within it, and that the people around you can be relied on when things become difficult.

Rugby produces this sense in a particular way. As a contact sport, it does not allow for passive participation: for the length of a session a player is fully involved, physically and mentally, depending on others and depended on in turn. Repeated across weeks and seasons, this shared involvement builds a familiarity and trust that many sports establish more slowly.

This also explains why a loss of belonging is felt acutely. It rarely ends abruptly. More often it declines gradually, and frequently without being noticed, until the child has already decided to leave.

The core problem

Belonging is most visible once it has already been lost. By the time a missed session appears in the data, the child has usually decided some weeks earlier. The information arrives after the point at which it could have been acted on.

II. Framework as an enabler

The Phineo ladder was used as a shared reference, not a prescriptive model. Each pair marked where they currently measure and where they would prefer to. The result was consistent across both sessions. Most clubs measure near the bottom, at steps 2 and 3, which record who attends and who takes part. Belonging corresponds to steps 4 and 5. The longer-term impact, the adult shaped over years of participation, corresponds to step 7, and is only observable long after the child has left.

The seven steps (from bottom to top)

1. Activities happen as planned.
2. The group is reached (most clubs measure here).
3. The group takes up what is offered.
4. The group changes how it sees and what it can do (belonging).
5. The group changes how it behaves.
6. The group’s wider situation changes.
7. Society changes (impact).

From step 4 upwards, we are talking about impact.

The ladder was useful mainly for making the gap visible and giving both groups a common vocabulary. Both sessions, however, identified the same limitation. The model assumes a steady progression from activity to impact, and belonging does not follow that pattern. A child can be at step 5 and return to step 3 after a single event: a coach leaving, a conflict within the group, a difficult defeat, or a change in circumstances outside the club. The ladder cannot represent that regression, nor account for the influence of factors beyond the pitch. It is a reasonable starting point but insufficient on its own. What is missing is a model that allows for movement in both directions, accounts for several factors at once, and takes context into account. No such model appears to exist yet in a form clubs can readily use.

III. Findings — Observations from the discussion

The discussion produced a number of practical observations, the kind of knowledge that exists within clubs but rarely enters a formal framework.

Belonging is one factor among several

Crowded schedules, the difference between competitive and recreational programmes, and the time and money a family can commit all contribute to children leaving, independently of how much they belong. The group and the family carry as much weight as the individual.

Parental involvement as an early signal

The clearest indicator was not the child but the parent. A parent who attends, stays, and engages with other parents indicates that the family is integrated. When parents withdraw, the child often follows some weeks later. Few existing frameworks account for this.

The role of a consistent coach

A child is often attached to a particular coach rather than to the club: someone who knows them and holds steady expectations from week to week. When that coach leaves, the attachment does not always transfer, and the child may leave as well. Coach continuity is therefore relevant to impact, not only to staffing.

The case of the shorts

A club was losing girls at around the age of twelve. The aggregate data pointed to adolescence. The specific cause was the white shorts and the anxiety associated with menstruation. Once enough trust existed for the girls to raise it, the club changed the shorts to blue, and retention recovered.

A simple check-in

A brief signal from each child of how they feel, on a three-point scale, without explanation. It does not identify causes, but it shows who may need attention and when a group’s mood changes. It is simple to run and provides something to act on.

Visibility and recognition

Representing children’s participation externally, through social media, club publications, or events, functions as more than communication. It signals that they are recognised beyond the training session, and allows family and peers to see it as well. That recognition contributes to retention.

Former players as a long-term signal

An adult who returns, to watch, to volunteer, or to bring their own child, is among the clearer indications of long-term impact, and one that no survey captures as directly. It also demonstrates to current members that the club continues beyond their own time in it.

The role of presence

The most frequently cited effective practice was also the simplest: an adult who is present, observes, and initiates contact without a specific agenda. Without this, the available data tends to arrive too late to act on.

From findings to measurement

Looking back at these observations, some matter more to me than others.

Visibility came up a lot: social media, being seen, recognition beyond the pitch. It has its place, especially for teenagers and for keeping a sport attractive. However, visibility can go wrong, and it can slide easily into vanity. It is useful, but I would not put it first, and I would not build a measure of belonging on it.

What sticks is simpler, and harder. It is the human factor: presence, and the adult who sets an example. The coach or director who is there, who notices, who behaves in front of children the way they hope the children will behave. That is where belonging actually forms. Of everything we discussed, it is the part I trust most.

If presence and example are what work, then the task is not to set them aside as unmeasurable, but to find a way — using what psychology and the social sciences already know — to observe them properly, to repeat them deliberately, and to show that the intuition holds. Not to replace the feeling with numbers, but to give it enough structure that it can be trusted, replicated, and defended to the people who ask for evidence.

IV. Measuring belonging

Numbers tell you where to look, not what is going on underneath. They count who turns up, who stays from one season to the next, how many parents are there on a Saturday. The rest comes from people: the coach who notices a child has gone quiet, the director who happens to be around, the conversation that only takes place because the trust was already there. Each kind of information is of limited use without the other.

The qualitative side can seem impossible to measure, but it is not, or not entirely. Belonging is something psychology and the social sciences have studied for a long time. There are tested ways of asking whether people feel they belong, rather than each club inventing its own questions, and methods built for things that are messy, change over time, and depend on context, which is what belonging is. These are tools the club could draw on rather than starting from nothing.

None of this replaces the human eye. It adds structure and a shared language, so that something a coach already senses can be observed consistently, compared from one year to the next, and explained to a board without falling back on attendance figures alone. Belonging also never holds still: it rises and falls with who is coaching, how the group is getting on, and what is happening in a child’s life beyond the club, so any honest measure has to allow for that movement rather than tidy it away.

Refining the definition

One thing the discussions helped clarify was the word itself. In talking it through with the participants, we arrived at a simple working definition of impact:

A plain definition, but a useful one. It holds two things together: that something genuinely changed, and that the change was for the better. With young people, both parts matter, and both are easy to lose sight of.

V. Open questions

The questions raised during the discussion but not resolved. They are starting points for further work rather than conclusions.

• What small, everyday signs tell a coach that a child belongs — without needing special tools or training?
• How well does a parent’s involvement predict whether a child stays, and does it shift with age or sport?
• How much does keeping the same coach matter for belonging — and what helps coaches stay for the long run?
• How do former players who stay connected reflect long-term impact, and what keeps them around?
• What would a model of belonging look like that makes room for ups, downs, and outside pressures?
• How does a club build the kind of trust where children feel safe saying what is really wrong?