Person in Focus -The Stories We Carry in October: Lucy Southgate, COO

Sport Was Simply Part of My Life

Sport was simply part of my life. I don’t remember making a conscious decision that I was going to be “sporty”, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about where any of it might lead. I enjoyed it. I was good at some of it. It gave me time with friends, a sense of belonging, the enjoyment of competing and plenty of opportunities to challenge myself.

I ran throughout school and eventually represented my school during county competitions. I played netball throughout school and captained the team, and I danced for years, progressing through examinations until I was close to teaching level.

At the time, none of this felt like preparation for something else. I wasn’t thinking about transferable skills, resilience, leadership or personal development. I wasn’t asking myself what these experiences were teaching me or how they might shape the person I would become.

I didn’t know what to ask, because I didn’t yet know I was learning.

I was simply growing up and doing things I loved.

Looking Backwards

It is only now, at 39, that I can look backwards and recognise some of what was happening underneath those very ordinary experiences.

Perhaps that is one of the interesting things about reflection. Once we know what happened next, we have a tendency to make our lives appear much more organised than they actually were. We identify particular moments and say, that’s where I learnt leadership or that’s what made me resilient. But life rarely feels that coherent while we’re actually living it.

I don’t want to look back at being a young netball captain and turn it into a leadership programme that never existed. I was playing netball with my friends. We wanted to play well, we wanted to win, we laughed together and I’m sure we frustrated one another at times.

But looking at those same memories now, I notice things I couldn’t have noticed then. I know what it felt like to have other people look towards me when something wasn’t going well. I experienced encouraging somebody who was struggling and began to understand, probably without having any language for it, that different people responded differently to pressure, disappointment and encouragement. There were friendships, disagreements, responsibility, competition and the shared experience of winning or losing together.

Nobody called any of that leadership development. It was just part of playing in a team.

Three Different Teachers

Running gave me something different. However many people help you prepare, eventually you stand behind a line by yourself. Then the gun goes and you run. You have the satisfaction when something you’ve worked towards goes well and the disappointment when it doesn’t. And then, usually, you come back and do it again.

Dance brought something else again: repetition, correction, practice and performance. I could spend months working towards an examination and eventually walk into a room knowing that somebody was going to assess it. I didn’t think of that as developing discipline or confidence. Nobody needed to tell me that I was learning how to deal with nerves, correction or being uncomfortable in front of other people.

I was simply experiencing those things.

At the time, these parts of my life existed quite happily without needing to be connected. Athletics was athletics. Netball was netball. Dance was dance. School was school. Friends were friends.

I didn’t need a framework for any of it, and perhaps young people shouldn’t always need one.

When Life Gets Bigger

Then, somewhere around 16 or 17, life started to become bigger.

I was studying for my A-levels while working between 16 and 20 hours each week. Work was becoming increasingly important to me and new opportunities were beginning to appear. There were still only so many hours in a week, and choices had to be made. Education and work stayed, while athletics, netball and dance gradually didn’t.

At 17 another important part of my life began too. I met Owen, my now husband and, many years later, would become the Founder of NYSA.

Looking back from 39, I’m struck by just how much was changing within such a short period. I was still technically a teenager, but study, work, a serious relationship, independence and increasing responsibility were all arriving at roughly the same time.

I don’t remember experiencing it as some grand transition into adulthood. I don’t think many of us do. When you’re living through those years, you don’t stand outside your own life observing your personal development. You just get on with it. One week follows another, priorities shift, relationships develop, opportunities appear and gradually the things that once filled your days are replaced by different things.

That is probably the most accurate description of how sport left my life too.

There wasn’t a final race where I knew it would be my last. I don’t remember a big goodbye to my netball team or a moment when I consciously decided that dancing belonged to my childhood.

I just stopped. For a long time, I don’t think I thought very much about that.

Dropping Out or Moving On?

I suspect there are many young people whose experience is similar. We can talk about young people “dropping out” of sport as though there must always be a particular reason, a failure somewhere or a moment when something went wrong. Sometimes there undoubtedly is. But sometimes life just gets bigger.

Education becomes more demanding. Someone gets their first job. Relationships become important. Money begins to matter. Independence is exciting. New opportunities arrive and start competing for space.

You can still love something and no longer have room for it in quite the same way.

For almost three decades, the story I told myself was fairly straightforward. I had been very involved in sport when I was young, then at around 17 I stopped. My working life began, adulthood arrived and the story continued somewhere else.

It is only now, my work has unexpectedly brought me back into conversations about sport and young people, that I’ve started to question whether those chapters were ever as separate as I imagined.

What Did I Take With Me?

I don’t find myself wondering whether I should have carried on competing. I don’t regret the choices I made. The 17 year old version of me had other things she wanted to explore, and some significant opportunities were about to come her way.

What I wonder is whether I understood what I was taking with me. What had all those years of being part of teams given me? What had being trusted to captain one allowed me to experience? What had standing on starting lines taught me about myself? What did all those hours of dance, repetition and performance leave behind when I stopped dancing?

At 17, I probably wouldn’t have known how to answer those questions. But now I think there would have been value simply in somebody asking them.

That thought has stayed with me because it connects with many of the conversations we’re having through NYSA today. In youth sport, understandably, we think about progression. Who continues? Who gets selected? Who reaches the next level? Who might become elite?

Those pathways matter, but they are only some of the possible stories.

Most young people who participate in sport will eventually build their lives somewhere else. That doesn’t make their sporting experience unsuccessful, and it doesn’t mean everything they experienced suddenly becomes irrelevant when they stop competing.

Perhaps a lot of the value simply travels with them.

The Stories Underneath the Outcomes

A young person who learns what it feels like to contribute to a team may recognise that experience years later in a workplace. Someone who experiences disappointment in competition and still returns the following week may draw on that experience years later when life presents a completely different challenge. Someone who is trusted with responsibility in sport may discover much later that being trusted changed the way they saw themselves.

We may never get to see those outcomes, and there probably isn’t a straight line between any of them.

Human development is much messier and, I think, much more interesting than that.

Two young people can be part of exactly the same team, with the same coach and the same opportunities, and experience that environment completely differently. Something that seems insignificant today may acquire completely different meaning years later when another experience causes us to look backwards.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly interested in the stories underneath the outcomes. Through our work at NYSA, we can create programmes, opportunities and environments with the best intentions, but we can never completely know what another person will take from them.

Young people don’t arrive as blank pieces of paper waiting for adults to write the correct development plan onto them. They arrive with family, friendships, culture, school, confidence, insecurity, previous successes and disappointments already forming part of who they are.

Maybe our responsibility isn’t always to decide what an experience should mean. Perhaps sometimes we need to create good environments, listen carefully, ask better questions and give young people enough space to discover some of that meaning themselves.

What I Wish Someone Had Asked

At 39, I find myself doing exactly that with my own story.

I can look backwards now and see connections that the younger version of me couldn’t possibly have seen. But I don’t want to pretend there was a carefully mapped pathway from playing sport as a child to the person I am today. There wasn’t.

There were experiences, people, relationships, opportunities and choices. There were things that went well and things that didn’t. There were probably moments that felt enormously important at the time that I barely remember now, and small moments I hardly noticed that shaped me far more.

Sport sits somewhere amongst all of that.

By 18, my world looked very different. I was working, studying and living independently with the person who would eventually become my husband. I was also beginning to be given levels of responsibility that, looking back now, seem quite remarkable for someone of that age.

I thought the sporting part of my story was behind me. Now I think I had simply carried parts of it into whatever came next.

I don’t wish somebody had persuaded me to keep competing. I’m comfortable with the choices I made and where they eventually took me. What I wish is that somebody had helped me recognise what I was taking with me when I left.