A shift to embracing those concepts will go a long way to maintaining sport's place in our society. If adults and administrators try too hard to 'create' sport for the kids, the irony is we might turn them off.
Rather, if we can take a little backward step, and ensure as a society we have the environments in place to facilitate kids' engagement in fun physical activity and sport, they will develop the lifelong skills and passion for it.
Similarly, if you look at Brazilian football, famous for its production line of talent, it has relatively unstructured competitions and coaching systems for its juniors.
Instead, much of the pure footballing ability and love of sport is developed through random street games.
So as coaches, consider how we can replicate more situations like this for the athletes - the opportunity to learn through play. Putting participation numbers to one side, if developing talent was the objective, then in terms of coaching, sometimes less is more.
English premier league footballer Yannick Bolasie and his '360 flick' is a good example of that. He attributes his freakish skill to the playground environment in which he spent so much time - an overcrowded small space, cluttered with swings and slides, where the local kids had to deal with limited time and space in a chaotic freestyle hybrid of soccer.
While learning to navigate all the obstacles, he developed his own special trick to avoid opponents and obstacles such as the bottom of the slide - the 360 flick - a trick that stayed with him, and he eventually took into the premier league matches.
It certainly gets you thinking about environments that we have as a community, and being proactive to get the balance right between providing the rules and competitions, but also allowing opportunities for freedom of imagination and expression.
Cirque du Soleil, the circus style entertainment group, actively promote windows of free play. It's all part of what they call their creative process - play time, and opportunities to find some magic.
They say it's about "dreaming the unimaginable, creating the unexpected". They offer their people the "freedom they need to imagine their most incredible dreams and bring them to life", and dedicate periods of training with no coaching or instruction where play and exploration is promoted.
The challenge for our more traditional sports is how to include and maintain that element of free play within their codes.
The state of Tiger Woods now is probably a good example of what can happen with taking things too seriously and specialising when young.
Yes, he has had some great golf success, but before he even hit his 40s he has had to deal with numerous injuries and multiple operations on his knees and back - some seriously negative consequences for him, and that's only the physical ones!
In this rapidly changing world, stopping and taking the time to think carefully about the environments in our community is crucial - in our schools and neighbourhoods.
If we keep moving with the times to get it right, we can maximise the opportunities for everyone to engage in some fun physical activity, and at the same time provide great nurseries for fostering our talent - great things grow here!
Marcus Agnew is the health and sport development manager at Hawke's Bay Community Fitness Centre Trust and is also a lecturer in sports science at EIT.
■Views expressed here are the writer's personal opinion, and not the newspaper's. Email editor@hbtoday.co.nz.
