Rolling for a Better Future

Despite being an island of seamen, Iceland used to experience high numbers of drownings every year, fostering a keen interest in swimming education. The government stepped up and tapped into the underground hot water generated by Iceland’s volcanic activity to create geothermal pools, which quickly became more than a humble municipal investment, but perhaps the very secret to the country’s happiness. Every town now enjoys communal pools, which create a neutral, recreational space that brings all manner of people together.

Ultimate Frisbee is, in the Indian context, one of the few sports where men and women play on the same team, building gender equality through play.

With the promise of community care, psychiatric wards were unlocked 30 years ago. Today, the sickest patients live in squalor.

After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family and a brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines, looking in part to the United States.

A overview of 2014's Fixes columns - connecting the dots between 60 or so ways that people are trying to change the world.

To protect the heads of football players, it might be advisable to have them occasionally practice without head protection, according to a counterintuitive new study of a successful Division I football program.

When adults are asked what values they think youth sports actually reinforce most, they say competitiveness and the importance of winning. The Positive Coaching Alliance provides teaching tools that help coaches redefine the idea of “winning” from something that is reflected on a scoreboard to something that is reflected in a child’s character.

Girls in India are sometimes forced into the prospects of child marriage, prostitution, or slave labor; alternatively, families often teach girls to be wives and mothers. To empower girls to make their own choices, Yuwa, an NGO based in India, introduces girls to sports for social development. Yuwa also promotes educational workshops for girls, where girls can discuss women’s rights and their thoughts about their own bodies.

The Homeless World Cup is the premier soccer tournament for homeless players. Programs around the world use soccer as a means of building a sense of community, sublimating negative energies, and encouraging personal growth.

A group called Positive Coaching Alliance is training thousands of coaches and parents to change to culture of youth sports for the better, using a "relentlessly positive" approach, and trading out the win-at-all-costs ethos of professional sports for evidence-based, age-appropriate guidance to players.