Two children, one season, the same club and the same staff. A boy joins in September, speaks to almost nobody, and by January is encouraging a teammate who has just made a mistake, without any part of the programme having set out to produce that. Another child who had never missed a session starts arriving late, misses one practice, then a second, and eventually announces he will not return. In hindsight the signs were visible throughout. Neither of these two developments appears anywhere in the club’s records.
Both cases were put to a workshop at the Sport x Impact Forum in Hamburg in June 2026, which ran twice in parallel and brought together two groups that seldom work side by side: people who run youth sport clubs and people who measure social impact. The two sessions developed quite differently from one another, which says something about the difficulty of the subject. Both started from the same observation, namely that a coach sees a great deal during a training session and almost none of it is the kind of thing an organisation can record or report.
What belonging actually refers to
Belonging is distinct from attendance, and wearing the club shirt does not signal it. It describes the sense that the group would notice an absence, that a recognised place exists within it, and that the people around can be relied on when things become difficult. The psychological literature has treated this as a fundamental human motivation since Baumeister and Leary’s review in Psychological Bulletin in 1995, and self-determination theory places relatedness alongside autonomy and competence among the conditions under which motivation is sustained rather than merely produced.
Rugby generates this sense in a particular way. A contact sport does not permit passive participation: for the length of a session a player is entirely involved, physically and mentally, depending on others and depended upon in turn. Repeated across weeks and seasons, that shared involvement builds a familiarity and a trust which many sports establish more slowly.
The same mechanism explains why its loss is felt so sharply. Belonging rarely ends abruptly. It declines gradually and often without being noticed, until the child has already decided to leave. The practical consequence is uncomfortable for anyone responsible for retention: belonging becomes most visible once it has already gone. By the time a missed session shows up in the data, the decision was usually taken several weeks earlier, and the information arrives after the point at which it could have been acted on.
Where the existing framework stops being useful
The Phineo impact ladder served as a shared reference during the sessions rather than as a prescriptive model. Each pair of participants marked where their organisation currently measures and where they would prefer to measure, and the result was consistent across both sessions. Most clubs measure near the bottom of the ladder, at the steps recording who is reached and who takes up what is offered. Belonging corresponds to the steps above, where the group changes how it sees itself and what it can do, and then how it behaves. The longer-term effect, the adult shaped over years of participation, sits at the top of the ladder and only becomes observable long after the child has left.
The ladder was valuable mainly for making that gap visible and for giving two professional communities a common vocabulary. Both sessions nevertheless identified the same limitation. The model assumes a steady progression from activity to impact, and belonging does not behave that way. A child can be at the fifth step and return to the third after a single event: a coach leaving, a conflict within the group, a heavy defeat, or a change in circumstances outside the club entirely. The ladder cannot represent that regression, and it has no place for factors beyond the pitch. It is a reasonable starting point and insufficient on its own. What the discussion described as missing is a model that allows movement in both directions, accommodates several factors at once, and treats context as part of the measurement rather than noise around it. No such model appears to exist yet in a form clubs can readily use.
What the room actually knew
The discussion surfaced the kind of knowledge that exists inside clubs and rarely reaches a formal framework.
Belonging turned out to be one factor among several. Crowded schedules, the distinction between competitive and recreational programmes, and the time and money a family can commit all contribute to children leaving, independently of how strongly they belong. The group and the family carry as much weight as the individual.
The clearest early indicator was not the child but the parent. A parent who arrives, stays, and talks to other parents indicates a family that is integrated into the club. When parents withdraw, the child frequently follows some weeks later. Few existing frameworks account for this at all.
Attachment also proved to be personal rather than institutional. A child is often attached to a particular coach, someone who knows them and holds steady expectations from one week to the next, rather than to the club as such. When that coach leaves, the attachment does not always transfer, and the child may leave as well, which makes coach continuity a question of impact and not only of staffing.
One club had been losing girls at around the age of twelve. The aggregate data pointed towards adolescence in general. 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. The example illustrates the limit of aggregate figures rather precisely: the number told the club where to look, and only a conversation explained what was happening.
Several practices came up as workable. A brief signal from each child of how they feel, on a three-point scale and without explanation, identifies no causes but shows who may need attention and when the mood of a group shifts. Representing children’s participation externally, through club publications or events, signals recognition beyond the training session and allows family and peers to see it, which contributes to retention. Former players who return, to watch, to volunteer, or to bring their own child, are among the clearer indications of long-term effect, and no survey captures that as directly.
The most frequently cited effective practice was also the simplest: an adult who is present, observes, and initiates contact without a specific agenda. Where that presence is absent, the available data tends to arrive too late to act on.
Presence is the part worth measuring
Visibility came up repeatedly and deserves a caveat. It has its place, particularly for teenagers and for keeping a sport attractive, and it slides easily into vanity. It belongs in the picture without belonging at the centre of it, and a measure of belonging built on it would measure something else.
What holds up is both simpler and harder. Presence, and the adult who sets an example. The coach or the director who is there, who notices, and who behaves in front of children the way they hope the children will behave. That is where belonging forms, and of everything the two sessions produced, it is the finding that carries the most weight.
It is also the part conventionally described as impossible to measure and impossible to scale, which is a claim worth resisting. If presence and example are what work, the task is to observe them properly rather than to set them aside. Belonging has been studied for decades, and tested instruments exist for asking whether people feel they belong, which spares each club the trouble of inventing its own questions. Evaluation methods designed for effects that are messy, context-dependent and changing over time, from realist evaluation onwards, exist for precisely this class of problem. Contribution analysis offers a defensible way of linking what a club does to what changes in a child, without claiming a causal certainty the setting cannot support.
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. Belonging 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, and an honest measure has to accommodate that movement rather than tidy it away.
The sessions also produced a working definition of impact, arrived at collectively and plain enough to be useful. Impact is a change that leaves a positive effect. It holds two things together, that something genuinely changed and that the change was for the better, and with young people both parts are easy to lose sight of.
Questions left open
Six questions were raised and not resolved. They are starting points for further work rather than conclusions.
- Which small, everyday signs tell a coach that a child belongs, without requiring special tools or training?
- How well does a parent’s involvement predict whether a child stays, and does that shift with age or with the 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 remain connected reflect long-term impact, and what keeps them around?
- What would a model of belonging look like that makes room for rises, falls and outside pressures?
- How does a club build the kind of trust in which children feel safe saying what is really wrong?
Bernard Lecuivre runs Coeos Transformation in Brussels and directs the Rugby School of Citizens Brussels, a youth rugby school for players aged 4 to 12 built on a Respect & Plaisir ethos. The workshop described here, Belonging is Impact, ran at the Sport x Impact Forum in Hamburg in June 2026.