Actualizing Athletic Excellence Through
The Intelligence of Play

Introduction
Something dramatic happens when adults step in and "organize" child's play. Kids stop choosing sides. They stop calling the shots and negotiating the fouls. When adults set the schedule - play becomes practice. Neighborhood pick-up games disappear. Front and center, everyone is watching, try-outs, uniforms, grown-up rules and regulations, one wins and the rest are losers. This is what countless millions of children face every Saturday morning - driven by well intended adults. What we used to call play has become a compulsive race for recognition. Media and money compound the pressures to win at any costs, especially the unbonded child, the unsafe child, the child that does not know what it feels like to be unconditionally loved and accepted. But, you know this. You've heard it all before.
For more than twenty years, Chuck Hogan, one of the most respected sports educators in professional golf, wondered why some athletes play with ease and excel, while most struggle to overcome performance robbing doubts, fears and anxieties. While working with athletes like Peter Jacobsen and Johnny Miller, Chuck became convinced that athletic excellence increases with psychological security. Create a safe yet challenging environment and there is literally no limit to learning. Introduce fear and anxiety and performance diminishes as attention splits between meeting the challenge and defending our self-image.
This project is an opportunity to share, in a concrete way the hope and possibility that Joseph Chilton Pearce, Chuck Hogan and Touch the Future hold for children and how this can express itself in athletics. It is the vehicle that will carry our message to the athletic community, to corporations, to parents, coaches, to schools and to young players all across the nation It will become the invitation that will draw others to this vision and set a new standard of excellence for athletes as role models to our nation's children.
Surround children with unconditional acceptance and provide models of performance and behavior that are free of conflict and you can't keep them from expressing at there highest levels. The zone, that state when time stops and the great shots are oh-so-easy, is literally child's play for kids and adults who feel safe within themselves. This is The Intelligence of Play and the message our most respected athletes will deliver to parents, players and coaches all over America.

Executive Summary

The Project
The Intelligence of Play pilot project - World Class Golf

Our Mission
Eliminate the barriers to learning and performance implicit in the way most adults view athletics and competition.

The Vision
Define a model of personal athletic excellence, instruction and coaching which allows children to unfold capacities that exceed the limitations most adults have accepted for themselves.

Target Audience
Coaches, instructors, parents and young players in each major sports discipline.

The Package
Individual video based training programs will be created for each major sport. Included will be up to date information on human development and learning along with progressive coaching philosophies, personal interviews and carrier highlights with the most respected players in each field. Each presentation will communicate a common vision and do so in the most powerful way possible, through the eyes our most successful athletes.

Summary
The Intelligence of Play is designed to bring about a fundamental change in the way young people are introduced to and participate in athletics - not just in Jr. Golf - but all children - in all fields of athletics. The project is a catalyst for both personal and cultural change. The closer we get to root causes, the more subtle, difficult or abstract it becomes to bring about this change. A change of perception however, thought very subtle - can have dramatic impact on behavior and for a life-time. It is this change in the perception of adults that this project is designed to bring about.