Alex: 0:37

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Working it Out podcast. Today I'm with the CEO of Wallball UK as well as the Stealth Doctor, Dan Grant. Welcome to the Working it Out podcast Dan.

Dan: 0:49

Thanks Alex. Pleasure to be here.

Alex: 0:51

I really appreciate you coming on today and I've seen whilst digging into your work I've seen you actually wear so many hats so it'd be good to go through those whilst we talk through the episode but really appreciate you taking the time to be on here and what we'll do is we'll jump into our first question because the one that we love to ask. All of our guests, it's around our Working it Out locker. what we do with this locker is ask people to induct give us one item from your relationship with physical activity. Please induct one item for me.

Dan: 1:21

It would be remiss of me not to just give you a wallball ball. I'm going to put a ball in there.

Alex: 1:29

Thank

Dan: 1:29

you very much. I think

Alex: 1:30

for those who are listening to this for the first time and haven't heard what I've been doing, it'd be good to understand one, what is a Wallball ball and two, why?

Dan: 1:41

Yeah, so the sport I do, it's got many different names. I guarantee everyone listening to this has done it before. It's hitting a ball against the wall with your hands. So you might have called it patball. The official name for generations was handball, but then there were talks with the Olympics around 2012 and the Olympics said there's already this other sport called team handball. So you have to change the name. So the name Wallball has come through as well, but basically it's a rubber ball, just slightly smaller than a tennis ball, but much bouncier the same as a U S racquetball, if you ever come across those and you hit a ball against the wall with your hands. And the court is just a wall and the floor is just as line markings. It's super easy to get going, really hard to get good at because the ball's so bouncy. But yeah, that's what I love. It's just a, it's just a ball and you're good to go.

Alex: 2:27

How did Wallball come into your life?

Dan: 2:30

I, at school, I played the English version of hitting balls against walls. So like every country hits balls against walls in various ways. So there's like the Irish have Gaelic handball and that's the one that's spread around a lot. The Spanish have pelota and that's spread to South America and all over the place there. The schoolyards have pat ball. And we have an old English ball called fives and there's there's a few types of those. There's Eton Fives, if you're really posh, there's Rugby Fives, there's Winters Fives, there's lots of different fives. My school played fives, and I used to play that, I became one of the best players in the country for that. And then, one of the other top fives players, he was a teacher, and he went to America, and if you go to New York, There's two and a half thousand one wall handball courts, or what we now call Wallball courts. So these are just like concrete walls, they're outside, they're free to use, they're free to access, everyone can use them, and they're in use all day, every day. And he saw that and was like, holy hell, like This is like fives, but really accessible. And he came back to the UK and wanted to like, get things going at that time. We realized that there was more of a world circuit. So there was like international events. There was like the equivalent to the tennis Davis cup, where you could play for your countries. And so we wanted to put an England team in and there were England trials. I went along cause I was pretty good at fives, got in the team. And yeah, that's how I started. So I started off as an athlete wanting to be the best in the world. Settled for being best in Europe, I tried

Alex: 3:57

That's amazing. I've got stats on here that you've won the Spanish Open, which is pretty, pretty cool. But I think for me, what I've already just learnt, I did a bit of digging, but I didn't I know I knew I had linked to five So I didn't know how historic it was everything that I see promoted about wallball is it's a new sport it's a new activity a new thing. We should engage it. But no, it's got rich history to it.

Dan: 4:22

yeah, it's got a it's got a massive heritage to it You know actually hitting a ball around is one of the oldest sports in the world you actually have records of it going back to Greece and even ancient Egypt They're doing something similar and obviously they weren't playing the current formalized version, but for us I find it really interesting now because yes wallball in the one wall handball sense that has been going on in its current form. It started around the Great Depression time when the Irish who loved playing their Irish handball, which normally involves like a big alley that they make with four walls. They couldn't do that during the Great Depression. So they started to build these one wall courts and then, the city loved it and it took off from there. That was about 120 years ago. So that is where, that kind of version of the sport originated and it hasn't been played in the UK. There are versions of handball, like different wall sports. If you go to the Southwest, there's like these giant walls where people hit balls against it's all this random stuff. But the traditional formalized version of the sport, which we play now, that is something which, yes, It's old, but also people in England don't know about it. So we are making it new and we're trying to make it exciting. And yeah, so it's an interesting thing. Like I think the the uniqueness of it is that, yeah, it's this traditional sport, which is also quite exciting and totally innovative at the top.

Alex: 5:43

Now I've really liked that. I think there's definitely when we dig into the second half of this podcast around The what you believe are the reasons for inactivity. I'm just 100 percent sure we're going to be going into the accessibility, well I'm not trying to lead you down a certain path, but the accessibility of Wallball is everything I see on the website, everything I see in every interview, I see like any space, any ball, any time any ability, I think it really does show in every single, piece of work that you do. And I really, really enjoy that every, you can really pick up in every single interview, every single story. So I can, I could, when I was planning this forecast, I could see where it was going already, which is, which was really good because your message is so clear. going back to yourself and into more about you as an individual. next bit is around when it comes to physical activity, what are What one emotion would you use to describe your relationship with it?

Dan: 6:38

For me personally, it's always been along the lines of fun and happiness. I've always liked being active, but I don't enjoy playing sport when it's not fun. And I don't enjoy being on court with angry people, for example. I'm known for having a smile on my face even when I'm losing because I just enjoy it. So yeah, if it's fun, I'll do it. And I'll give anything a go. I think this will come into it later as well. Like I don't personally, I don't understand the mindset of people that just get so insular into one thing. If it's a new thing to try and someone says, give it a go, I will always give it a go because sport is fun.

Alex: 7:15

Yeah, I'm completely with that. I have a I really sort of, I have two sides. I have a I'm really competitive, but, and once I'm in something, I always want to have fun, but I also, it's not about winning, but it's about doing my personal best. I'm quite competitive within myself. So that, and I'm like you. I've. I thought when I got sick of football because I wasn't playing to a good standard and then no one was taking it seriously and it wasn't fun anymore. So I'm just going to try American football. just going to try Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, just figure out what thing is good for me. I wasn't good at any of them. And now I'm playing golf, which I'm still not good at, but still finding that fun. But yeah, I'm exactly the same. If it's not fun, I really I need sport for my mental health. So yeah. Digging into fun then, how did you, so going through school, Fives was the main part, how did school impact your physical activity? Was it a good influence, was it only roles or people specifically who supported you along the way?

Dan: 8:19

Yeah. Like I said, I've always been active. I think my personality at a younger age moved me into the individual sports more than the team sports. I don't get me wrong. I do like team sports. We played football, cricket, rugby, hockey, the normal stuff at schools. But then I was already playing tennis from a young age and I really enjoyed that. And it was my favorite sport to watch on TV. So I kind of got into tennis. And then when I went to secondary school, it was this weird thing where they said, in the summer. You're supposed to play cricket or whatever. And they were like, Hey who's good at tennis? And I was like I'm all right at tennis. And they were like done. And so that was it. So I was like, I was moved more into individual stuff. The way that fives came about, so fives was like, it's the side sport, and my school that did it, it doesn't even do it anymore. But. I really liked it. I thought it was really fun. I liked the challenge of it. It's ambidextrous sport and it was during like, the rugby term and, I didn't really enjoy rugby too much after getting kicked in the head one time. And then I got quite scared to get involved in big tackles. And I think there, there is one person that stands out as a guy, he was called Owen Toller and he was one of the teachers and he was in charge of five. And I spoke to him and I was like, Can I just play fives during this term and no one else could do that Like it was literally just like a you know I think you do in one of the terms and that's it and I spoke to him can I play like basically a year and He said yeah, and he would do that with me. So it was just me and him and he would just stand above the court coaching me Whatever and I thought that you know at the time I didn't even appreciate what kind of burden that must have been on him, but he did it, and that has literally led to my entire life of being an international athlete, setting up a governing body, setting up an international sports tour, like making friends all around the world, getting a Churchill Fellowship to explore this sport around the world And it's all really thanks to him. And there's there's a very cute story which was confirmed recently when no one from my school had ever won the school's nationals. And that was like the big thing you played. And in my last year, He was there at the Nationals, which is like a four day competition. He was there day one, two, three, but he couldn't make day four because he was teaching. And I got to the final. And yeah, he's quite a, he's a meek, reserved, quiet man. And I won the Nationals that year. And apparently he was, sitting in the lunch hall with all the other students and the staff around. And someone went up to him and told him that I'd won the nationals. And apparently he stood up and just cheered by himself and then sat back down. And it's a really like beautiful little story and turns out it was completely true. So yeah. So Owen Toller that little interaction where he believed in me has literally had butterfly effect ramifications on my life.

Alex: 11:15

That's incredible. I never get bored of hearing these. I think this is the joy of being on this side. I get to hear all of these amazing stories. So then we've spoken about school and we've spoken about fives. You started off in tennis and you wanted to do it for fun. Be really interested to know your earliest memory of being physically active. My

Dan: 11:37

earliest memory of being physically active is not, I don't know, it's probably, there must be another one before this, but I do remember playing a bit of tennis. I was being introduced to it, but then getting a racket and like literally every day, I would just play tennis against the side of my wall. And I was like, I could have rallies with myself. And then when you go back to mum and dad's, house now. You're like, this place is tiny. So I must have been like a really tiny person. But yeah, I just like love hitting the ball just against the wall, which I guess has carried through my life. Yes. And then I think we'll probably touch on this later. That is something that I did where I wanted to be Innately in my personality, I guess I wanted to be good, so I kept doing it and I didn't, I, when I failed, I can, I continued because I wanted to be better and I think the failing is something that we will probably talk about later.

Alex: 12:31

That's really interesting. How then did you Do you get into start competing in a sport like you've mentioned it briefly in terms of finding out about the international circuit and because you've also it wasn't originally called UK Wallball. It had another name. So how is this transition from? It seems like a group of people interested in a sport, which is popular somewhere else. How did you move it here? Compete start growing the sport itself.

Dan: 13:00

Yeah. Good question. Wide range of questions. So I guess, first of all, I think I came from it from an athlete point of view. Like I wanted to be the best and I had all that selfish athlete trait going on. And as soon as we found out that it was international, I was like, and I'd say I trained a lot and I wanted to do it. And the first lot of stuff was team based and the first time it was called the Federation cup, which is basically the equivalent of the Davis cup in tennis. And so we went to the first event one year and we didn't, we know how to play. We were bottom in the world. And but we just gave it a go and then we went away and we basically just marked like a court against the side of a tennis wall. We just got masking tape and put it down and we just trained like every Tuesday against that wall. And if you weren't so middle class, this would be an inspirational Hollywood movie. But by the next year, we were sixth in the world. And then we were fifth in the world. And then we were fourth winning the cup for emerging nations and things like that. So that was my career. And at that time. My horizons were really expanded. So I wanted to get good. And if they, everyone said, if you want to get good, you've got to go to New York. Like you've got to train in New York because New York has all the players. They have two and a half thousand courts and, the best players are over there. So two things happened that year. One I went to the world championships, which were in Portland, in Oregon. And when I was there, I was like, Oh my God, coming from like the fives world where, there's 30 people. It's all quite nice. And then you go there and there's like thousands of people who have this shared interest of hitting a ball against the wall. And like from there, the world champion, the next world championships is next week, the day we're recording this it's next week in Ireland. You have make lifelong friends. And you meet all these awesome people and you just see the standard is great that year I also went to New York to start training and people took time out I was this weird English person like a foreigners hardly ever came over And you were just like wow, this is great. And I just met the people I fell in love with the sport and I thought it was great and roughly around that time I'd done my first degree and I was working in movies and I had a bit of a media background. And so the organization at that time, which was called England Handball, not to be confused with the other England Handball. That movie sorry not to be confused with the other England Handball. Unfortunately that company And I spoke to the guy who set it up, and I'd helped a bit with the media and comms side of it. And I was just like, look, I really like this. Do you mind if I, try to resurrect it and we go for it. And he said yeah, absolutely. Just give it a go. So then I restarted it. And

Alex: 15:43

Hmm. the

Dan: 15:44

other thing that happened in my life, like I think in the beginning, you said I do quite a lot of stuff. And that's true because parallel to all of this, I was doing sport on one stream, but then I started doing medicine and I started to train to be a doctor. And as you go through that, you start seeing all this other stuff. You start seeing social determinants of health. You start seeing the physical activity for health. You start seeing all the problems. And I was looking at it and going, Oh my God, like I could merge these two worlds here because. A lot of the solutions to the problems we're going through, that sport does it. And I've seen it in New York, and I think we could do it here. As I set UK Wallball up, the purpose was, yeah, let's carry on playing the sport and, give us a platform to play. Let's start doing community stuff where we can actually maybe get community courts, maybe get schools playing, maybe start just getting people active that way. And we'll set up a like a national event as well that we can start pulling internationals over. And yeah, those little thoughts began to guide where UK Wallball has now become, which is like a charity and governing body focused on getting people active and underneath it all, you go on our site and things like that, you'll see what you said earlier. We've got a really clear message. We're like, I want to get people active. You want to do all that kind of stuff, but underneath it, which is something that I probably won't ever, we don't really push to the forefront unless we're in like specialist audience circles is health. Um, again, we'll touch on it probably later in the podcast, but I think that we have this really interesting world and I'm literally in the middle of the Venn diagram where I sit in the meetings from a sports point of view, and you're like, none of you understand health, and then you're in the meetings on the health side and you're like, none of you understand community and physical activity. And I think both sides think they do and on a super high level. Yes, they get it. But when you get into the weeds, I really don't think either side gets it. And I think that's a bit of an issue, which I'm sure we'll touch on later in the podcast, Alex.

Alex: 17:51

I'd be really interested to know about. the stealth doctor in your professional career, because I think this is really interesting for people because there's not many people in the, in our sector, the sports sector, if you, like you say you sit in both, who also have a doctorate specifically in medicine. a doctorate through a PhD in a specific sport related field. So really interested in finding me out. How you do both. And you spoke about how they overlap, but you very much have this stealth doctor side, and I've seen you do you do a lot of talks at, I don't wanna get this wrong space related stuff I'm gonna call it. So I'll let you explain it more.

Dan: 18:31

Yeah, okay. I said, let's let's put the sports side aside. And I'll talk to the medical side. So yeah, I came to medicine late and I started doing it. And I'd come from a creative background. Don't ask me how I made the jump from Hollywood movies to medicine, but I did. And it was it was a decision. Let's just say that. So I started doing. Medicine. And I think that ultimately the things that really interest me are I like cool stuff. I don't want to make it sound more profound than that. If it's cool, I'll do it. And there was a module about space medicine and extreme environment physiology, and I was like, that sounds cool. So I did it and I met cool people and I got really interested in the extremes. And that does cross over with sport later on, but I think my whole medical career has. It's pushed me down a road where, yes, I do sport, I like extreme environment stuff, which is all about optimization and understanding things that like, when you push the human body to the extreme and As I came out of, and I started working as a doctor, I managed to land a job at a company called Meditex, which do biomarker testing. So this is like remote blood test monitoring, we monitor bloods in the NHS when you're sick, and athletes have always monitored their blood tests at a super high expensive level. And then in the last 10 years, like this whole thing has become so much more accessible. But it's all around the world of, Prevention and empowerment and all the strands of my medical training has led me down a path where I have become increasingly interested in Prevention and empowerment and the reason I called this I'm called the stealth doctor Is because I really and this is something I learned from space, you know in space There's a really nice example of the fact that, you orbit the Earth every 90 minutes. You're waking up and you need to get a sunrise and a sunset every 90 minutes. And it's really bad for your health because your circadian rhythms are totally screwed. So that's when they introduce circadian lighting on, International Space Station and stuff like that, which helps regulate and we're back to normal. And so I was like, Oh, that's a really interesting thing. And actually, then there's a lot of other things where you manipulate environments or change the environment, which impacts people's health. And personally, I'm really interested in, yes, I like empowering you. So I do like the education side where I empower you to understand your health. But I also like doing the things where I can manipulate the environment that you're in, and that will make you healthy. And you won't even know I've done it, but I've done it And that's why I've called like the stealth doctor. I do a bit of both. But yeah empowerment and prevention and of course the nhs don't do that. I mean they say they do but they don't and I and my personal feeling is I don't think they should be doing a lot of prevention stuff They're not like not early prevention. I think now the whole sector's gone to the stage where That is what community and private organizations are for. And the NHS, stretched as it is, should shrink a bit and be like, we'll just treat you when you're sick. And that is where I see that kind of happening. But yes, I do prevention. I do empowerment. Part of it's come from an extreme background and it crosses over with sport. And that all goes into, if I pull the two threads together, things like what I do with Wallball, where we manipulate the physical space to create a non traditional sporting space, which is just welcoming, encouraging, and it's proper. It's not just urban sport. It's urban design and architecture, which means that you'll get active because You'll on a subconscious level you'll feel like you want to and just give it a go.

Alex: 22:02

That's amazing. like I said at the beginning, just a bit of time now to jump on a podcast every now and again as well, which is really appreciative. I heard you in an interview saying that green spaces are being removed from inner cities and we're seeing a lot more grey spaces and we're utilising them. Can you just give us a bit more around that please?

Dan: 22:23

So grey spaces is going up. And that means the green spaces are going and I think it's important to then, we're not going to change that. We've got to embrace it. And I looked at it and, that's where Wallball does fit in because, if you're putting walls up, then you can start doing stuff. And, I do think it's one of the big problems, there's a lot of problems, which I'm sure some of the other guests have touched on in the past as well, but why aren't people getting active, but also, put the NHS hat back on, why is people's health getting worse? And they do go together and urbanization is a big part of that. And, non utilization of the grey space in the appropriate way. And I think, we're getting into the stage where nowadays, urban sports are in the Olympics. It's buzzy. People say urban, they talk about like grey space and what are the urban sports at Olympics? Like climbing is not really an urban sport. It's like windsurfing is definitely not an urban sport not with heavy surfing. And but yeah, Skate and BMX, there's a few that actually definitely belong in there. But yeah, urban stuff is really interesting. But I don't think we've designed things well in the UK to date. And I think things are beginning to change. And there's a few kind of like thought leaders that are looking at it. But we have some inherent problems going on and when you look at like urban spaces at the moment You often see these like MUGAs right these big like multi use games areas the big caged areas. What are they good for? They're good for the three people that want to go in there and play basketball and they're good for the drug dealers. They're probably not very good for other people. They don't look welcoming. They don't look like a nice place to go looks like a prison half the time and if they're made nice They're turned into like fiber side facilities, which you need to pay 60 quid an hour to rent So I think we can do stuff better. And I'm really interested, let's throw the stealth stuff back on as well, like the non traditional sporting space. So if you have, if you make a caged area, that's a traditional space. You've made a sport area. It's a bit like putting a playground up and being like, hey, play over there. That's where you should do it. I'm interested in doing things in a non traditional way. So sure, sure. Don't get me wrong. If you put up loads of walls in like proper sporting spaces and things like that. Great. I'll take it. But the last big project we did was in. Canada water in Surrey Quays. And we basically looked at it and went, this is the side of a shopping center. In one of the most deprived postcodes going on with massive health inequalities. Everyone who lives around there, they walk to Tesco's, which is in that big shopping centre, and then they go home. So why don't we turn one of the outdoor spaces on the side of the wall into wallball courts, which are just two walls against the wall. And we made them super bright, vibrant, colorful. We've made the

Alex: 25:07

cool.

Dan: 25:08

Yeah, we made the floor awesome and colorful and vibrant. And we put patterns on there, not only to reflect the the architecture of what was already in that area in the history of Canada water. And that's personally, I think art and sport should go hand in hand. And I don't think they do that very much. I think, you are seeing there is a trend of hype courts at the moment, which is really cool tend to be basketball courts. And there are some amazing examples across the world, but like making things look awesome and arty is great. And if you make things arty, then you should be ingrained in the community. So what belongs there? Because if you put something arty in that belongs. It probably won't get graffitied and tagged as fast as other stuff. So we made these like awesome courts, one was a blue court to represent like the waterways. One was a green court to represent the park. And we had a little urban section, which was like orange and purple. There were also designs in the orange and purple section, not just to represent the art, but for kids to go along and just use the lines on the floor and the space to make their own stuff. We put seating around this. It becomes more of like an amphitheater type area where you can get food and you can have your lunch. And if you're sitting outside, first of all, you're doing quite well from a health point of view, you're getting outside, you're getting fresh air, you're in a communal space. So you start talking to other people and you're watching physical activity that could happen. And the walls. Yeah, they were used for Wallball, but people were using it for other stuff. People were using it for tennis every day because you know There are no tennis walls left in the uk and people really want them so people using it for tennis people used it for like football people Use the space for jump rope and the scouts would come and use it as a little playground area. And it's just this space Which was you know, it was a dead space before, which was just bricks and some planters and it looked horrible. So we got rid of it all. We turned it into a really nice area. And the whole idea was just to encourage informal activity. And from the way that we try to innovate that, not only are we in a informal, in a, like a untraditional sporting space, so people can just come and they can play informally. But one of the beauties of what we do in Wallball, and I think that, I think a lot of other sports have spoken to us since and being like, wow, that's really cool because a, they can't do it or they want to do it, but haven't really found a way is that we were in this really nice position where everything you need is on site. So we put up posters, we put up a QR code. If you scan that, Then we know, then it teaches you how to play. So you can watch a how to play video and wall is such an easy sport to start getting going. Like within 30 seconds, you can start doing it that you can watch that video. We also put a vending machine on site, which meant that it's.

Alex: 27:45

this is such a good idea.

Dan: 27:47

The vending machine is awesome and it's got the balls. It's got the gloves. So you can go in and you can just tap your card. We have iterated this. So we did have a court. We have a call at the moment in Bankside in a more traditional sporting space in Marlborough Sports Gardens. And we had one of those like twisty vending machines in there where you put a pound in and get a ball out. But we'll make a loss on that because the balls cost more than a pound. But whatever. Whereas when we went to Surrey Quays, we were able to get like an electronic vending machine much easier to stop, much easier to keep hold of. You can brand boxes and the boxes, the balls come in, have the QR codes on teach you how to play. So basically you can turn up, you can watch a video that teach you how to play. You can get a ball that's on site and then you can just play. And it's awesome. And that for me is like proper. That's how you get active in the urban space. And if I'm building it out and saying other urban stuff, yeah, you make more urban playground that you do more arty stuff. It just encourages activity. And maybe other stuff goes in the vending machine too. So we just get people interested in doing stuff.

Alex: 28:50

I think the traditional versus non traditional interests me there as well because not bashing squash at all, but my first experience was I wanted to play with a friend and we found a squash court, which was 45 minutes across London that we could be a book that weekend because everywhere was booked in advance. So we travel across and we paid for the court, had to pay for hiring a club and they didn't have any. Balls to give her. So everyone, you've got to bring your own stuff. And we were like so many things with this as someone who is really willing to travel and to buy equipment and to just make that effort. I've done that because I'm a sporty person. If there was someone who wanted to try it or wanted to try a hand and hand eye coordination sport like Wallball or squash, they won't have those same motivations to go through all those milestones, even the 45 minutes across by the first time they've looked. To see if their local ones available and it's not that they're off, but your sport is like it's in a space where someone's going to be every day and it's super accessible, super easy and there's not much thinking they don't necessarily need you in any way because you've done your part about putting out the court. They may have a tennis ball at home that they could, or if like you said, a football at home, which they can just bring to this space. I think that's the part which I like the most is in terms of once you've just. Just put out those lines. It's there. It's like reintroducing Curby, if it's got different names, into people's lives, a sport that everyone loved as a kid. It's like if reintroducing something like that's what people love doing. Just to those informal activities.

Dan: 30:34

And you've touched on a few things there, which are, the barriers to entry. And you said accessibility earlier. That is one of our key things that we're most proud of. Because. I think, a lot of people who work in the sector, middle class decent backgrounds will probably be like, Oh yeah, you might have to pay for a squash court, whatever. But actually the reality is when you come down to what, let's go back to medicine, social determinants of health. When you come down to what makes people unwell and sick, and that is a burden on the nation through the finance that it costs to keep people healthy once they get sick. As a lot, the poorer you are, the worse you do, and the poorer you are. You're not even going to get on a bus to go to the leisure center, let alone pay two pounds to go into the leisure center and pay five pounds to pay squash, because you can't afford that bus in the first place. And where you live. You look around and it's just no ball game signs are everywhere and you know You can't hit a ball against the wall. Accessibility is key. So that's why for me the non traditional side is good and also what we say, you know for sure I want you to play the traditional version of Wallball because then you're playing the sport which is played all around the world that does open up avenues and Pathways and more traditional sporting pathways But we also say the motto of our organization is any wall any ball anytime. Because you don't need to play on a big court. You can mark the court. You can put masking tape, chalk, you can play against your own wall at home and be like right that gutter That's the side and then this line here on the wall. Let's play against that. You can make your own court boundaries. You don't need to use a Wallball, which is like the special ball. You can use a tennis ball and everyone's got a tennis ball somewhere. You can use Whatever you want, so that any wall, any ball, any time that I think is really powerful. And that's the accessibility side. And I just feel like, a lot of sports can't do it. And the ones that can. Don't. Because maybe someone in the leadership is a bit too traditional. And I think you need to shake stuff up and I don't think, I think outside the box, which to be honest, if you have grown up in a sport, it is difficult to do that. We are in a unique position at UK rule ball where, you know, not only are we, seeing different ways to play the sport and it opens itself up to it, but we are innovative and ideas are fine and it's great. And we, that's, I think other sports can really struggle there.

Alex: 33:03

I think what I've seen is that the need to evidence impact has Stunted innovation, because you say, how do we've got this amazing space, how do we track how many people are using this amazing space, we need to then track access in terms of how they're getting in and out and we need to be able to have some sort of way of registering, just so that we can continue trying to do the great work which we believe in, but I need to know who's coming. I need to know who's playing this sport. And so we need a specific space for it. So that's always been a huge issue. It's going to take time. But when I joined Sport England, and there's this whole new system partner investment and this new system part of the strategic partnership approach, that's not the main outcomes anymore. before it was how many people you got through the door and how many times have they done it? And whilst there still is a need to evidence impact is it has changed a lot over the last few years and there is a This is a 10 year strategy. I'm really promoting Sport England. I don't normally do this. So this is Getting they're getting the money's worth out of me today But I do believe in their new the new strategy in terms of where they want to be because that will allow other traditional sports to be more innovative and be in more places and be in the communities like you're doing and it allow us to work with organizations like yourself more you say. We want to, we're doing this amazing thing. It's so hard to track how many people are engaging in it, but this is the overall impact it's having in this space. This is all the things it's doing outside of sport for the community, et cetera. And this is how we, the potential impact. So yeah it's hopefully trailblazers like yourselves are us always to go, how do we show an evidence impact in a slightly different way, which isn't bums on seats.

Dan: 34:59

Yeah. That, that has been a big problem for us is fitting into the traditional sporting culture and, Sport England don't recognize us as a governing body and that makes life a little bit tricky for us. So if you have any sway, Alex, let's go in, but I also know that, the way that recognition happens is really tricky and it's built towards urban sport, and that's before you even put all the politics in that have gone into what all the sports are. And I do agree, when we started off, I was going for little pots of funding, and it was like, you try and get some money, which would be like, hey, you need to work with 14 year old black girls who are involved in knife crime. That's it. And you're like, I'm happy to have the funding because I need funding. But I'm just working on one tiny thing, which doesn't really push me forward in the way that we need to as an organization and you gave me like five, six different pots of funding to do different things. And if you just given me. that money and I could hire someone, they could deliver all those projects and more. So we were a little bit stuck there. Evidencing is really hard. You're right. And when Surrey Quays even, and we still seeing breakdowns of it because the Surrey Quays project for me, it's amazing. And it is, and for you, if you're someone who works in the sports sector, you must look at it and go, yeah, this is actually a really great case study. Really good example. And then, And we, our surrogate markers that we were able to use is basically if you scan the QR code. And if you buy a ball If you buy a ball, like we can say one person has got active if they bought a ball, cause they're going to do stuff. If you want to bend the statistics a bit, you say you have to play singles. You have to do something. So two people who go active and if you really want to like. Ben, the statistics, you say four people are active because it's doubles, but we wouldn't do that. But it's, those are the surrogate markers and the courts were in use every day. However, the funder for it in their middle management, they couldn't see. The massive impact they're not on the ground seeing Oh, great. The tennis people are coming and just the importance of just having that space.

Alex: 36:57

So we've already started quite, quite a bit of this conversation around the second half of the podcast, which is root beliefs in terms of your, the root causes of inactivity, specifically in England. And, normally, in previous podcasts, we've just gone straight personal into this, but this has transitioned really nicely. Think we're halfway there anyway. I just want to tie it in a nice bow, just so we have you and Dan's beliefs out there, rather than here's what Wallball is, and you've got many different hats, as you said. To tie all of these thoughts and how all the interventions that you spoke about in, into this nice little bow. If you were going to start mapping the causes of inactivity, where would you start?

Dan: 37:43

Oh, it's tough. It's a big question. I think you have to approach it from the prevention model that we get in medicine. If I'm, and for that, and first of all, I should say you can go into more detail. So yeah, the medical prevention model is basically, there's primary, secondary, tertiary prevention. There's also quaternary prevention and primordial prevention. So what does it mean? In the health side, primary prevention is You know, we don't want you to get sick at all, right? So we're going to try and prevent that from happening in the first place. That seems like vaccinations, stuff like that. And as you get older, it's education and it's stuff like diet activity and it does go into a little bit about, creating the environment for you to be able to be healthy. Secondary prevention is, once something as bad happened to you, we want to make sure it's not bad for very long and we definitely don't want it to happen again. And tertiary prevention is, something bad has happened. You're in a bad way, but we don't want it to get worse. We don't want you to die. Quaternary prevention is about end of life. And primordial prevention is a bit more nebulous and it's about things, the, you have no control over. So it is in the Stealth Doctor territory, but it's also in like your genetics, what your mom does when you're still in her womb all three to like what the government does and the policies that go in place to create different things. So how do we solve the problem? It's massive and it's not one thing, but you layer on prevention models. So primordial stuff is really important. And that is urban design, urban planning, and upskilling everyone who works in that sector to understand that you can create the grey space, which is coming, but you can make it in a way which is going to get people. Active and healthy. And it's not just about pavements and putting some outdoor gym stuff. It's about designing it and digging into the health research. So you understand how the colors work, how the sounds work, what makes a safe sound. What are we doing with the street lighting? How do we do that in a way which also doesn't interrupt people's sleep and has it in a circadian way? What do you do about toilets? One of the major barriers to old people, young people with disabilities going outdoors is a lack of public facilities and a lack of public toilets. And, it's something that we hardly ever touch on. And also within that realm is education, which I'm sure some of the other guests have spoken about, but like really early education about Health and physical activity and also promoting sport and physical activity more at schools. When we were younger, no doubt, you played a lot more sport than you do now. PE sessions, you had more of them than you do now. And priorities of education is a big issue because I understand things from all the different points of view. You do need people to do STEM. You do need people to, get involved in arts is going, so there's a big art push to try and get people to do that. But also you just got to get active. You've got to get healthy. And then loads of barriers there and, and digging into stuff like I'm sure your dissertation was digging in about, girls being able to get active. What are their barriers? Because a lot of schools, they don't really address that very well at all, especially mixed schools. That's primordial. That's all there. Then your primary prevention is about, Educating people. So that education that you layer in from a government or like a high end point of view that is implemented and people understand it and people get going and they understand that getting active is something that should be prioritized and it's good. And if that's from an early age, then that kind of carries through. We also are going to have the facilities to do that. And when I talk about that. I think we need to talk about the traditional sports and minority sports. So in recent years, minority sports are being killed off and people who don't engage in sport, that's what minority sports, that was their real power because not everyone. I know this is a shock Alex, but not everyone wants to play football and that it's just push. There's so much money in football. It's outrageous. And when you go to the London Sport Awards and Sport Awards, like who's winning the awards? It's football. It's the community sports organization. It's like Fulham FC with their, I don't know, million pounds community project or whatever. And all the minority stuff is dying off, and minority sport. As stupid as some of them sometimes look, that is how you foster communities because you can go right back again to the primordial side and go that, it's the outlier research. We start selecting you from sport when you're like in the academic year, so when you're young. The difference in height growth between September and August is like a foot or whatever. So you're really good at sport. If you're born in September, you're really bad. If you're born in August, that's a massive generalization, but there you go. And that sets you off on this trajectory, which takes you into a different place. And if you only do football, hockey, rugby, cricket, that's all you do. Then you're already selecting people from a young age. You're only going to do them. And what are the other people doing? They have no options anymore because we have got rid of the minority sports. So things like, Wallball is a minority sport, but we should encourage it. Like all these other little sports, which have basically been dying off. We need to encourage them. Now it's much harder than just saying that is just a Sport England, top down thing, because, we've also screwed ourselves over with the hyper professionalization of sport, which has removed a lot of the fun from it. We've, the days have gone where You know, you could make your bike at home out of washing machine parts and turn up to the Olympics and you could win and inspire a generation now. You watch the cycling, you go, screw that. I can't do that. Like these guys are massive and they're lifting like 300 kilograms on the deadlift or whatever it's mad. And hyper professionalization moves people away from sport as well. That's a trend that we've seen. And within that realm too, I think that culturally there's a real issue with governing bodies and the, where the sport comes. And I've seen this in Trump's over the years, partly because I am, I come from it with the health hats. I'm like, I don't care. As long as you get active. Sure. I want you to do mine, but I think for every, if you get a hundred people doing mine and 10 want to carry on and 90 want to do something else, I see that as a win other organizations less so. I'm not going to throw out names. Some of them involve rackets, but as a lot of organizations out there, which will silo you and say, you want to do sport? Do this. You can't do the other one. Don't even try and do the other one. And do I want to collaborate with that other governing body? Absolutely not. Because then I might lose my players to them. And, Because of how data is collected, because of how funding happens, I do understand where that mentality has come from, but it's just so wrong. And if you talk to any young person now on any survey, hardly anyone, unless they're really keen on sport, which are not the people that we need to listen to, because they will do sport no matter what, we need to listen to everyone else. They will say I don't want to do just one sport I want like they basically want a menu of stuff like turn up do whatever you want They're only going to do it for five minutes and ten minutes And they probably won't do it in the way that's super traditional and that you really want them to. But that is how it's done and it's okay to sit on your phone. It's okay to do like other stuff And so many governing bodies are just so completely insular that is a big problem because there's no cross pollination, there's no crossover. So you're seeing, education is poor. You're seeing that the governing bodies don't cross pollinate and you're seeing that to the minority sports are getting killed off and they're getting killed off because of all these different reasons and top down funding does not fund them at all. So it's a real challenge. And then they just die because they rely on volunteers. And, oh, Alex, you're moving into this world where, what is the big change? I think about 10 years ago, I was at a conference and it was all the governing bodies were there and a bunch of like other fitness companies and everything. And it's really interesting because people were saying like, what's the major problem here? Is it the governing bodies? And yeah, people were like we don't have enough squash courts and they're all disappearing and leisure centers want to get rid of squash courts and and all these like spaces outside They're not doing it and a woman stood up who I can't remember who she was but she owned like a cycle studio and it was like a more modern cycle studio and she was like you guys are all idiots Like, the rivalry here is mad, because the competitor to sport is not other sports. The competitor is literally everything else in life, and it is media, it is Netflix. It's Snapchat, TikTok, everything else. That is the problem. And that is the problem. We live in this society now where it's very hard to hold your attention for five minutes, let alone one hour. Now, why are you going to do an hour of activity when your brain has been molded over the last 10 years to do lots of different things really fast, really quickly, and we've got people on screens which release endorphins quicker than if you do a sport. And we want to be perfect really fast and have an Instagram life. And you know what? Being good at sport is really hard. It's sometimes easy to get going. It's very difficult to get good and people don't do that. And that in the young people now, there's a thing, there's a trend about failure. I said, I touched on this again, failure. is a problem because when I was young and maybe it's my mentality, I'm sure that, this has always existed, in order to get good, you fail and you get better and you fail and you get better and you appreciate that's how learning happens. And not every like CEO podcast or ever will tell you about like failure is important, blah, blah, blah. But, as a lot of young people don't want to do that because it needs to look good pretty fast. So you need to be, get up to a decent stage very fast and failing is not good, and it's not fun and it's not okay. So whereas actually if you go on to like things like on social media or non sporty stuff, you can get very good at other things very fast. So you're seeing like this massive trend away from stuff. And I don't think governing bodies really get it. And this is when, health and social stuff doesn't really cross over very well. So there's a lot of things going on here. And yeah, this is before we even get into like secondary and tertiary prevention. where yeah, we need people to get active and we need people to understand that's what they need to do. And being active is not, and I know there's been trends in Sport England about, oh, we don't call it sport. We call it activity. We call it healthy movement. We do all this kind of stuff. And Sport England, because of the nature of the funding has moved away from being a sport organization to really being a health organization. And yet, It's come in this way, which is like totally underfunded with people who probably don't have the educational background to really understand. How they're moving into the health world. Like you basically Peter principled a lot of people that support England because they're sport, they're not health.

Alex: 48:50

Thank you so much for that. I think what we'll do now is dig into what you think is the highest priority. Cause we've gone through a few things there and the prevention model is one that I've not been familiar with so I am going to have fun after this, digging into the prevention model and you've used some really real life examples of what that looks and feels like when we're talking about the sports sector in general. Out of everything you spoke about now, would you say is the highest priority? What should the sports sector be doing?

Dan: 49:22

There are hundreds of organizations like us and we are very marginalized. A lot of the stuff I've spoken about today. Where it's you want to use the non traditional sporting space. You want to be innovative. You want to be open to just like trying stuff out and just seeing if it works and that funding stop giving it to football's got enough money. Start giving to others. And I, my, my take home. Is that we should be funding and supporting people with a broad brush, you know We shouldn't be so specific and we shouldn't be like we're going to do this and this sport We should be funding as many different things as possible Which really tap into those minority sports and we need to keep those minority sports alive. So I'm not saying give them two grand, five grand or whatever. We need to be giving decent money to minority sports to do decent things within the community. That is number one. And my number two is we really need to do some work around education in the areas that make the decisions. So people who work in the sports area who make the decisions, health is way more complicated. Social determinants of health are way more complicated than people think. So we need to educate. And if you're coming from it from a medical point of view and you're, you need to understand what is actually realistic and what we're doing on the ground. And ultimately, hopefully that results. With someone who does a phd and then becomes the person who will make those decisions Without having to rely on those of other people in the future like that is where we have gone wrong. So those are the two things I would do, Alex.

Alex: 51:06

I think, yeah, we've spoken a lot around the need to, and the, like you said, smaller sports, minority sports are dying off, and the impact that has, and I can see that from my time working at King's College London. When I went there, there was sports I'd never heard of, and I'd been in the sport, the sports sector, like Kabaddi. And that's the one I always go back to, where I think, you haven't heard of that, here's one you're gonna everyone has to YouTube because it's so different, but it's huge in india huge in asia And it's got a huge culture to it And if we want to have a diverse community, we should be encouraging sports like this in this country so I completely agree with that point and hopefully now we will move in a direction where we can work with a wide range of sports, but we're still nowhere near like you're completely correct. The second point is one that's really interesting to me is around educating the actual professionals within the sector so that they're more aware and knowledgeable from a health perspective. And you're talking about those coming into the sector from a degree level, because I go back to mine which is probably the traditional route. I did a sports development and coaching sciences degree. And within that, I did a introduction to physiology in year one, and then I was like, Oh, I don't have to do this in year two and three. I'm going to drop that one. That's not what I wanted. That's I want to do sports development. So I'm not going to do physiology or health. I'm doing so that was is literally seen like that. And I chose the sports governance and sports policies units because that's where I thought the most appropriate things to work to get a role in the likes of Sport England is I needed to be knowledgeable in that. But you're saying, no, it's the flip side. You can influence policy if health.

Dan: 52:56

Yes, and I will i'll give you an example. So first of all I'll touch on the first one. Going hand in hand with minority sports is that we need to do, you know The pr of those minority sports as well. We need to broadcast them and you know Let's bring back ESPN8, The Ocho. Let's bring back Trans World Sport and Grandstand. Like, when I was a kid Grandstand. It's a whole day. It's the Olympics has just happened here when we were recording. And it's amazing. It's sport all day. And it's a bunch of random sports that you can get really into. And when I was a kid, grandstands on TV, and it's like the whole of Saturday or Sunday was just random sports all day long. Now, funding has gone from the BBC funding has the hyper professionalization of sport means that funding only goes to a few sports now. So you don't broadcast them all, but we got to broadcast them. You've got to show people what it can do. And maybe you show people that. Being at a really high level in a sport is actually not that hard for quite a lot of sports. You can probably get up to these levels. You don't have to be like doing it since you're like six years old. Let's bring back the minority and let's broadcast it. It comes to the second one I'll talk about a bit of research that I did the other year which took a long time to publish, but it was actually published this year, but basically, having worked in these sectors, I was getting increasingly frustrated that we would give money for social prescription, right? So social prescription is, The buzzword whatever we're going to give a ton of money to basically get you active. That's what it is So normally like what is a prescription when you're sick is for a drug social prescription is we're gonna You know give you a token to a leisure center or fund a community organization That's gonna, you know help you get active and stuff like that. So that's what social prescription is My problem with it from coming from my background was I was going. Your evidencing here is absolutely rubbish and you are giving so much money out. And yes, we have spoken already about evidencing in sport is pretty bad. And sometimes it's skewed us in the wrong direction. I do agree with that. And I do think sports organizations are required to evidence, maybe too much stuff, and that's resulted in some bad stuff. However, when you approach things from a medical point of view. You do need to do that. You do need to evidence base your medicine to make sure it is right. So if I'm giving out a few billion of funding, I damn well want to make sure that I'm funding the right organizations, which actually have an impact. I don't want to fund the class that does nothing, and how do you measure that? You don't measure it through subjective questionnaires. which are just people being like, I feel great. You don't measure it through BMI, which is not great. You don't measure it through just like your weight on a particular day. These aren't very strong. So my background working in preventative medicine, I work with biomarker testing, so blood tests. And when we get into medicine we, a lot of the blood tests are really highly evidenced, right? And when we diagnose you with some medical conditions, like We're doing it based on your bloods, like diabetes. We're doing that on bloods. We're going to start you on a statin because your cholesterol profile shows you something on the bloods. So it's mad to me that we don't evidence stuff in the community side better. So last year I ran, oh, not last year, in 2019, I ran a trial, which was published this year, so COVID got in the way, but basically we worked so the company I was with at Medichex provided some of the equipment. We worked with the university of Herts and a bit of UCL. And we worked with Watford football club who do like an amazing outreach programme. And they do shape up, which is basically if you're an obese man, then you can get referred to this programme so that you can basically do stuff every week for six weeks. And then you can do another six weeks of, Other stuff or maybe it's 12 and 12 but you can basically you're obese and we're going to see how you improve now The control study because they have like different groups. So the control group we were like, let's just measure it in the normal way Right, so we're gonna just measure your BMI. We're gonna look at your weight. We're gonna ask you some questionnaires That's it Then this the group that we worked with the intervention was like the only difference here we're laying in blood tests And we're laying in some education around those blood tests. And that means that we can put in things like sugar markers, cholesterol markers, vitamin markers, and stuff like that. And from an evidence point of view, right? If after the programme finishes, Your markers have improved I can say hey, you know what this programme actually works We should fund that programme. Did work, so we should fund that but if you do a programme and the markers don't improve then you shouldn't fund it And you shouldn't rely on your mate who says it's a good thing to do and on networking in conferences, Whatever and questionnaires which say stuff look at the not the subjective but the objective, and you can go, we need to fund this because it objectively works. And. If you really want to get into it, like if I was building this trial out, which is probably a lot of work maybe too much work to do. But if we're building this out, you start to cost model stuff off the back of it. So like how much money should you fund social prescription? What's the return? That's something that a lot of people want to know what's the return if I give you x amount of money to do social stuff like people don't understand the social return half the problem with what Wallball Is it's hard for me to get money in because it's such a cheap accessible sport that you don't need to buy expensive stuff, you don't need the apparel, you don't need any of that, which is great on one hand, but it's bad on the other hand, because how do I get investment in? Because people don't see any return. The return of the sport and the reason we turn it to charity is because it has a social return, and people don't understand what a social return is. But if you're working in the prevention space, especially secondary prevention, and you can start putting blood tests in, Then you can start seeing that return. Because if you were diabetic at the beginning and you are not diabetic at the end of the programme, we know that you are saving the NHS, I don't know, like 120 quid. If you just have one tablet a year, if you get admitted to hospital for one day because of your diabetes, you're saving 300 quid. If you get admitted to intensive care because you've had a really bad complication of your diabetes, that's 6,000 pounds per day. So if your social prescription programme has completely altered that health trajectory, so that now instead of being diabetic, getting sicker, going to hospital, going to intensive care, you have actually reversed it. You know what? You're potentially saving thousands year on year through that programme. Let's fund that programme. Education goes in and with it, let's bring over some of the medical evidence based approach to really understanding how it works. And it's not applicable to everything, like it's not applicable to, what I do with Wallball, but it is applicable if you are trying to be one of those social prescription programmes that are working with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, post stroke, post heart attack, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's what I mean.

Alex: 1:00:14

I think that's the perfect place to stop. It's been a lovely episode. I've been listening so much. I've just lost complete track of time and this is probably the longest episode to date, which probably means that it's a great one because I've really, I've learned so much from yourself. If those listening have really enjoyed the podcast disagree with what Dan says, agree with what Dan says, wants to pick up something to do with what Dan says, please do comment on the post when it's on LinkedIn. The whole point of this is to create conversation and to build this map. So if you have any, anything that you want to add or disagree with, do comment and then we can help me build this map. And I'm sure Dan would love a debate as well. Hope you enjoyed that. Do comment and hopefully see you at the next one.

Dan: 1:00:59

Thanks very much, Alex.