The ‘digital bridge’ getting kids into sports

Friday, 3 July 2026

The future of getting kids into sports might not be sending them outside to kick a ball around - instead, it might be giving them a phone and a virtual reality headset.

That’s the premise of GameFit, a new fitness programme being trialled by Sports Waikato to get young people moving.

Built in collaboration with virtual reality company Beyond, the programme challenges ideas on what physical activity should look like and is designed to increase confidence.

Sport Waikato head of innovation and digital Leanne Bats said while screens being used to encourage young people into sports sounded counterproductive at first, early trials in schools around the region were proving successful.

“My mantra is ‘as the world changes, so must we,’” she said, adding sport was not fixed and instead evolved over time.

With technology now part of everyday life and younger generations never having lived without it, it was time to consider how it could be leveraged to get young people active.

“It takes breaking from how we've done it in the past and going maybe we don't want to take kids back into sport - maybe you want to create sport that kids are going to go to.”

Bats said her initial hypothesis was that if young people got active through GameFit, they’d be more likely to engage in tradition sports too, describing the programme as a “digital bridge”.

Initial trials at Thames High School with 10 students who weren’t participating in any sports or extracurriculars proved successful, with two participants immediately getting involved in other sports at the school.

Teachers also noted participants had increased confidence and self-esteem, and were more engaged in physical education.

“These kids might have been quite disengaged in the past, and then [we’re] now starting to kind of see green shoots,” Bats said.

GameFit is now being trialled at 10 schools across New Zealand: five in the Waikato, four in Northland, and one in Wellington.

The same concept is being used at PlayLAB, which is under construction at the Grassroots Trust Velodrome in Cambridge.

The interactive space will host a range of “gameified” sports activities, and is set to open in September.

Visitors will be able to participate in 10 different areas or “pods” and experience sports in a way which was unexpected.

“Each of these pods is essentially based on either a core skill or a core game,” Bats explained, adding they were hoping it would appeal to people with all different types of views on sports.

The heart of GameFit and PlayLAB was to have fun while being active, Bats said.

“We play sport, but often when it turns into sport we forget the play element of it all, and we become a bit serious and it becomes quite competitive.”

“This is where some of the issues come in around sport and sideline behaviour because people take it so seriously.”

While screen time seemed counterintuitive to movement, that was because providers “haven’t designed that journey”.

“If we're going to leave it there and go ‘[screen time is] the devil’, that's the opposite of what we're trying to achieve - we'll end up leaving people sitting here just using their thumbs.”

She said the alternative was a massive decline in young people being active as sports lost resonance.

“The benefits of movement are for everyone.”