‘They’re just not sporty’

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By James Bone, 

Founder of Active Stories

A parent once told me her two-year-old “just wasn’t sporty.”

That phrase has never left me. 

I started to question whether a child was genuinely “not sporty,” or whether they simply hadn’t yet had enough opportunities to develop the physical skills and confidence that allow them to participate in the first place.

Sometimes the path you plan isn’t the path you’re supposed to take.

In 2008, I was studying for a business degree with a placement arranged in London. Then the financial crisis hit. The company couldn’t afford me, and the placement disappeared. At the time, it felt like a setback. 

Looking back, it was the most important setback that happened to me.

I went back to university and asked myself a simple question: What do I actually love doing?

The answer was spending time with people on a tennis court. I had been a competitive junior and a qualified LTA coach since I was 18. But coaching taught me something deeper: I didn’t just enjoy improving a serve; I enjoyed helping a person develop. 

A tennis lesson was rarely just about a forehand, it was a conversation about confidence, motivation, and ambition.

In 2010, I founded Generation Tennis. It became a genuine family business, eventually delivering coaching across seven clubs and twenty schools with a team of twenty people. I was proud of the scale, but I was prouder of the people. Coaches who came through our programme developed careers built on communication and leadership.

It reinforced a core belief: If you help people become more capable, the impact goes much further than the original thing you were teaching.

The moment tennis became something bigger

While running Generation Tennis, I became captivated by what early years children could do in the right environment.

I remember a two-year-old who would arrive with a dummy in his mouth and a comforter in his hand. The second he stepped onto the court, he became a superstar. With age-appropriate repetition and encouragement, he was rallying ten shots with me before he was even three.

It wasn't a scientific study, but it was proof of potential. It made me realise that we shouldn't be deciding what a child is capable of before they've even started school. What if we gave them the foundations: running, jumping, catching, and the confidence to try, before they ever felt "not sporty"?

In 2016, I founded Tree Top Toddlers, an early years programme teaching movement through stories. It won an award at the Nursery World Show in its first year. But the more time I spent with these children, the more I realised movement was only part of the story.

I started asking: What else happens while a child is moving? Can they listen? Imagine? Learn new vocabulary?

The Motor-Language Connection

This question sent me down a rabbit hole of early childhood development and the EYFS. I wanted to understand the relationship between a child’s movement experiences and the opportunities those experiences create for communication and learning.

I now call this the Motor-Language Connection.

I don’t use that phrase as a universally established scientific framework; it’s my way of describing what happens when we stop treating movement as something separate from the rest of a child’s development. A movement activity involves following instructions, taking turns, and describing actions. While movement doesn't "automatically" produce language, it creates a rich, intentional context for it to flourish.

The shift to Active Stories

I spent years learning that a great coach can make a huge difference. But children don’t spend their lives with one coach, they spend them with their teachers and practitioners.

I realised that if I wanted real impact, I had to stop being the one in the room and start putting the tools into the hands of the people who are with children every day.

That is what Active Stories has become.

It is the culmination of everything I’ve learned. Sport taught me coaching; Generation Tennis taught me leadership; Tree Top Toddlers taught me storytelling. Today, instead of coaching one group of children, I help give practitioners the knowledge and resources to create better developmental opportunities for hundreds of them.

I’ve never forgotten that two-year-old on the tennis court. 

The child whose parent wasn't sure he could even do sport.

We don’t need to decide who a child is when they’re two. Give them the opportunity. Give them the foundations. Give them the confidence. And then see what happens.

That is the real purpose of physical development: not to produce the next generation of athletes, but to give every child more opportunities to discover what they are capable of.

I have spent my career trying to help people become more capable. I genuinely feel like this is only the beginning.

If you would like to understand more about the research and the thinking behind the Motor-Language Connection, click here:  The Motor-Language Connection