How a Boxing Gym on Chicago’s South Side Became the Youth Sports Science Institute

Noma Shields was cleaning gloves, wrapping hands and hitting bags in a boxing gym on the South Side of Chicago when the idea for the Youth Sports Science Institute took shape. She had gone there to work through a period she describes as traumatic. A degree and international experience were already behind her. Neither had anything to do with why she was in that gym. She felt more like herself in that gym than in any office she had worked in.

The young people she started coaching had come for similar reasons. They carried anger and sadness with no other outlet. Between rounds they talked about school and home. It was the kind of talk that happens in a barber's chair. Shields began to wonder what would happen if that time were used to teach maths. The first experiment was a spreadsheet. Students counted their jabs and crosses and recorded how hard and how fast each punch landed. Shields remembers teenagers who had come in to learn how to fight, arguing instead over whether a number sat in the right column.

Why the organisation needed to exist

Chicago's segregation is a legacy of redlining. Shields says it decides what gets talked about where. On the South Side people talk about healing from racism and injustice. A bus ride north in the West Loop they talk about virtual reality, wearables and health technology. She calls it the city's miniature Silicon Valley. Sport gets caught in the same split. In one place it is how people recover and in the other it is a market for fan engagement and fitness data.

She was living in both worlds and wanted one organisation where a young person could heal and build at the same time. Work on the idea began in September 2023. The Youth Sports Science Institute was incorporated in April 2024 and is known as YSSI.

From a boxing programme to an institute

The first version was a boxing and science programme and it confused people. Funders asked whether she was starting a fight club. Boxing was a hard sell next to after-school programmes raising money for basketball and soccer. One high school listed the programme as boxing and nearly got into trouble before anyone checked that the fighting happened in VR.

The first summer was a six-week camp for 40 students running four days a week. Shields had never run a camp or hired anyone. Partners who watched the programme saw a wider market and pushed her into sports she felt underqualified to coach. Wrestling, basketball, soccer and baseball followed. New kit came with them, including VR bat attachments and smart basketballs that coach dribbling through a sensor linked to a phone. Only then did people start to see the sports science in it, she says.

How the model works

Every YSSI programme has three parts. Students play a sport and then work with the technology attached to it. The maths comes last and is drawn from the data that technology produces.

In boxing the first half hour is fundamentals and reaction-timing drills. Sloppy haymakers score nothing in the VR game that follows. Students then pair off. One boxes in VR while the other logs the results in Google Sheets and then they swap. By the end of the session they are cleaning their data and building charts and dashboards from what they just played.

Partners and reach

YSSI works with around 50 students a year. Roughly 15 attend weekly programmes across autumn and spring and about 40 come to a summer camp. At least ten organisations have partnered with YSSI. Rush, Northwestern and UChicago Medicine are among the hospitals that asked for sessions on injury prevention, rehabilitation and heart health.

Black Baseball Media trains baseball and softball players across the South and West Sides. It let Shields bring VR bat attachments into its batting cage. Players moved between live swings and a headset and talked about swing speed and exit velocity. Coaches said they felt like they were coaching in the 1990s and asked how to build their own Moneyball programme at their schools. A single bring-your-kids-to-work workshop for Accenture led the firm to donate a batch of VR headsets.

The results turned up a year later when Shields kept running into students from the first summer on buses and trains. One had been the class clown and cared more about fighting than anything on a screen. He later joined Sneakers to Scrubs, a nonprofit run by former Division I athletes now in medicine at UChicago. He told her he wants a career in healthcare. Another had been going through serious trouble at home. She said the programme had been her happy place and that she had since joined her school's dance team. Shields still calls it the worst summer of her life. Both of them told her it was their best.

Running it as a business

YSSI has done all of this on under $50,000 a year. It brought in around $30,000 in its first year. Shields says finances have been the hardest part. Running a programme and running an organisation turned out to be different jobs. Community filled the gap with space and equipment given in kind.

Her next stage is a platform. It gathers two and a half years of curriculum that currently sits across Google Docs and Sheets into something a school outside Chicago could log into. She calls it Khan Academy for sports science. She also wants a near-peer structure in which university students teach high school students who then teach middle schoolers. In five years she wants YSSI to be community-driven. In her words it should have its own soul outside of her.

Her ask of the sports technology industry is specific. She wants the companies that talk about fan engagement to help write curriculum and to fund after-school programmes. She wants their people in classrooms as guest speakers and mentors. Her nearer goal is smaller. Since the Accenture donation YSSI can put about 20 headsets in a classroom instead of ten. She has yet to run a session with all of them switched on at once.