There are more words written, spoken, yelled, screamed, printed, published and promoted about sport than there are of any other human endeavour!

Sitting in the local bar with some friends, we might describe last night's Super Bowl game as "explosive" and "entertaining" and the players as "dynamic" and "tough".

Or we could be chatting with family at the dinner table and sharing stories about our recollections of playing sports at school and use words like "fun" or "challenging" or "exciting".

Sport is such an emotional, deeply passionate experience for so many people around the world that the need to share that essence of that emotion with friends, family and colleagues often leads us to express the richness of our feelings with colourful, colloquial language.

The media too has their bottomless big bag of beautiful sports words that they dip into whenever something extraordinary happens and they feel the need for some powerful language that aptly describes what's happening on the field, on the court or in the pool.

The whole world of sport uniquely inspires a veritable word tsunami flooding the newspapers about goals and home runs and gold medals and world records. In sport every little achievement seems to be incredible or amazing or brilliant or stupendous or monumental or super or the greatest, the best, the brightest...

But what's the most important word in sport?

Is it "talent"? No.

Is it "commitment" or "dedication" or resilience"? No.

Is it "champion?" Or "winner". No.

Is it "speed" or "strength" or "endurance" or "power" or "agility". No, no, no and no.

The most important word in sport is - L.O.V.E. - Love!

Why is Love the most important word in sport?

In sport, it's usually the things we can see, the things we can measure, the things we can count that everyone - well - counts.

It seems that the only things that really matter to the sporting public, pundits and punters are medals, ribbons, times, runs, goals, tries and victories.

But stop for a moment and think for one, quiet, still minute, about what sport means - what it really means to you.

Is it about who won the game, or is it sharing the experience of playing the game with friends?

Is it about the trophy sitting proudly in your office or is it knowing how you chose to practice daily, to work hard, to overcome any obstacle, to manage any challenge and to never give up until you realized your potential?

Is it about kicking the winning goal or is it the memory of learning how to kick a football with your older brother in a back street somewhere until it was too dark and far too cold to keep playing?

We often get so hung up on who won, that we forget what sport is really all about - fun, family, friends and fitness.

And it's about love.

When you love what you do - you do what you love

Around the world we know we face a lot of challenges. It's a tough time to be human! We continue to encounter a litany of crises that none of us - as individuals or as a species - have ever experienced before. We need something that can bring us together, inspire us, nurture us, strengthen us, help us to be healthy (mind and body) and to unite our communities.

This is where sport comes in.

Governments around the globe have all tried various ways to increase sports participation. National sports participation programs have evolved around good health messages (physical and mental health) and the need to keep people active to decrease the burdens on already stressed and strained national health care systems.

Whilst this messaging is important, people rarely do anything out of logic.

We hardly ever make proactive decisions about our health.

We make changes to our life and lifestyle only when it's too late or almost too late. We are emotional creatures. We need to believe in something. We need to be inspired - to feel - to be moved.

What if then, instead of appealing to peoples' logic or health anxieties - what if, we focused on helping each and every child - every individual human being on the planet, to fall in love with sport, movement and physical activity?

What if we made sport more fun and we made fitness more enjoyable, engaging, exciting and shared it as an expression of the sheer exhilaration of movement? What if rather than regaling kids with stories of great players, Olympic champions and world record breaking feats, we asked them "what do you like to do" and then created the environment and gave them the opportunity to do it?

What if sport was based not on oxygen transport systems or muscle twitching or angular velocities - what if we as coaches, as teachers, as parents were committed to a single sporting ideal: "how do we help kids fall in love with sport and with the experience of being physically active with people they care about and who care about them?"

For a long, long time, sport lost its way and became overly obsessed with performance pathways and elite athlete development models and we forgot, that the reason all of us got into this in the first place - the reason any of us do anything was, we fell in love with doing something we loved doing.

Sport can't fix the economy.

It can't make you immune to the next pandemic.

It can't reverse global warming.

But what it can do is connect communities, inspire hearts, move bodies and create moments of enjoyment where we feel - where we believe - albeit briefly - that we can overcome any adversity and be strengthened physically, emotionally and spiritually from the experience.