The $10M Presidential Fitness School Innovation Challenge — and How to Build Your Entry
On 1 October 2026 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition launched the Presidential Fitness School Innovation Challenge: $10 million in prizes for schools, districts and youth organisations that get students taking the 2026 Presidential Fitness Test (PFT) and build a culture of fitness around it. Submissions close on 5 February 2027 at 5 PM ET.
If you teach PE in the United States, this is worth your attention. A single middle school in the Regional tier can win $100,000. Here is what we know, and how to make your testing day do double duty as your evidence.
The prizes
There are two tracks. You can enter both, but each needs its own submission.
Track 1: PFT Implementation & Innovation ($7 million in cash)
| Category | Student population | Estimated prizes | Amount each |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local | Fewer than 1,000 | About 100 | $20,000 |
| Regional | 1,000 to 10,000 | About 30 | $100,000 |
| District / National | More than 10,000 | 3 | $500,000 (two) and a $1,000,000 grand prize |
Track 1 is for schools and organisations that have already put a PFT approach into practice and can show it works and could be sustained, repeated or expanded. The written submission is a cover page plus an implementation narrative of up to 10 pages, submitted as a PDF.
Track 2: PFT Participation & Equipment ($3 million in equipment)
Schools that are administering the PFT and want sports and fitness equipment to keep students active. Prizes are redemption codes of $1,000 (under 500 students), $3,000 (500 to 1,000) and $5,000 (over 1,000), redeemable with US Games. The submission is a cover page plus a participation statement of up to 3 pages.
Who can enter
Individual schools (public, charter, private, parochial, Tribal and alternative), school districts, state and local education agencies, nonprofits, community and faith-based organisations, libraries, parks and recreation programs, and youth clubs. For-profit businesses are not eligible, which includes us: this is your prize to win, not ours. You do not need a brand-new program; incorporating the PFT into an existing PE or youth program counts.
Key dates
- 1 October 2026: registration and submission portal opened.
- 17 November 2026, 2 PM ET: second informational webinar.
- 5 February 2027, 5 PM ET: submission deadline. You can register up to this date, but only registrants get access to the portal, so register early.
- Spring 2027: winners announced.
Register, read the official rules and find the webinar links at fitness.gov. Read the rules PDF before you plan anything; it has the scoring criteria, and everything below is written to serve them.
What a strong Track 1 entry needs
The challenge FAQ describes Track 1 as requiring an evidence-based implementation narrative. Ten pages is not much. A judge reading thirty of them will reward the ones where the evidence is specific, the method is repeatable, and the plan to sustain it is credible. In practice that means answering four questions with numbers:
- How many students took the test? Participation rate by grade, not just a total. A school of 900 where 870 students completed all three categories is a story.
- What did they achieve? The breakdown of Presidential, National and Participation awards, by grade and across the school. Judges want to see the distribution, not a highlight reel.
- How did you run it? The station plan, the timing, how you handled students who opted out or needed accommodations, and how you kept it from becoming a public ranking exercise. SHAPE America's appropriate-use principles are a strong frame here; our best-practices checklist maps them out.
- How will you keep it going? A second testing window later in the year, with the same students, is the simplest proof of sustainability, and the comparison between the two is the most persuasive chart you can include.
Every one of those answers is data you already generate on testing day, if you capture it properly. That is where the tooling matters.
How to capture the evidence with the PFT app
We built PFT, a free iPhone and iPad app, for exactly one job: running the 2026 Presidential Fitness Test in a single class period. It happens to produce the evidence a Track 1 narrative needs as a by-product of running the test.
- Participation, by class. Import your class lists from a spreadsheet, record each student's results at the station, and the app shows at a glance who has completed every category. Your participation rate is a count, not a guess.
- Award tiers, automatically. Enter a result and the app applies the official 2026 standards for the student's age and sex, including the choose-one-per-category rule, and tells you whether it meets the Presidential or National benchmark. No rubric lookups, no transcription errors in your data.
- A class report you can drop into the narrative. PFT Pro generates a class report PDF with the tier breakdown for each class, and a CSV export of every result so you can build school-wide charts across classes and grades in a spreadsheet.
- Certificates and parent letters. The official certificates auto-filled for every student who earns one, plus parent letters, which doubles as evidence that your program involves families, not just a testing day.
- Done the right way. Results live on the teacher's device, are never shown on a leaderboard, and awards are generated only when you choose. The app follows the appropriate-use principles the challenge FAQ itself points educators towards.
For districts testing on managed iPads, PFT Pro can be licensed for the whole district and unlocked through your device management, with no Apple ID needed on each iPad. Get in touch and we will set it up.
Going beyond one testing day
The strongest sustainability story is longitudinal: the same students, tested in autumn and again in spring, with the improvement charted. PFT is deliberately focused on testing day. For year-round tracking across the whole school, with progress over time, goals and 30-plus other fitness tests, the Fitness Tests app runs the same 2026 PFT template alongside everything else your program measures. Schools running both get the fast testing-day workflow and the year-over-year data in one place.
A suggested timeline from here
- This week: register at fitness.gov, download the rules, and put the 17 November webinar in your calendar.
- November to December: run your first PFT window. Import rosters, test every class, export the class reports and CSV.
- January: write the narrative around your numbers: participation rate, tier distribution, your method, and your plan for a spring retest.
- Before 5 February 2027: submit. Then run the spring window anyway, because the data is worth having whether or not you win.
Thirty schools in the Regional tier will each receive $100,000 for doing something most PE departments were going to do this year regardless. The difference between a school that wins and one that doesn't will mostly be whether the testing day left behind evidence. Make sure yours does.
Fitness Tests and PFT are made by ConnectedPE Pty Ltd and are not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the President's Council. Challenge details are taken from fitness.gov as of 3 November 2026; always check the official rules for current terms.