What comes first the Chicken or the Egg?

Should children learn sport specific skills at a young age or should they try to develop skills in all areas of sport? We have certain beliefs in regards to this?

With travelling around Europe we are seeing more and more young children playing competitive sports at an early age. 5 year olds playing matches on local parks, children receiving technical coaching in individual sports and more children dropping out of sport and PE during adolescents.

Too many children are enrolled in certain sports before they've mastered such basic movements as bouncing and catching a ball, running, skipping, hopping, spatial awareness and walking with the correct posture. How is that significantly different from expecting a child who's barely learned to speak to recite the Declaration of Independence - for an audience, no less?

During the early years, children must have the chance to explore on their own. Whether you’re fostering what biology specifically endowed or awakening new interests, allowing a child to freely dabble in many pursuits -- rather than specialize in one or two --will help her learn where her strengths and weaknesses, her likes and dislikes, and her passions and indifferences lie.

When parents consistently place their children in situations where winning is the ultimate goal – where the winners are considered heroes and the losers “losers” – winning is what they come to value. They learn that only the end result counts, not the process involved in getting there.

While the goal of many parents is to give their children a running start on the development of sports skills (because success in sports certainly must equal success in life!), the research shows that competition is actually detrimental to skill development. One reason is fear of failure and its resulting stress, which isn’t conducive to either learning or performance. Young children, in particular, are susceptible to this problem because pleasing their parent’s means so much to them. And when their parents focus on winning – either through action (screaming on the sidelines) or words (asking “Who won?” instead of “Did you have fun?”) – winning becomes the children’s goal as well.

Of course, you may think the goal of winning would be enough to propel children into performing their best. But young children aren’t cognitively ready to make that connection. They attribute winning or losing to ability, not effort. Nor are they emotionally ready to handle the pressure of playing mistake-free games. And they’re not physically ready to play without making mistakes!

Children under the age of eight are motivated by pleasure. And, yes, winning feels good when everyone around you is making a big deal out of it. But does that feeling last? And what about the children who aren’t winning?

Dare I say it? Winning isn’t everything. And if we want our children to grow up to be self-assured, character-driven adults – who also happen to have positive feelings about physical activity – then it really shouldn’t be.

Kids of any age can learn to do things properly. They may not have the motor skills developed yet, but they can at least try to do it right. One of my favorite misconceptions is that “practice makes perfect”. That’s totally wrong; practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes PERMANENT. What I try to teach is: “Perfect Practice Makes Permanently Perfect”. That’s a pretty big difference!

Of course, this really changes things for a youth coach because we need to teach the correct fundamentals or we’ll simply be reinforcing the bad habits kids develop. The hardest thing to do as a coach is to try and correct a flaw that a kid has developed over years of “practice”. This is even harder when the kid is good, because correcting the fundamental flaw generally means that getting worse before getting better. That means the kid is going to be reluctant to try this “new” way and may not stick it out. In the long run, the difference could be huge. While we’ve already acknowledged that that we’re not developing professional athletes, there is no reason to limit the ceiling on how well each child may develop.

The solution is simple: we need to learn the right fundamentals before we start sport specific coaching. The fundamentals are the A,B,C’s. Agility, Balance, Co-ordination and Speed.

Now, I want to make sure to state that most of us think we know much more about sports than we really do. We think that because we played and we were pretty good that we clearly know how to teach a kid to play baseball or basketball. That’s simply not true.

Parents play an important role in promoting specialization. They apply pressure on their children to specialize by providing tuition to summer camps and clinics, by paying for private lessons.

Coaches promote specialization by convincing young athletes that year-round training in a sport is needed to reach the “international “ stage.

In most cases, preadolescent children should be encouraged to develop skills necessary for many sports before specialization occurs. Children between ages 6 and 9 should develop movement skills associated with body awareness. Little emphasis should be placed on conditioning and developing sport-specific skills. Children between the ages of 10 and 12 should develop skills necessary for a variety of sports. However, competition should be de-emphasized to minimize stress and to enhance learning.

Potential negative effects of sport specialization include physical and psychological burnout, loss of social contacts through other sports, loss of transferable athletic skills. The potential negative effects of sport specialization are three: physiological/physical, psychological, and sociological. These components, however, are not exclusive to certain sports, but potentially to all youth who partake in a single sport all year.

Early exposure to a variety of activities is more beneficial than prematurely pushing a child to learn a particular skill or specialize in one sport before he or she is developmentally ready.

A great athlete would likely have been successful in any sport, still having tremendous accomplishments and the same impact they had in their chosen sport.

What we advocate is that young children (3-11 year olds) participate in a variety of sports, which will develop all the ABC’s and other vital components such as team work, self motivation, athletic awareness, confidence building, social interaction and many other valuable skills. By doing this, the young child will nit be burnt out by the age of 15year old and hopefully have a life long affair with wellness, health related activities and physical well being.

 

Pembroke Community Games.

After a successful first year of running an athletics day within the Pembroke Community Games, we are running another day this year on Sunday May 10th at 2.00pm in Deer Park. Along with athletics we are also developing a tennis event. These events are FREE for any child living in the Pembroke area. If you have any child who wishes to partake in this day please contact me to confirm your attendance. Events are for children aged 6 to 14 years old.