Sports participation and physical activity needs to be a staple in every young kids’ life, not just athletes. The benefits of physical activity on all forms of health are plentiful. With that being said, I believe it is especially important for young athletes to participate in sport as early as possible to develop a lot of the skills that will help them be a better athlete and a better person later on in life. With sport participation early in life, with good coaching, young children will reap the benefits of skill acquisition, physiological capabilities, and a framework for positive youth development regarding what constitutes as their behavioral or mental health attributes.
The purpose of sport is obviously much greater than being the best athlete in the world. There’s a reason so many children participate in sport and their parents let them. Of course every parent and child wants to be good at the sport and hopefully earn a scholarship to the college of their dreams or become a professional athlete. However, for most kids this dream cannot be accomplished for a multitude of different reasons, some that we will talk about later, but overall sport participation for the youth plays a much greater role than an attempt to just be good at the sport they are playing. Sport participation builds character, it builds skills that the child will use for the rest of their life like teamwork and communication, and it teaches them to compete and how to practice to learn different skills (Legg, 2020). Parents want their kids to be good people, and sport participation can play a major role in developing these personable qualities that puts every child on the right track to be a functioning member of society. The WHAT, WHY, and HOW from a coaches perspective on how to reach these goals starts with playing sports early and having a childhood long program to continue improving at your sport whether it be in the category of sports skills, strength and conditioning, or positive youth development.
So WHAT is it that parents and children need in order to achieve their goals in sport participation? Well they need a long-term periodized model that allows them to continue getting better at skills relating to their sport, staying healthy, and if they do this their participation in sport over time will develop them into the good person they want to be. Periodization in simple terms means having a long term plan that allows the body to adapt to the stressors (physical and mental) being placed upon it (Edwards & Tipane, 2021). To start, we will talk about developing sport skills. This starts at a very young age when young children are learning basic hand-eye coordination skills. Prior to puberty is a time in which the nervous system is going to be developing at the fastest rate and it is therefore the best time for the child for start partaking in practice regarding coordination and sport specific skills (Balyi & Way, 2016). For example, most team sports require you to have basic hand-eye coordination skills like catching and throwing. These coordination skills are going to be best developed at the time prior to the onset of puberty, and are going to continue to be refined and developed for a child’s specific sport as they start to get older and into a more competitive part of their lives where they are trying to get a scholarship. But to start, children need a periodized plan that will continuously push the envelope of the sport skills they are developing so they can continue to be ahead of the curve. This is the same that goes for strength and conditioning. A periodized progressive plan based off of developmental age is going to prove to be extremely beneficial in regards to developing physiological capabilities and keeping the athlete healthy over their sporting career. Developmental age is the age based off of how the child is developing, and the way it is identified is through peak height velocity which is the fastest rate of growth for a child and shown to be the onset of puberty (Balyi & Way, 2016). Through this process they will continue increasing their sport skill and will have a lot of positive youth development traits from those as well. The reasoning for WHY a periodized program for sport skills, strength and conditioning, and positive youth development will be discussed next.
There are many reasons for WHY these experiences are necessary for the development of a young child. To begin, the reasoning behind a periodized progression for sport skills will be discussed. In simplistic terms, the reason for a periodized skill development program is to help the athlete get better at the skills necessary for their sport. We will get into the details of HOW in a later paragraph, however having the ability to play sports starts with having different skills. A periodized program is not meant to be something where the parent or coach forces the athlete to be practicing skills at all hours of the day, but it should include subtle opportunities for play throughout the day at a young age and giving them the opportunity to play multiple sports in their childhood. These skills will all transfer over to other sports and continue to build off each other. The reason it is necessary to have a strength and conditioning program throughout childhood is similar, but has its own particular benefits. In terms of skill acquisition, movements like the Olympic lifts require a lot of neuromuscular coordination and while it is not necessary to lift extremely heavy in those lifts at a young age, it is beneficial to have that coordination for those lifts so when the athlete gets older and reaches the period where they are developing power, they will have the movement technique down and can focus on the training program instead of on learning the movement. Other reasons for having a strength and conditioning program throughout childhood is to increase movement variability, and to keep the athlete healthy over the course of their athletic career. There are a great amount of arm and back injuries for the youth in baseball because a lot of the time, athletes are overdoing the amount of work and are not getting sufficient recovery, but also the athlete’s nervous system are putting out outputs of power that their body is not strong enough to handle. A well periodized strength and conditioning program can reduce the risk of a lot of injuries in sport because strength provides the body with resiliency. As the athlete gets older they can use this program to develop strength, power, and speed at the correct times in order to get increasingly better at their sport. These physiological capabilities mesh with those sport skills in order to develop a greater athlete. You might ask why is this important for positive youth development. This is because, from a coaches perspective, a lot of the athletes that have success in their given sports are the ones that are truly realizing the 5 C’s of positive youth development (Lerner, 2005). For example, the most confident kids are the ones that have been successful at their sport and know they can do it. All of the kids that use a program to get better at sport will also stay in sport longer and they can develop all of the 5 C’s which include competence, confidence, connection, character, caring/compassion, and contribution. Being in sports allows the athletes to work on all these skills and we will now discuss HOW that happens.
As mentioned, sport skills can start to be developed very early in a child’s life specifically for skills like hand-eye coordination for team sports. Infants starts to reach and grasp to explore the environment at 4 months of age. They are using visual and tactile feedback that form the basis for hand-eye coordination later. We can continue to progress these skills into catching as they start getting older through consistent practice. Then once they start playing sports at whatever age the child or parent chooses, they can use these basic hand-eye coordination skills to continue to build new skills in the sports that they are playing. For example, in baseball the child will have to use a glove to catch, and then to play the game they will have to couple that with a throw. In basketball, the athlete must catch a pass and either dribble or go up into a coordinated shot. All these skills need to be progressed and developed over time by constantly pushing the envelope. We have to implement constraint-based practice over time to allow the athlete to get better at whatever skill for their sport they are lacking. Strength and conditioning is a little bit different because the coach can control the narrative on when things need to be progressed for some extent. You can start building those technique skills for lifts early on, but a lot of the physiological capabilities for sport are going to be developed based on peak height velocity. For example, aerobic endurance should be trained at the onset of PHV and strength should be trained directly after the growths starts to slow because there is more testosterone in the system to build that strength base (Balyi & Way, 2016). This strength base creates the basis for power that the athlete will then be able to use in their power-based sport. Over time with strength and conditioning it is also necessary that we do not overtrain the athlete, and this is done through undulating periodization where we apply a stressor and then lower the intensity or volume to allow for recovery before ramping it back up (Legg, 2020). This is a extremely brief version of the HOW of sport skills and strength and conditioning. But this process will create a better athlete and will give the athlete the ability to remain playing sports and developing those 5 C’s of positive youth development. They stay with a team longer and build connection. They get coached hard and have to learn to build character. They have opportunities to help their communities and learn how to be compassionate and contribute to society. Developing all of these attributes starts with playing sports early.
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