PES6252 Chap.2 Positive Sport Experience for Young Athletes
Positive Sport Experience for Young Athletes
With children, somebody chooses the context
The published course content pairs positive sports experience for youth with effective coaching in a single row, and two class sessions carry the topic. The pairing is deliberate. Everything the previous chapter said about effectiveness depending on context becomes concrete the moment the athletes are children, because with children the context is not given by the sport.
A club committee or a parent chooses it, and the choice decides what will count as the coach having done well.
The lecture puts that choice to the class directly, asking for coaching objectives for children and then for adolescents and adults, in each case for participative and for performance sport.
Four outcome domains, four kinds of evidence
The psychological outcome family, named in the definition as perceived ability, self esteem, intrinsic motivation and enjoyment, is given a structure through four domains: competence, confidence, connection and character, with caring and compassion added as a fifth in some formulations.
Learn them as places to look for evidence rather than as a slogan, because each names a different kind. Competence is demonstrable in the sport. Confidence is what the athlete believes about that competence. Connection is a fact about relationships that an attendance sheet partly records.
Character is hardest, because nothing inside a training session measures it directly, and a coach who claims all four has usually evidenced one.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why the coaching context for children is chosen rather than given
- 02
Participative against performance objectives, across two age bands
- 03
The four outcome domains, and the evidence each one needs
- 04
Enjoyment as an outcome variable rather than a soft aim
- 05
Sport for all against elite pathways, in their strongest forms
- 06
Selection at a young age as a retention decision
Say what went wrong when the results improved
- 3Identify what changed in October, in the vocabulary of this course.
- 4Work the damage through all four outcome domains.
- 2Say what the committee was and was not entitled to do.
Key terms
- Participative Context
- A coaching setting whose purpose is involvement rather than result, in which continued participation, enjoyment and perceived competence are the outcomes that count.
- Perceived Ability
- What an athlete believes about their own competence, which can move in the opposite direction from measured competence and is one of the named psychological outcomes.
- Connection
- The relational outcome domain, covering an athlete bonds with coaches and team mates, and the one most directly removed by a selection decision.
Positive Sport Experience for Young Athletes FAQ
Does this course say that elite youth pathways are wrong?
No, and a written answer that says it does has taken a side the material does not take.
The course stages the dispute and asks for both sides in their strongest form, and the published position in the behavioural literature it draws on is that youth sport is good for some children and bad for others rather than good or bad in itself, with the difference resting on how a programme is built, how closely it is watched, and who the child is.
What the course does ask is that a programme report against the outcome it was constituted for.
How do I evidence a claim about character or connection?
By replacing the abstraction with something a second person could observe. Character becomes a named behaviour in a named setting, such as acknowledging an opponent without prompting across a run of fixtures. Connection becomes attendance at voluntary sessions or a validated relationship measure.
The rewrite costs you a large claim and buys a small checkable one, which is the trade the outcome domains exist to force, and it is exactly the move the review criteria describe as delineating the content further.
Assessment move
Take a youth programme you know and write its stated aim in one sentence, then write the measure it actually reports against. If the two do not match you have found a live example of this chapter, and a paragraph of personal experience for the review that is analytic rather than anecdotal. Keep it, because the criteria ask for personal experience and most students supply none.
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