The Social Side of Youth Sport
Although sports do not intend to socialize youths they are the perfect place to improve youth culture
As soon as I saw him I knew he was going to be in trouble and I wasn’t wrong.
A coach’s intuition of a young athlete:
Call it intuition or even experience, but something was telling to watch this young athlete. Although on the face of it he looked like a good-looking kid that was slightly taller than the rest, his demeanor told a different story. Not least that bit of anxiety that he showed behind a tough man façade among the other boys.
That was lunchtime and it was his first year in school. I was their sports coach and although we had half a dozen practice sessions at this stage I was still on the lookout for new talent for our team.
I should have been delighted to see him play because he had enough talent to make the team. Sure, he had plenty of technical issues to his game but they could be worked on to make him better. Yet from that first day, I realized he was different.
I just knew he was either going to be the best player or a wasted opportunity in sport.
Socializing for a young sportsperson:
By the time young people get to High School age, they are usually already in puberty. This is a time of great change and maturation. Physical changes in their bodies are a couple with new social surroundings. Their relationship with their parents and their siblings are changing too. It’s a time when a young person begins to exercise more independence from their childhood background.
Although they don’t want to lose that grip on their close contacts that have been around them through their earlier years they are venturing out a bit more in the world to see what it has to offer them.
The young sportsperson is the same.
They begin to open out their curiosity for other sports and try their hand at other things. Now that they have built up a decent skill base in their initial sport, they realize that branching out to other sports gives them a license to meet other people as well.
By a young athlete being confident of their gross motor skills they can bring this confidence into their new social relationships also.
The non-sporting youth:
The young person who has declined to play sports in childhood can still try sports in their early teenage years. Like the sporty child, by the time they get to their teenage years, they too want to cast their social net a little wider to meet other people.
Because popular sports like baseball, basketball, and football require a team of players to compete, young people know there are likely to be more others involved and this is an attractive selling point for them.
But physical ability often dictates who makes the cut and this can put many young people at a social disadvantage.
Teams versus gangs:
Although many young people buy into the concept of teamwork not all of them get to experience the benefits of being in an organized team. Many, because of their lack of ability, end up giving up sports and seeking out other smaller groups of people to hang around with.
This is how gangs can form.
Of course, not all gangs are bad, as some can just be a handful of pals who stick to their group and support one another as they grow.
But some gangs can go down the wrong path of development and adopt a negative culture that sets out to go against the regular flow of positive youth development.
The advantages of sporting teams for young people:
Being involved in youth sport provides a cradle of positivity for young people as they develop and grow. When organized properly and officially backed by local clubs and schools usually there are adult leaders that take the reins and attempt to provide a structure to the club, organization, or team. This structure generally mimics the fixtures of the sporting calendar set out by the specific sports’ governing body.
Young people love to compete and as movement is their language that carries their athletic energy, being involved in organized youth sport gives them a routine that can be hugely beneficial. Not just for their lives as a teenager but for later down the line when they enter into their adult years.
By being a member of a youth sports club and looking forward to regularly competitive games a young athlete is not just mingling with their teammates but they are meeting new opponents regularly. All of this broadens their awareness of other people of their age group. It allows them to build up a solid network of people and learn about how other young people are.
Mixing with other young people in a positively organized sporting environment can deliver many new benefits for young people.
Not all coaches are saints:
All young people seek human support.
They want enough people around them that will guide them but at the same time allow them to learn in their way and without feeling badgered or pushed to view things only from others’ points of view.
Many sports coaches understand this and some do it excellently. But there are also ones who cannot learn the proper guidance skills and to understand them. They still favor doing things less constructively for young people.
However, young people still get the exposure of being socialized if they are involved in team sports. By only trying out for a sport for a few sessions’ young people are going to meet and potentially befriend other youths and this is always a good thing.
A coach’s intuition of a young athlete:
Although I’ve had the pleasure of coaching many young people, unfortunately, that good looking kid who was taller than the rest wasn’t one that continued with sport too long.
He had plenty of physical ability to play but lacked the basic skills to be part of a small group of his peers not to mention being part of a bigger and more aggressive team sport.
Thankfully my initial instincts upon working with him led me to investigate his past. There I found out that he had experienced a tough and untrusting childhood. This meant he was incapable of being responsible enough for all of his actions.
The proof of a young person’s inability to socialize within a team:
On one particular day as we welcomed an opposing team to our school, although I was eagle-eyed in watching him, his anxiety quickly got the better of him.
Both teams had competed in a sporting game and were making their way toward the locker rooms when something in his head popped. He smacked a left hook on a member of the other team for no apparent reason. There was a look of shock and dismay on all the boys’ faces from both teams.
No one on his team even bothered defending him when the boy that was hit pushed back.
Due to the speed of his strike, I`d say it was a knee jerk reaction if it weren’t for the fact that there was no issue to react to in the first place! Instead, the truth lay in this boys’ lack of social contact with other boys during the first few years of his life.
Afterward, when speaking to the boy and his parent it turned out that he had never been involved in competitive sport. He genuinely thought that showing a tough demeanor when walking by the opposing team’s locker room after the game was the way to rule.
But, of course, it wasn’t.
It just goes to show the importance of being social and giving sport a chance from early on. Team sport gives youth an open social world that they’ll learn from. There they can begin to understand how to behave as they positively develop as a young person.
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