Student Sport

The Developing Athlete Support

During Term One we were extremely fortunate to have Dr. Craig Harrsion at Ōtūmoetai College for an insightful presentation based around ‘The Developing Athlete’. During his presentation he highlighted three main areas where we as parents, teachers, and coaches need to have a better understanding in order to help our tamariki and rangatahi have a healthier and longer lasting relationship with sport and being physically active. These were, Talent, Growth, and Support.

Talent

In most youth sports, “talent” is linked to growth and maturity. The early developing kids are bigger, faster and stronger compared to their peers, which gives them a performance advantage. This is referred to as the Relative Age Effect (RAE). We must be aware of those late developers and provide them with the support, guidance and coaching they need so as not to lose them from sport all together as research has shown that these late developers more often than not go on to become high performing athletes.

Growth

Kids experience a period of accelerated growth during puberty that disrupts coordination and decreases the body’s tolerance to physical stress. This is known as ‘Adolescent Awkwardness’. Time spent relearning how to move and building strength is needed during adolescence to defend against injury and provide the physical foundations to perform at their best.

How we support our rangatahi through their developmental years is crucial. A focus on learning and development, rather than outcomes and personal bests, raises happier, healthier, and higher performing athletes.

Great athlete support helps kids to answer 3 critical questions as they navigate adolescence and their college years:

The Value of Play

Dr. Craig Harrison also spoke about the value of play and how we tend to think of play as frivolous, but play is a highly evolved and intricate form of behaviour that serves many functions. Play is integral to the developmental process in children and teens, so the fact that there has been a consistent decline in active play in general and unsupervised outdoor free play in particular over recent decades presents a major problem. It is vitally important that we recognise the vital role that play serves in developing well-adjusted kids and the negative consequences when kids are not fully able to satisfy their need for play. Once we understand what kids are missing out on we can take steps to reverse these trends and bring back play.

One of the defining characteristics of play is exploration. As well as exploring the world around us, play allows us to investigate what our body is capable of. Engaging in play enables kids to adjust and recalibrate as the body grows and changes over time. Part of play is experimenting with different ways of doing things and exploring the growing range of possibilities that open up as their capacities and capabilities develop throughout the childhood and adolescent years.