Participant Development in Sport

LTAD?


Core skills and capabilities?


Early Specialisation?


Talent Development?


Critical Periods in Development?




There is increasing demand on coaches and teachers to keep informed of relevant research evidence, and to adapt their work accordingly.  Evidence-based practice is accepted as the default position for those claiming to be professionals in sport.


The trouble is ... Well, there are a few troubles.  For example:

• Some of the research literature is highly complex, and uses arcane jargon;
• Some of the literature seems to contradict itself; and
• There is awful lot of it out there.

Dave Collins, myself and a small group of subject experts from physiology, psychology and sociology carried out a comprehensive review of the literature on participant development in sport on behalf of sportscoachUK in 2010.

Click on the image to get a free copy.

The report turned out a lot more 'comprehensive' than we'd imagined at the start, and it is certainly the most thorough review carried on playing, developing and improving in sport.

It also includes HUGE list of references.

It offers a critical analysis of such hot topics as LTAD, early specialisation, and talent development.  It also gives an examination of the assumptions that underlie most sports development programmes.

The review was written as a reference document for sportscoachUK, and so the tone is at times quite technical.  So, we also wrote an Executive Summary, which is available by clicking the next image:

The Review team was:

Richard Bailey, PhD, RBES Ltd

Dave Collins, PhD, University of Central Lancashire

Paul Ford, PhD, University of East London (Now BOA)

Áine MacNamara, PhD, University of Limerick (now UCLAN)

Martin Toms, PhD, University of Birmingham 

Gemma Pearce, MSc, University of Birmingham 

We hope this resource proves useful, and makes some contribution to the quality of sporting experiences of all.

You have read this article education / education sport / exercise / gender / learning / Olympic Games / olympics / PE / personal skills / physical activity / physical education / player development / sport / sports / sports coaching / women with the title women. You can bookmark this page URL http://say-sport.blogspot.com/2012/01/participant-development-in-sport.html. Thanks!

Can a woman be a sports personality?

2011 has not been a good year for women's sport.  So said Gary Lineker, in defence of the all-male shortlist for this year's Sport Personality of the Year.


Throughout the show Lineker and his fellow presenter Jake Humphrey repeated their mantra - 'this has been an amazing year for British sport' - with the fervour of vacuum cleaner salesmen coming to the end of the month.  But, if their earlier defence of the award's selection process was true, they obviously didn't think it had been a good year for sport; it had been a good year for men's sport.


Lineker's position can be questioned in a number of ways.


First, we might ask why the BBC's celebration of such an amazing year of sport was so dull.  The BBC is well-versed in reducing thrilling action to gentle tedium (aka A Question of Sport).  But the highlights presented this year didn't amount to much at all.


Second, it s not at all clear how the achievements of Andy Murray and Amir Khan this year are more noteworthy than those of Rebecca Adlington, Jessica Ennis, Kerri-Anne Payne and Sarah Stevenson?  By any objective measure of sporting success, Khan and Murray would have been placed significantly lower than these women.


Of course, the BBC event is not based on objective measures of sporting success.  It is an award for sports personality.  There is obviously something oxymoronic about this phrase; a show based on champions who were also a bit of a laugh would barely make it through the opening credits.


According to the organisers, the award ought to go to the "to the sportsman or woman whose actions have most captured the public's imagination".


And here is the problem.  The vast majority of people's information about sport is via the media, which decide for us what we celebrate.  So, Sports Personality of the Year highlights a much bigger issue, which is the highly partial coverage of sport.


Some sports are covered; others are ignored.  Some sports people are lauded; others are demonised; others are invisible.  A football match between Bangor v Prestatyn is televised live; England winning the World Netball Series passes with barely a mention.


The standard defence is that coverage of sport follows demand.  But demand settles for the diet of sports presented.  Spectator sports that are, on the surface, profoundly dull (snooker, darts, Welsh football) can secure an TV audience, whilst more obviously exciting sports (basketball, kickboxing, netball) are pushed to the margins, or satellite TV.  And, generally speaking, we don't have much interest in sports we have never seen.


Occasionally, the media bias that is inherent within the system works in favour of individual women, but for reasons that have nothing to do with sport.  How else can be explain Zara Phillips' otherwise inexplicable prize in 2006 (ahead of Beth Tweddle, Nicole Cooke, and some men) or her mother's victory in 1971?


Take away the Royalty effect, and eleven women have won the award in the fifty-eight years history of the event.  Despite the suggestion by some that matters are starting to sort themselves out in our more enlightened times, the ratio of male to female winners has remained relatively consistent from the beginning.


A perusal of the list of past winners shows a clear pattern: female victory usually requires an  unprecedented achievement (think Kelly Holmes, Virginia Wade, Paula Radcliffe).  Male victory often requires much less.


The outstanding example of an athlete who has somehow been overlooked by the media is the triathlete Chrissie Wellington. Despite the fact that she is widely regarded by sport professionals as one of the world's greatest athletes of any discipline, and continues to dominate the ludicrously challenging Ironman (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, 26.2-mile run), she is hardly known at all in her home country.


Wellington was not shortlisted in any of the four years she won the Ironman (which included 2011).  Writing in her blog, Wellington seems remarkably philosophical about the debacle:

"But the responsibility doesn't just lie with the media, it lies with the athletes to actively engage with the media, it lies with the governing bodies who must package their sports to make them attractive, it lies with sponsors to package their athletes and it lies with the government to promote a range of sports in schools."

She is right, of course.  The marginalisation of women's sport is the result of systemic bias.  But 'the system' is not a thing in itself; it is the complex of different elements.  Change happens through these elements.


The "panel of industry experts" selected by the BBC to shortlist was made up entirely of newspaper and magazine sports editors:

"These are chosen because of their expertise in the area, their coverage of a wide range of sports throughout the year and the extent of their readership".

Actually, this just means that all national and larger regional newspapers were invited to vote, along with Nuts and Zoo magazines.


I'm not making this up.  Nuts ("it's got girls. Lots of girls. Glamour models, enthusiastic girls-next-door, brunettes, blondes") and Zoo ("a compelling package of girls, football, bloke news and funny stuff") contributed to the selection panel for Sports Personality of the Year.


So we have reason to doubt their suitability for this particular task.  We might also wonder whether newspaper editors, who surely must take some responsibility for currents inequities, really fulfil the BBC's stated requirements of expertise and coverage of a wide range of sports.  It requires no complex statistics to realise that the column inches given to male sports people is hugely greater than for their female peers.  And when women sports people are giving newspaper space, it is rarely their sporting prowess that is the focus.


At least the Daily Mail, the voice of reason and tolerance, kept the issue alive.  The day after the Sports Personality of the Year was broadcast, the paper had an extended feature on some the leading female sports people in Britain:

"The females may have been missing off of the shortlist for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year Awards, but they certainly made an impact on the red carpet earlier tonight.

The ladies of the sporting world couldn't wait to flash their legs and show off their glitzy style at the bash ..."

I suppose we are lucky that some of the female sports people are attractive.  Otherwise, there'd be no coverage at all.

You have read this article equality / gender / media / sport / sports / women with the title women. You can bookmark this page URL http://say-sport.blogspot.com/2011/12/can-woman-be-sports-personality.html. Thanks!

Old farts and sexy skirts

The former England cricketer Ed Smith has claimed that sport is a condensed form of life, and it has a lot to teach us about 'the game of real life'. I suppose he is arguing that sport is like a model village that we can look at and study from different angles without getting run over. And in some ways he is right.

In other respects, though, sport is very different from real life. And nowhere is this difference more pronounced than in that strange land called sports administration.Administrators are the people who attend meetings, make rules and punish wrong-doers. They run their sports because nobody else has the time and inclination to do so.

Will Carling famously described the Rugby Football Union committee as "57 Old Farts", and was punished by losing his captaincy of the England team; a severity of punishment reserved for those who have unwisely and willfully stated the bleeding obvious. I have been told that things have changed a lot in recent years, but, now I think about it, my informant was a sports administrator. I have absolutely no doubt there are young, smart and forward-looking people, just as I have no doubt there are also ridiculous old farts smelling up the system.

Evidence?

One of the best-known examples of silly old men reveling the extent of their distance from normal, civilised life was Sett Blatter's suggestion a few years ago that women footballers wear sexier, tighter clothes: "Female players are pretty", he said. "Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball".

On another occasion, when asked about possible difficulties for gay people in Qatar, hosts of the 2022 World Cup, Blatter's advise was that gay fans "should refrain from any sexual activities".

Now, this is not the opinion of a random old man in a park; Blatter was (and still is) the President of the world body for football.

Boxing, not surprisingly, has its own old farts. Women's boxing first appeared in the Olympic Games at a demonstration sport in 1902, and a mere hundred and ten years later it will return in London. It is well-known that many of the old-guard of boxing are still horrified by the very idea of girls hitting each other, but their influence is clearly waning as women are showing themselves to be equal to their male counterparts in skill, fitness and heart.

Losing the argument on the grounds of boxing, the old farts have recently tried another angle. The AIBA, the world body for amateur boxing, which is ultimately responsible for the sport in the Olympics, has suggested that women boxers wear skirts to help them stand out from the men.

'Stand out from the men'? I think the AIBA is confusing elite athletes with Bangkok ladyboys. Why is it necessary for boxers to be obviously men or women? Surely the main criterion for their value is their boxing ability.

Or perhaps I am being naive. Some have suggested that the main motivation for this move is what we might call the 'Beach Volleyball Strategy'. In other words, the claim is that the AIBA wants to sex women's boxing up. This was, of course, Blatter's plan with football.

Is this marketing, 1950s style? Or are there more libidinous thoughts here? Frankly, I don't know. I do know that the suggestion is crass, and reveals a lack of confidence in women's boxing just as it is about to be properly launched into the world.

You have read this article administration / boxing / equality / sport. / women with the title women. You can bookmark this page URL http://say-sport.blogspot.com/2011/11/old-farts-and-sexy-skirts.html. Thanks!