Ch.

23 Summary – Children & Sport Psychology – Ryan Collins

This chapter starts the last section of the book on facilitating psychological growth and development. As

I’ve transitioned from coaching youth to high school and now college the concept of growth and development in the

individual is something I’ve become increasing driven towards facilitating and nurturing in our young people,

especially in adolescence age. I’ve learned in recent years that while people reach physical maturity in high school,

mental or cognitive development doesn’t stop until about 22 y/o in females and 24 in males. So just because “you’re

18 now…” or live on your own, doesn’t mean shaping and development is done.

This specific chapter focuses primarily on why youth participate in sports, why they quite, what they view

as “fun”, as well as sections extremely useful in what to consider and emphasis when coaching youth and how

parents strongly influence these experiences from them and challenges and strategies for working with them. We get

a nice chart on page 545 about the “facets of fun” or the differing aspects of fun such as team rituals and cheers,

learning skills and improving, friendship, well organized practices, working hard, and coaches treating players with

respect. These coincide with many of the needs of youth such as skill development (sports skills, communication,

accountability), relatedness, excitement, fun, and ability to experience success. Participation peaks between 10-13

years old, and 2-3 kids out of 10 playing a sport will quit before the next season. The two main reasons are having

other things to do and change in interests. Still, 28% of dropouts site no longer having fun, coaches, pressure to win,

and not being good as the reason. We as leaders can help positively affect this group.

Of the intrinsic reasons that lead to participation, winning isn’t the most commonly listed by participants.

We must decide how we define success in our programs and this is best done by striving for continued learning and

improvement of skills, as opposed to outcome goals related to someone else. This ties back to concepts covered in

my first project on working with parents and defining for all how and what we view as success.

There are two very powerful sections towards the end of the chapter that will be extremely useful resources

for me. The first focused on what to consider and emphasis when working with youth, appropriate goals and

processes for teaching. I may be running a country club youth team this summer, so these would be very useful in

this event, let alone if I ever get back into coaching youth age kids fulltime. Some of these concepts are applicable

for even our adolescence age kids in high school and college. The last section was on parents and the impact they

can make on their children’s development. Like I mentioned, this was the topic of my first project so I think we’ve

hit pretty hard the potential negative and positive effects of their actions. This part of the text offers insight and
Ch.23 Summary – Children & Sport Psychology – Ryan Collins

strategies for navigating the complex relationship of educating and working with parents to help facilitate

performance and most importantly intellectual development of the child.