Everyone in our team was excited when we released new features for player evaluation and testing and sending progress reports via email. We had planned it with the best intention to help coaches track player’s progress and give personal feedback to players – the thing that parents are missing most from their kids’ sport clubs.
Everything started very well and we got very positive feedback from many clubs using our software. But suddenly an opposition rose on our Facebook page over the issue of whether player evaluation and testing would deprive kids of fun of playing. Our post received comments like:
Yesterday the underdog Iceland beat England in football at the 2016 UEFA European Championships. Incredible and energizing indeed, but this victory is only the tip of the iceberg. When we look at the invisible yet fundamental part of Icelandic football, we find a well-established youth sports system.
John O’Sullivan, one of the brightest writers about youth sports, has recently come out with an article outlining the biggest problems in youth sports today. It’s one of the best written pieces on the topic. Problems with management, coaching and parenting all boil down to this – the child’s interests aren’t made the core of their physical activity.
Don’t let kids be the casualties of overambition (Image credit)
We might think it only happens in professional sports, but it’s far worse than that. The quest for success is not always righteous and some fall off track, trying to reach their goals using the darker arts of the game. It is now infiltrating youth sports as well and at a younger age than we would ever imagine.
You will take some hits on the way, but Long-Term Athlete Development model is the way forward
We have delved into the subject of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) in our last blog post. We looked at the benefits that focusing on the long-term, holistic development of an athlete can bring. Many may feel that a lot of what adds up to the LTAD model is common sense – people mostly agree with the concept pretty easily. Yet we still see that actually applying LTAD to the whole training process as an overarching idea can be difficult as practical problems arise. But to solve these problems, we first have to define them.
The whole team of Sportlyzer has grown up doing sports. We have people who have excelled in swimming, karate or skating. We have people who have competed in rowing, football or triathlon and more. Even after youth sports we have stayed connected to the things we love, making us a pretty good example of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model. It’s a sports development model that we live by, intended to ensure long-term benefits from age-specific exercising, bringing lifelong sports enjoyment and success. Let’s discover the major benefits of the LTAD model.
Physical literacy is a brilliant concept that has been gaining some traction in the sports community. Canadians, the frontrunners of the concept, have started to implement the idea in their sports community on a large scale, but to the wider world, being physically literate is either a complete nonsense or just being good at sports.
