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Too much Technical Proficiency and not enough Character?

Posted Monday, 16 January 2017

Teachers and coaches wishing to deliver better technical and tactical outcomes in school sport are well supported. A variety of courses, resources and external forces guides them towards a well established body of knowledge, which is extensively available in a variety of guises to suit all learning styles. It is...

Teaching Persistence Through Sports

Posted Wednesday, 11 January 2017

Would you like your pupils to have greater persistence? Would your parents like their children to learn determination at school? These are uncontroversial questions. Persistence (or "Grit" as American psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth calls it) is a predictor of future high achievement. More reliable as such than either IQ or...

Why Winning Matters (More than it Should)

Posted Monday, 9 January 2017

“The most important thing … is not winning, but taking part” Baron de Coubertin For more than 100 years, Pierre’s observation has confused the landscape of sport, and inspired strong and conflicting opinions. This is less the case in North America, which is more comfortable with the summary dismissal of...

Creating a Culture of Health and Fitness

Posted Monday, 9 January 2017

Not all children like games. The better the quality of the experience, the higher will be the proportion that do, but that figure will never be 100%. Sometimes it will be the children who are unable to readily master necessary skills, others will not enjoy being outdoors in the cold...

The Two Ways of Improving Sports Performance

Posted Monday, 9 January 2017

The industry of coaching, sports and schools is about improving performance. Of individuals, and teams. There are two ways of doing this: the formula is simple PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT = REDUCTION (of error and inefficiency) + INCREASE (of creativity and magic) Much of the culture of sport in Britain is focussed...

Replacing Compulsion with Culture in School Games

Posted Monday, 9 January 2017

There has been much recent consternation about the future of potentially dangerous sports in schools, largely fuelled by Professor Pollock’s widely articulated assessment of the dangers of physical contact. Her campaign appears confined to an attack on Rugby Football, in defiance of the science that shows that, before the age...