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Changing the Tone of School Sport

Posted Tuesday, 24 October 2017

How important is winning? The answer to this - apparently spurious - question massively influences the success criteria of school sport. If winning is the most important thing, it has implications that are far reaching. It influences how the game is coached, refereed, team selection, substitution, as well as the...

Parenting the Young Sports Star

Posted Wednesday, 11 October 2017

Size and speed are the enemies of pre-maturation sport. They give the early developers an undue advantage, and they unbalance the game. Anyone who has ever coached or refereed these games dreads the arrival of the man-child: the boy who scores five tries every game, or the girl who scores...

Parents in Sport: Do you want to Witness Joy or Victory?

Posted Friday, 6 October 2017

The great majority of parents like to see their offspring participate in sports or physical activity. Rarer is the carer who sees no value in this. The reasons why they approve of this type of involvement vary, though they are infrequently thought-out beyond the vague conviction that it’s somehow “good”...

Does Size Matter? Are big schools always at an advantage in sport?

Posted Monday, 2 October 2017

“They have got more to pick from!” is a regular refrain explaining the competitive success of large schools. Certainly, if sporting ability followed the curve of normal distribution - and no other factors were involved - then this would be true. It can't be as simple as that though, or...

Should you “Give Up” Time for School Sport ?

Posted Tuesday, 26 September 2017

Teachers are often thanked (maybe not often enough), for their role in encouraging school sport, and undertaking the supervisory roles that make it possible. Such thanks often acknowledge the “giving up” of time to enable such games to occur. As a sign of the times, pupils are now sometimes thanked...

BOOK REVIEW - The Greatest:The Quest for Sporting Perfection by Matthew Syed

Posted Tuesday, 19 September 2017

This book is an easy-to-read collection of articles, all of which have previously been published in “The Times” over the previous ten or so years. Their loose connection is that they summarise a range of factors which characterise high performance in various sports. The articles are collected into five categories,...