Too much Technical Proficiency and not enough Character?
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 widely recognised, however, that technical competence is only one ingredient in the performance cocktail. Many of the other variables that determine success in sport are personal qualities. Uncontroversial is the assertion that attitude matters. Determination, courage, empathy, selflessness are indisputably important - but entirely separate from the sort of skills developed in a square of four coloured cones. Those personal qualities are not ability dependent: all children might develop them regardless of their size, speed, co-ordination, or other factors which unequally determine success in youth sport.
The Minister for Education values a combination of features generically labelled "character". Desirable personal behaviours and values. Easy to define, though less easy to develop and measure. Physical activity may be one of the few remaining vehicles through which these capacities may be enhanced. But it's not inevitable. Simply kicking a football more often doesn't increase resilience
Many high performing sportspeople have well rehearsed, and apocryphal, stories of teachers who predicted that they would never succeed in sport. These prophesies fail as they are based on the wrong metrics. Technical capability, size and speed dominate youth sport. Attitude and application are more influential in the adult version. The industry of Talent Identification is clear that later developers are often more durable and resilient than the child prodigies. The theory is that they have had greater experience of failure and struggle - vital experiences at top levels, but denied to the chosen few of school sport, to whom success comes easily.
Many of the justifications for the investments of time and resources that schools make in physical activity, are the alleged "life lessons" learned in this environment. But websites and publications don't boast about these: they prefer the safer measurements of goals scored and trophies won. Filling the trophy cabinet is a visible short term expedient that pushes longer term success criteria aside
So, if developing desirable personal characteristics is a significant part of the school coach's role, where do they go for guidance? The profusion of assistance in developing technical outcomes is curiously absent here. Finding help in teaching a leg break, or drag flick, is easy. But strategies for building determination and persistence are almost completely absent. Would parents of young players prefer that their offspring developed sports skills or personal ones, such as empathy and humility? Probably no one knows, because no one has asked them. Is dribbling round a cone in a way that is regarded as good a better life experience than learning to overcome disappointment?
Unusually, Google is of little assistance. Searches for "teaching persistence through sports" (and similar qualities, such as empathy, determination, courage etc) are wholly unsatisfactory. The odd scholarly journal or something in the press. No instructional guidance whatever. By comparison, results for searches such as "teaching the drive in cricket" produce spectacular results: stage by stage illustrations, wide range of video and several pages of high quality resources.
National Governing Body awards are much more comfortable preparing coaches to deliver technical outcomes than personal ones. Detailed information in where to put the hands on the stick is much more prominent than how to overcome apprehension. Desirable "values" might be acknowledged, but ways of building them are consistently sparse. For the inexperienced coach, practical guidance in this most difficult part of the job is rare.
Good teachers and coaches doubtless weave the human side within the technical. So, what is the mechanism by which novices can achieve this rare and valuable ability? Sports coaching has developed significantly in the 50 years of its existence, and since the invention of plastic cones. But its development has been spectacularly lopsided, in favour of technical outcomes. It focuses on coaching sports, not sportspeople. And unsurprisingly, therefore, creates games that are of high standards of play, but much more mixed exhibition of personal qualities. In the circumstances, this shouldn't be surprising.
Maybe the time has come for the industry of coaching to redress this imbalance. The performance of school sport will closely resemble its delivery priorities. We get the game we coach.