Sportsmanship in adolescence

Dr Asha Pemberton

teenhealth.tt@gmail.com

PARTICIPATION in sport yields multiple benefits for tweens, teens and young adults. Apart from the direct impact on physical health due to regular training cardiovascular health and movement, sport supports improved time management, communication skills, interpersonal relationships and emotional self-regulation.

Through participation, young people learn to dig deep in other to unearth their best abilities, while learning to reconcile that sometimes, despite best efforts, outcomes are not as they would want. These are all valuable life lessons.

Sportsmanship encompasses the domains of fair play, adherence to rules, respecting the judgement of referees and officials, and treating all players with respect. Together they embody the wider aspects of what sport means.

While young people will prepare and train to engage in performance to their highest level, it must be steeped in respect for opponents, following the regulations and accepting defeat with poise and grace. Victory feels good, and everyone enjoys the moment when they win.

Sportsmanship teaches young people to celebrate their joyous moments without actively making an opponent feel even more disappointed. Good sportsmanship takes maturity and courage – when you work really hard at a sport, it is not easy to reconcile when you do not perform at your best or someone else is simply better. These, however, are the foundations of sport and, indeed, life. There is always something to learn from the successes as well as the challenges.

A major challenge that adolescent athletes face is navigating the interface between social interaction and sport. In some instances, young people enjoy healthy team dynamics, through which their main social space is embedded in their athletic pursuits.

In these cases, tweens and teens find common ground with teammates or opponents in the same sport and build both their training life and leisure life with the same group. The natural benefits of this context are that they have a peer group that understands the consistency, sacrifice and emotional challenges of support and as such a bilateral system of support develops.

In some cases, however, young people whose main social network is also involved in sport can have catastrophic outcomes. It happens unfortunately more frequently than not that a young person can become ostracised by teammates for any number of reasons. Social exclusion and bullying occur on and off the field of play, with similar detriment to the developing adolescent mind.

The risks to longevity in sport, emotional health and beyond for those affected are innumerable. Such scenarios should be promptly identified by teachers, coaches and support staff to put measures in place to rectify challenges or make appropriate changes.

In our community, while there are many opportunities for young people to engage in sport, with clear benefits to their holistic development, there are also many barriers. The attrition rate, particularly among adolescent females, is alarmingly high and holds true for all sports.

To remedy this, active and consistent efforts must be made by parents, families, schools, communities and the sporting fraternity to identify challenges promptly as they occur, provide fair and mediated solutions, all while keeping the ultimate goals of sport participation in mind.

The wider our network of sport engages young people, the better our chances at crime reduction, improved academic attainment and general emotional wellness of the future of your emerging young adults. These benefits will not happen by luck or chance, but through systematic and intentional efforts to not only engage young people in sport, but support them remaining engaged for the long term.