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Sports Can Be A Fantastic Activity For Children

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Sports can be a fantastic activity for children from kindergarten to high school to get involved in. They allow children an outing for physical activity, along with the enjoyment of playing with friends. However, picture a coach that is yelling at his players, not teaching properly, and worries more about winning than the love of the game. That is an example of poor coaching. .Each year twenty to forty million children participate in athletic programs across America (Smith et al., 1995; Conroy & Coatsworth, 2004). Unfortunately, it is without certainty that a significant amount of those children will have at least one bad coaching experience. They could even fall into the terrible situation in which they spend years with a poor coaching …show more content…

Gearity and Murray describe an effective coach as, “a coach who helps an athelete(s) improve self-esteem, efficacy, motivation, anxiety, etc. is likely to be deemed, in part, an effective coach” (2011, p. 213). By going off of that, a poor coach would be a coach that does not help a player with those psychological aspects of their life. Jowett & Poczwardowski stated that the interactions between coach and player can impact a player’s enjoyment and performance, which can lead to the overall quality of the coaching (as cited in Lorimer & Jowett, 2009). The five themes that Gearity and Murray came up with throughout multiple interviews with players are poor teaching by the coach, uncaring, unfair, athlete coping, and inhibiting athlete’s mental skills (2011). Poor teaching is self-explanatory, players are not properly taught how to effectively play their sport by their coach. This can be an example of the coach not explaining his lesson well enough (Gearity and Murray, 2011). The poor communication between athlete and coach can have negative effects on their relationship (Fraser-Thomas & Cote, 2009). In a study done by Stein et al. to determine feedback preferred by players, seventy adolescent hockey players answered a questionnaire. The players preferred more positive information feedback than they had been receiving (2012). Next the theme of uncaring will be looked at. An uncaring coach is a coach that does not focus on the emotions of his or her players. They have

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