How Sport Empowers Youth And Creates Leaders
The following is an edited excerpt from the book, Developing Youth Leadership through Sport, by Mark Mungal.
People often say things such as “Let’s play basketball after school,” or “My team is playing volleyball this weekend.”
But in a sense, people aren’t just playing sport; they’re engaged in something real! When we step onto the field or court — whether it’s a neighborhood pickup game or a professional championship — we’re involved in an authentic experience filled with real emotion and real interpersonal interactions.
These core interrelated aspects of sport — authenticity, emotion, relationships — make it a powerful medium for developing youth leadership skills.
The Authentic Nature Of Sport
Fifteen years ago, my colleagues and I started a nonprofit organization now called the Caribbean Sport and Development Agency (CSDA).
A core part of our work involves facilitating workshops and delivering presentations throughout the Caribbean to enhance the capacity of physical education teachers and coaches who use sport as a tool for youth development. Many of the concepts, principles, and methods shared in this book come from these CSDA adventures.
At one such workshop, the attendees had been sitting in a conference room for a while listening to presentations from various experts. Recognizing that energy levels were dropping, when it was time for our presentation, we decided to ditch the PowerPoint and switch to a hands-on throw-and-catch game.
We asked the participants to crumple up paper into balls, and we shifted the furniture out of the way to create an open “playing” space. By the time we divided the participants into teams, the atmosphere had already changed. It was no longer just an activity at a workshop.
Participants almost immediately became more relaxed and casual in their interactions. Their overall body language transformed from the conference-room posturing to the playground swagger. Speaking tones shifted from formal and inhibited to friendly and outgoing. The crumpled paper was now a real ball, and the participants were now actively engaged in a real sport experience that brought out a different energy level and a familiarity among the participants that is not common to other settings — that’s the authentic nature of sport.
This authenticity is one of the core characteristics of sport that makes it so powerful, and as with many powerful things, if we harness that power, we can achieve great results. At the same time, if we don’t manage that power effectively, it can as easily lead to undesirable outcomes.
The reality is that the power of sport can be good, bad, or ugly. The positive outcomes include strong and meaningful relationships, discipline, focus, team building, skill development, physical fitness, and many others. However, the sport environment can also encourage some less favorable results, such as cheating, discrimination, substance abuse, and violence (including child abuse).
The good, bad, and ugly outcomes appear at every level of sport because every level facilitates authentic engagement, whether it’s a backyard game of volleyball or World Cup football in Brazil.
Part of our responsibility as coaches and physical education teachers is to harness the power of sport to facilitate the generation of positive outcomes in youth.
Children and young people don’t automatically become focused, cooperative, and disciplined because they play sports. But they can, if we know how to use sport to generate positive, meaningful results. We also have a responsibility to safeguard children and young people from the negative effects associated with poor practice in sport.
Emotions In Sport: A Rare Outlet
Sport is also powerful because it generates real emotions. At every skill level, participants experience a wide range of emotions, including authentic joy and sorrow, excitement and frustration, pain and pleasure.
In the final minutes of the 2005 World Cup qualifying match between Bahrain and Trinidad and Tobago, Trinidad and Tobago scored a header to win the match and secure a spot in the World Cup. When the final whistle blew, these big men, who had been playing at the highest level all their lives, were in tears — not just crying but embracing each other and sobbing uncontrollably for the entire world to see. This single game of football caused them to experience real, intense emotions — that’s the power of sport.
These emotions are not limited to elite sport; they can be experienced during informal participation settings as well. If someone makes a three-pointer in a pickup game of basketball, he or she may feel genuine satisfaction, joy, and excitement. Similarly, if two players on a team don’t pass the ball to a third person, that left-out teammate may feel real frustration.
Players experience the full range of emotions at all levels in sport: anger, ecstasy, sadness, happiness, and misery. Our role as coaches and physical education teachers is not so much to control the emotional experiences of young people but to create youth-friendly sport environments that allow participants to express their emotions, and then to harness that emotional power to teach life lessons.
Relationships In Sport: A Level Playing Field
In an authentic sport setting, we interact with one another in unique ways. For example, consider the physical contact that’s acceptable in sport but not in everyday interactions. At the workshop mentioned earlier, participants sat at tables, listened to the speaker, and talked to one another, but they didn’t high-five or jump into each other’s arms. However, as soon as we created a game (albeit with paper balls), the level of acceptable physical contact changed. All of a sudden, it was OK to celebrate with hugs and butt slaps.
When we are actively engaged in a sport experience, our responses to situations tend to differ from other settings. In the sport setting, we often drop our guard and become vulnerable. We become so involved in the game — the missed catch, the bad call, a goal scored — that we react naturally and spontaneously, and by doing so, we show others who we really are. We can’t help it; that’s the power of sport.
In that real setting, we are no longer doctors, lawyers, teachers, or postal workers; we are all on the same team, wearing the same uniform, focused on the same goal.
Sport brings people together from all walks of life, from different ethnicities, religions, and socioeconomic classes. When we’re on the field, there’s no hierarchy based on wealth or any other classification; sport creates a level playing field.
The relationships formed through sport are often strong and long-lasting.
Here’s a personal example: I have played football with the same group of friends for more than thirty years. We play against a different team every weekend, and midweek, we play a short-sided “small-goal sweat” at our high school. Because of years of playing football together, we have come to know, understand, and value one another’s strengths and weaknesses, flaws and vulnerabilities, and even though we all differ in many ways, we’ve developed a strong sense of camaraderie and solidarity that transcends traditional friendships.
These are not superficial relationships; they are based on years of playing sport together that have led to teamwork in other dimensions of our lives — joint adventures recreationally, socially, professionally, and through several charitable endeavors. That’s the power of sport — the power to create lifelong friendships.
How Does Leadership Relate To Sport?
If you Google “leadership,” you will find several definitions, many of them conflicting. In this book, we define leadership as a set of skills that someone uses to achieve an intended goal. In this sense, leadership doesn’t involve having a certain personality; it’s a skill set that anyone can learn and use — not just the designated leader of a team, organization, or community.
A football team, for example, has eleven players on the field, and each player has a different role. The midfielder is the playmaker. The striker scores goals. The defender keeps opponents away from the goal.
Captain is another role; this person keeps the team united and focused. The captain may be the team leader, but he or she isn’t the only player who demonstrates leadership skills. The goalkeeper, for example, tells the defenders where to stand on a free kick. The utility player decides when to drop back to help the defenders. Each player uses leadership skills within the context of his or her specific role.
The good news is that leadership skills can be learned. In the same way that children and young people can learn math, reading, and writing skills, they can also learn leadership skills.
Likewise, leadership skills can be practiced, improved, and then applied in everyday situations: in the home, at school, in social settings, and beyond. Because sport is authentic, emotional, and interactive, it’s a very powerful medium for facilitating leadership skills development — not the only medium but one we have found to be very effective.
Sport Provides Authentic Opportunities To Lead
Leadership in youth sport is sometimes treated as a status symbol rather than a tool to facilitate development.
For example, some coaches pick a captain — often the star player — to call the coin toss or shake hands at midfield. Although these roles are usually assigned to the team leader, they do not require any meaningful leadership capacity — but they may help a young person feel valued. There’s nothing wrong with awarding the title of captain based on ability or seniority, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with assigning symbolic roles to team leaders, but that’s not the focus of this book.
Instead, we give suggestions for using sport roles such as captain to facilitate leadership skills development. Our model proposes that every youth sport participant be given the opportunity to take on a leadership role — for example, captain, coach, team manager, referee, sport journalist, and so on — that would provide authentic opportunities to learn and apply leadership skills.
Sport provides many opportunities to develop and practice leadership skills, both on and off the field. In this book, we’ll highlight some authentic situations that enable young people to hone their leadership skills in school and community sport settings.
Why Emphasize These Concepts?
Leadership skills are not just for the outstanding boy or girl who becomes captain; they are for everyone. In the same way that all students need to learn to read and write, they all need to know how to lead.
At some stage or context in life, everyone will use these skills — whether in a family, community, sport, or work situation. Everyone will have opportunities to make socially responsible choices that benefit others. Thus, it’s important that coaches, physical education teachers, volunteers — anyone who works with youth — know how to facilitate the development of these skills.
It’s also important to remember that developing new skills takes time. Even if a young person learns a particular leadership behavior, he or she might not use that skill in an immediately observable way. The goal is to awaken skills that youth can use for a lifetime; coaches and teachers can trust that their intervention has made an impact, even if it’s not seen right away.
There are many effective educational platforms for developing strong youth leaders, including music, scouting, and sport programs. We have found sport provides an authentic setting for communicating, awakening, and developing leadership skills.
The CSDA Youth Sport Leadership Model is the framework through which we use sport to develop leadership skills.
Three overarching principles guide each phase of leadership development:
- Awaken knowledge in the participants
- Facilitate experiences to reinforce and practice that knowledge
- Encourage reflection on those experiences
Section one of this book discusses each principle in turn, and section two describes eight leadership skills young people learn as these principles are applied in rich sport experiences. The CSDA workshops with coaches and teachers follow these same three principles, as does the presentation of ideas in this book.
The goal is to awaken knowledge in you, the facilitator; to give examples of how rich experiences can be facilitated; and to offer questions for reflection.
Teaching Personal And Social Responsibility Through Sport
Don Hellison worked in the physical education and teacher education field in Chicago, Illinois, in an area where young people were deeply involved in drugs and gang activity. Hellison developed a model called TPSR — Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility — and proposed that physical education can be used to develop more than sport skills and improved health; it can also facilitate the learning of life or social skills such as anger management and conflict resolution.
In developing our youth leadership model, we have adopted many of Hellison’s ideas. For example, Hellison’s model starts with self-identification. Likewise, we ask participants to identify where they currently stand with regard to the values being presented (e.g., they ask themselves, “Am I cooperating with others? Am I cooperating all the time or just when told to?”) and where they want to be.
We have also adopted Hellison’s idea of focusing on a few specific values (referred to as life skills in this book) in each youth program. Those life skills vary, depending on the needs of the school or community in which the program is held. If the community is experiencing a lot of violence, for example, the program might focus on conflict resolution. Or we might focus on respect. Then within respect, we might break it down further: respect for self, respect for others, and respect for equipment.
Finally, we present these areas of personal and social responsibility as skills, in the same way that serving a volleyball and shooting a three-pointer are skills. We find the sport setting is a powerful place where participants can learn, practice, and apply these life skills.
Ultimately, we want youth to recognize they have the power to make a difference in the lives of others, and not just in the sport setting.
We use sport to develop leadership skills, but the goal is to transfer that learning to other dimensions of their lives.
For more on how to empower young people on the field and for the rest of their lives, check out Developing Youth Leadership through Sport by Mark Mungal.
