The Value of Introducing Young Children to Sports

Four Major Benefits of Structured, Peer-to-Peer Competition

As a father of young children who was also active as a child, Jason Borrevik often extols the virtues of getting children involved with sports at an early age. Aside from keeping them occupied with a safe and well-supervised activity two to four times a week, and possibly sparking a lifelong interest, children can learn many important life lessons from participating in organized sports. To be sure, the benefits are many and varied, but most can be placed under four major headings.

Physical Activity

To begin with the obvious, enrolling a child in a soccer or tee-ball league brings with it the health benefits of consistent exercise. In this age of technological and screen-based activities, sports can provide a much-needed respite from video games, YouTube clips, and social media. Additionally, although there are some exceptions such as ice hockey, most children’s sports leagues conduct games and practices outside. Jason Borrevik explains that exposing kids to sunlight and fresh air is crucial to offsetting all the time they’re forced to spend indoors.

Of all the positive aspects of involving children in sports early in life, encouraging good health through consistent exercise and playing outside in the fresh air must be the simplest — but perhaps the most important.

Structure, Rules, and Strategic Thinking

From this point onward, the benefits of children playing sports at an early age become a little bit more abstract. Being subject to a new environment where different people fill different roles (offence, defence, pitcher, goaltender, etc.), but are all subject to an agreed-upon set of rules as administered by officials of some sort (referees, linesmen, umpires, etc.) is a lot of complex information for a child to absorb. The concepts involved here are as wide-ranging as fair play, to deference to authority, to creativity within the rules of a game. But, once it is all understood, the child will be the richer for it, and be better equipped to deal with other, more serious parts of life.

Put another way, one of the major benefits of introducing competitive sports to a child is that it teaches many lessons through a single activity, and some of those lessons involve structure, rules, and strategic thinking — all things that Jason Borrevik knows will come in handy later in life.

The Value of Teamwork

Competitive, peer-to-peer sports foster a sense of unity, enthusiasm, and common interest among teammates. Study after study has concluded this, through the decades. Instilling the ideas of camaraderie and mutual aid through shared victory and loss are crucial milestones in a young mind’s social development.

Intangible, Character-Building Lessons

Speaking of lessons that accompany shared victory and loss, acquainting a child with sports early in life will also teach them many intangible and character-building lessons. Jason Borrevik explains that things like winning with honour, losing with grace, and trying one’s best no matter the circumstances are often experienced for the first time on the schoolyard basketball court, local gridiron, or municipal soccer pitch.

Finally, possibly the greatest lesson of all that organized sports can teach to a young mind is that games are merely that: games. In a roundabout way, by virtue of their ephemeral and largely consequence-less nature, competitive sports can teach children how to take setbacks in stride, as well as how to be humble in triumph. A game of tennis is merely a game of tennis. A loss on the diamond is merely a loss on the diamond. Losing streaks will end, just the same as winning streaks. There will always be another game. In this way, introducing sports to children at an early age teaches them to leave it all out on the field, as it were.

There is a lot of wisdom inherent in the structured, peer-to-peer competition of children’s team sports. As the father of young children that are enrolled in a few different leagues, and as a former active child himself, Jason Borrevik, can personally attest to their multi-faceted value in early childhood development.