American Sport Decline
No one of those individuals is solely responsible for what we see happening today in sport in our country. They are merely symbols of how out of touch people at the top of the sport pyramid are. For example take tennis. Bollettieri talks about needing to tap into the talent in the inner cities, yet he charges a minimum of $25,000 a year for his academy. If you go visit the academy there are more foreign kids there than American, because it is based on the ability to pay. Soccer is similar, it cost $3 -4,000 a year to play for some elite clubs. It is questionable if either of these systems has produced results. The basis of success in sport is fitness. Our kids are not as active, there is no physical education. It is questionable if the ones who are participating are being taught sound fundamentals. We need to get back to basics of movement and build sport skills and fitness on that base.
posted by Vern Gambetta @ 7/07/2006 06:31:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Vern,
Any thoughts on how Dr. Mike Marshall (past major league pitcher) runs his pitching academy in Fla? He certainly does not charge what first year teachers in OH make.
Mark Day D.C., CSCS, DACBSP
The following is an excerpt from an excellent piece by Gary Allen, Director of Coaching for the Virgnia Youth Soccer Association. The full text can be found at: http://www.vysa.com/coaches/99579.html
I think his insight in to the intrinsic development of young athletes and players with regards to their sport or game can be applied to our work on the athletic side. As Vern has talked about, giving the body a problem to solve and letting the experimentation and learning take place.
"We must focus on the long-term and intrinsic development of players, guiding them, but more importantly, allowing them, to think for themselves, to make their own decisions. This will enable them to have the tools to adjust and exploit a vast array of situations, in many cases, all in the same game. This is neither an easy nor a short-term learning process. The fact that we are dealing with pre-teens and teenagers further complicates the matter.
Players need time and opportunity to experiment, to enjoy the growth when they finally succeed at something they have been trying to do. We coaches often only see ahead a season or a year, and we are impatient for such growth to occur. We forget how we, as former players, were constantly learning and refining our games, and how often our greatest strides were made, not in structured learning environments, but in situations where we were allowed to experiment.
I remember when I was a freshman in college, playing varsity at a very successful Division 1 school. I was one of two Americans on the team. The rest were Brazilian, El Salvadoran, Israeli, and English. Some of the greatest learning experiences for me as a player that year did not occur in college training sessions. Instead, they occurred on Saturdays when many of us played small-sided pick-up games in a local park with Portuguese fishermen who were in port at the time. It is in this type of environment that players have the opportunity to truly learn how to play and adjust to many types of situations and players. Thinking and the ability to adjust take a long time to develop, with a lot of experimentation, and, yes, failure. But our culture won't allow the failure required to learn at any age or stage. We must always have immediate success."
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