WHY YOUTH PARTICIPATE IN SPORTS?

Developing and strengthening affective relationships are powerful results of sport participation. Sports participation provides a way for players to form meaningful and lasting relationships with peers and non-parent adults such as coaches. Teammates can impact a player’s self-worth (Vazou, Ntoumanis, and Duda, 2006) and competence (Kaya, 2021, Horn, 2004). Coaches can influence a player’s enjoyment and motivation (Black and Weiss, 1992; Kaya, 2014) and play an important role in psychological, social, and physical growth (Conroy and Coatsworth, 2006). Adults involved in sports organizations must be intentional about building positive relationships and providing opportunities for players to form friendships.

Sports participation provides a way to learn sports- and life-based skills. Positive youth development practices help young people develop skills that will enable them to succeed in school, home, and community. So, sports provide an interactive way to learn while participating. Whether the skills are sport-specific or broader, organizers encourage youth to take positive risks and value self-improvement over winning. Participation on athletics teams lets players work with culturally different peers. An intentional approach can help players learn acceptance of and respect for cultural differences (Perkins and Noam, 2007).

One reason for this is that sport-based youth development provides social and personal experiences that focus on the innate physical, emotional and social, and leadership qualities of young people. One of the main cogs in the sport-based youth development agenda is to develop their personal and social skills and improve the personal and social responsibility of young people to become contributors to their community. Especially, a sport-based youth development program is to provide an internship opportunities for sport management students who would like to pursue coaching careers.