5 What does ‘fun’ mean in children’s sport?
Various people other than Coach Z have tried to answer the above question – often by talking to children about their experiences. Nick Levett, from the English Football Association, has carried out detailed research asking 10-year-olds around England why they play football. One of his tasks was to ask children to make choices between 16 statements. See if you can identify the top six from his survey.
Activity 5 What would 10-year-old children choose?
The 16 statements that Nick Levett used are stated below. Identify what you think are the top six reasons that children chose as the most important things for them about why they play football and select the checkboxes for those reasons below.
Discussion
It is revealing that the children are driven by internal motivators and not by winning or trophies. Two of the statements in the top six are about children’s friendships, so making connections and sharing experiences with others is equivalent to fun and enjoyment for them. Levett found that the children’s top answer by far was that trying their hardest was more important than winning. How do you think this compares to the values that an adult brings to game day?
If you want to read Levett’s excellent article on how he did this research and what it tells us, you can read it on his blog: Children and some reasons behind ‘Play’.
Research shows that children’s motivation to play sport is significantly influenced by their age. Younger children tend to be mainly interested in the hedonistic, or pleasurable, aspects of moving and playing. As you have seen, older children place more importance on learning new skills and being with their friends. So, all the children talk about fun and enjoyment as important reasons for playing sport, but evidence suggests that they probably mean quite different things by those simple words (Bailey, 2017).
This advice is increasingly being passed on to coaches. Watch this video from UK Coaching to see this in action.
OpenLearn - Exploring sport coaching and psychology
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.