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 APLL News: Good Sportsmanship—More Than Just High Fives: National PTA® |
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Good Sportsmanship—More Than Just High Fives: National PTA®
Good Sportsmanship — More Than Just High Fives
by Mark Bennett, National PTA®
Most everyone who's played a childhood sport will remember the team forming a line after each game to shake hands with each of their opponents or give them high fives to congratulate them on their performance. These are visible examples of good sportsmanship that coaches often encourage their kids to display. Good sportsmanship also is shown more inconspicuously when, for example, a basketball player is knocked down by an opponent and doesn't complain when the referee fails to call foul play. It's also shown, of course, when the player's parents see the incident from the stands and stifle their anger toward the opposing team's player, and toward the referee.
According to Joseph Di Prisco, Ph.D., coauthor of the book Right from Wrong: Instilling a Sense of Integrity in Your Child, sportsmanship is the integrity, one's internal sense of conscience that shows through while playing a sport. "Good sportsmanship is about respecting your opponent, your coach, your teammates, and yourself," he said. In practice, good sportsmanship often is about controlling one's own frustrations, while being courteous to all others involved in the sports experience. It's the job of parents and coaches, Di Prisco explained, to make kids realize how they're undermining themselves and their values when they commit acts of poor sportsmanship.
How sportsmanship develops
Children learn the concept of sportsmanship as they grow and mature, according to Lawrence H. Kutner, Ph.D., co-director of the Harvard Center for Mental Health and Media. This learning process begins with the biological development of the child's brain and thought patterns. "Young kids expect to win, and they don't understand why others have to win," Kutner said. "We expect a 4- or 5-year-old to be upset about losing a game, but it's a problem if it happens in a 12-year-old."
This learning process advances through the child's emotional and social development, during which the child usually develops a sophisticated sense of empathy at around age 7 or 8. Empathy involves the child seeing past the immediate consequences of his actions, and realizing how his actions make other people feel. Adults can usually expect a child's concept and practice of sportsmanship to be appropriate for the child's age.
With younger children, sports are often much simpler. "In tee-ball there was one objective—to hit the ball and to try to please all the parents and grandparents in the bleachers," Di Prisco said. As kids get older, however, the competition inevitably gets more serious, and it can be more difficult for kids to bear in mind what their real reason for playing should be—having fun. Parents are often the reason why sports stop being fun for their kids. Children need the proper motivation for playing the sport in the first place—a boy playing baseball merely to please his father, for example, never makes for a good competitor.
Good sportsmanship depends on the child having a clear set of priorities—realizing that her sport should not be the most important thing in her life. This involves keeping a healthy perspective on winning and losing, realizing that it's not of the utmost importance. By only focusing on the outcome of the game, one team will always be disappointed. Setting effort-based goals for improving one's own performance, however, will guarantee internal rewards for each and every player. Kids should always strive to perform at their own personal best, and not compare themselves to others. The bottom line is that any sports program should be fun for the kids, and parents and coaches should do their part to make it this way.
Parents as role models
Parents have the obligation to serve as models of good sportsmanship to their children. Kutner said that the simple questions parents ask their kids after a game—"did you win?" versus "did you have fun?"—say a lot about where the parents' priorities lie. Parents also can foster poor sportsmanship in more subtle ways that they might not even realize, such as taking his or her kid's team out for pizza or ice cream only if they win. Through practices such as these, parents send the message to their children that winning is the most important thing to them, and it can make the sports experience much less enjoyable for the child. Parents should appreciate personal growth in their children, both in their athletic performance, and in their handling of emotionally charged situations in the game with integrity and grace. Kutner said parents should take care to appreciate good performances on either team, cheering for a good catch by an opposing team's player, rather than shouting "drop it."
By asking children to imagine how it feels to be on the receiving end of an act of poor sportsmanship, parents and coaches can help their children develop empathy. Instead of telling kids what they shouldn't do, though, parents should give them alternatives for what they can do. For example, instead of reprimanding a child for hogging the ball in soccer, you could tell him to pass the ball more often. "Ideally the more specific you'll be, the better they'll be able to follow it," Kutner remarked.
While some high-contact sports, like football and hockey, are more violent by nature, the need to exercise good sportsmanship is just as important in sports with less physical contact, like tennis, running, or swimming. The whole competitive experience can be overwhelming for a child, and she must learn how to properly channel her aggression.
Coaches as sportsmanship guides
Scott Lorek, women's track and field coach at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado (who has also coached at the high-school level), said that sportsmanship is shown on an individual basis, which "comes out real fast as you get to know the athlete...and how they're going to react." He said, "Displays of bad sportsmanship indicate something [wrong] in their approach—if they get that upset, we need to talk about why they're out here."
Coaches must address cases of poor sportsmanship with their kids as soon as an incident occurs. Lorek said that a coach should not let an athlete throw his shoes, for example, just because that's the way he vents his anger. Coaches also should encourage their kids to talk about issues that are bothering them as they occur, and to not let these problems fester. Sometimes the athlete will know he did something wrong right away, without being told, and coaches should be sensitive to cases such as these.
Scott Lancaster, senior director of the National Football League's Youth Football program and author of FAIR PLAY, said that the coach should address each case of poor sportsmanship separately with the individual, and never by ridiculing that player in front of the entire team. Lancaster said that coaches should always make their kids feel good about themselves, and to use mistakes as they occur as a learning experience. (See News from National to read about how NFL Youth Programs and National PTA are working together to increase parent involvement as a way of improving youth sports.)
"We have to acknowledge when our kids almost lose it but don't," said Michael Riera, Ph.D., who coauthored the book Right from Wrong with Di Prisco. Riera remarked that those kids who could go either way with their tempers could benefit by being shown good examples to follow. He commented that end-of-the-year sports awards banquets are inappropriate for rewarding good sportsmanship, which should be recognized all throughout the season.
The benefits that good sportsmanship provides to kids are life-long. Riera said that sportsmanship shows up in day-to-day adult activities such as good driving, and helps train good businesspeople to work through compromise. It also carries over into one's family life, in which family members learn to agree through disagreeing, realizing that nobody's perfect. "It's a cliché to say that sports are to learn lessons about life," Di Prisco said, "but the 99 percent of kids who don't go on to professional sports benefit in life knowing that they played hard and made something work." In his youth football training program, Lancaster always emphasizes to his kids the life skills that sportsmanship provides. "It's about how to develop yourself as a good citizen," he said. Good sportsmanship—it goes a lot further than giving high fives.
© 2002 National PTA®, Our Children, Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 4–5
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