Critical Assessment Traditional Sports Development Continuum (Essay Sample)

Sports Development Continuum
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Sports Development Continuum
Sport development models are used as the basis to help us understand the different responsibilities and roles of people who take part in sports development. These developments start from the lowest stage to the highest stage. This essay will compare and contrast the traditional sports development continuum with Cote and Hay’s theory of socialisation into sports. It is said that the traditional sports development continuum is the clearest continuum in terms of simplicity to comprehend it (Hylton et al., 2002). This is because it ranks and elaborates sports development from the foundation up through participation, performance and finally excellence. This essay will also look into how true or false this is.
Traditional Sports Development Continuum Assessment The traditional sports development continuum is usually presented in four stages which are discussed below.
1 Foundation stage
This stage focuses on basic skills such as body literacy, developing a positive attitude towards physical activities and hand-eye coordination.
2 Participation stage
Participation concentrates on partaking in a variety of sport exercises for reasons such as entertainment, well being, wellness, and fun.
3 Performance stage
Performance is a club stage and players endeavor to enhance their capabilities through effective coaching.
4 Excellence stage
This stage is about accomplishment in sports and it involves the top and international players. In evaluating the traditional sports development continuum, one identifies several things. First, the shape of the triangle, broad bottom and narrow top, can be used to understand how involving each stage is. For instance, the foundation stage involves children from all primary schools in the UK that cater for physical exercises while the excellence stage deals with the relatively few elite players. One major strength of the traditional sport development continuums that from the triangle, one can easily understand the four different stages and the activities that take place in each and every of them. One of its weakness is that from the triangle one can only see a continuum that arranged from the top to bottom without considering dropouts.
Cote and Hay’s Theory of Socialization in Relation to Sports According to Cote and Hay (2002), there is a general pattern in which young people socialise into sports. This pattern involves sampling, specializing and finally investing stages which are discussed below.
1 Sampling stage
During the sampling phase, children participate in a variety of sports. Mostly, the children settle on a given sport based on how interesting it is and how much fun they derive from it (Macphail et al., 2003). During this stage, no training or practice takes place, the playing is only for fun. According to Cote and Hay (2002), after the sampling stage, the young children may choose to proceed the next stages of sports development. In other scenarios, the young players drop out of the sport after the sampling stage.
2 Recreation stage
In the recreation phase, the young players often participate in games but there is no much motivation amongst them. They have no aspiration to play as the top or international players.
3 Specialising stage.
Here, practice is out of one’s will and the wide range of sports that the young players once involved in also reduces (Macphail et al., 2003). During the specialising stage, it is also seen that the fun derived from a sport goes hand in hand with the excitement of performance and competition. After the specialising stage, the young players usually decide to drop out of the sport, to remain in the sport and play for fun or to take up the sport as a profession (Cote and Hay, 2002). Taking the sport as a profession means that the young player will thereafter practice intensively and compete for success.
Differences Between The Two Sport Development ModelsThere are several differences that arise while comparing Cote and Hay’s theory of socialisation with the traditional sports development continuum. The traditional sports development model does not consider that players may decide to drop out from the sport at any stage but Cote and ...