Youth sports training with kids
You could open an interesting debate with respect to teaching sporting skills to kids.
I did last week during a presentation I gave to area basketball coaches.
Some trainers and coaches have decided that the skills required to achieve a certain task should be taught from the beginning.
Others believe in the concept of motor patterning – allowing the young athlete to find his or her own way of achieving a task.
The debate gets even trickier when you factor in the varying nuances and therefore objectives of different sports.
For example, in basketball, if the ball goes in the hoop, it doesn’t really matter how it got there.
But in diving, you know going in that once you jump off the platform, gravity will pull you into the water – the style in which you get there is all that really matters.
Where do you sit on this debate?
I asked the coaches in my audience the same question.
Should you teach or over-teach a certain style of execution to young athletes from day one, or should you allow the young athletes to learn the relative motor patterning via exploration and natural refinement?