Enhancing Youth Development Through Sport

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
It is commonly believed that through sports, children and adolescents learn values and skills that will serve them well as they prepare for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, many youth sport programs are neither properly structured nor implemented in a manner that these life skills can be learned in sport and later transferred to other life domains. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of positive youth development, to describe the role sport can play in preparing youth to learn essential “life lessons,” to discuss why so few programs achieve this goal, and to provide examples of several sport-based programs designed to achieve these goals. In addition, various issues relating to the design, implementation and evaluation of these programs and future sport programs are discussed.