WHY COACH MY SPORT

Beliefs and actions in a new approach to children’s skill development

1. To understand children’s physical stages of development starting from two years old to better being able to challenge them.
2. Teach the most versatile movement experiences possible for optimal development, the prerequisite to learning sport-specific skills well.
3. Use a game based approach with stories for holistic coaching.
4. Develop bigger and better brains through versatile movement experiences at a young age.

There are too many children today of age 6-7 trying out a sport that don’t have the fundamentals of coordination that are required to learn, enjoy and progress in the sport of their choice with confidence.
Too many kindergarten PE lessons consists of a series of “fun” games that poorly or indirectly develop good skills. Since it is not believed children can play skillfully at an early age, lessons become time-filler activities.

The problem is, one could do those “fun” games for years and still never learn fundamental skills to transition into playing sports later on.

Every healthy child can have the motor skills to learn, play and sample sports by the age of 6-7years, irrelevant of their genetic predisposition. We strongly believe in development and less in the concept of natural talent, but we also need to take a proactive approach versus a reactive approach. Children do not learn skills just by getting older and taller.

We can’t underestimate how early children start to develop these motor qualities and set healthy lifestyle habits.
If children can participate and have the skills to participate their learning is accelerated and their confidence builds, both in sports and as a person.

Our programme will develop fine and gross motor skills, spatial awareness and bilateral symmetry which are key for your child's development and will be hugely beneficial at school not just in PE but also in the classroom.

For the older children 6 - 7 year olds we will also be using The Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach.

The Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) approach was developed by researchers at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom to tap into children’s inherent desire to play. Bunker and Thorpe (1982) developed TGfU around the concept of teaching kids games by playing games. Butler et al. (2008) identified six Basic TGfU Concepts:

Teach games through games.
Break games into their simplest format - then increase complexity.
Participants are intelligent performers in games.
Every learner is important and is involved.
Participants need to know the subject matter.
Need to match participants’ skill and challenge.

Recent approaches to TGfU have advocated for a thematic approach to teaching games. Rather than teaching sport-specific units (e.g., volleyball unit, soccer unit), children and youth gain skills and knowledge to apply to different sports by playing a variety of games associated with these sports.