The young player as a learner

There is a popular belief that contemporary sports coaches face increasingly complex problems when coaching young performers. These problems appear to be located around the idea that ‘youth’ in the twenty-first century are somewhat different from their counterparts who went before them. This issue was flagged a generation ago, in a paper titled ‘Teaching and coaching today’s kids’. In that paper, Shirley Willis (1994) related the story of a then well-known, experienced coach who admitted (on a radio interview) that he couldn’t teach today’s kids because they had a different sense of authority. They questioned things and often expected to be included in decision making. Moreover, they weren’t impressed by the old-fashioned punishment methods such as push-ups. More recently, in considering young people as learners in a physical education context, Tinning (2007) wondered whether, because of the different social context and the increasing influence of digital media in their lives, young people were rather like ‘aliens in the gym’. Tinning concluded, however, that as far as physical competence and skill development were concerned, young people are probably more like their parents than aliens. So even if the argument for contemporary youth being different holds, differences in sports technique learning may well be less obvious than other differences.