Youth sports
[3] Participation in organized sports during childhood[citation needed] and adolescence has important benefits for physical, psychological, and social health.
[medical citation needed] However, sport involvement goes beyond health, other benefits allow them to form and strengthen affective relationships, teach youth to value self-improvement over winning, how to be competitive in a competitive society, and to work culturally with different peers and authorities.
[5] The practice of sport fosters young people's physical and emotional health and builds valuable social connections.
Beyond the individual, sport involvement cuts barriers that divide societies, making it a powerful tool to support conflict prevention both symbolically on the global level and practically within communities.
Effective communication among youth athletes, coaches, and parents improves team cohesion, facilitates skill development, and creates an environment that promotes physical, social, and emotional growth.
Nonverbal communication, encompasses, body language, facial expressions, gestures, and eye contact, which are important for reinforcing verbal messages, showing empathy and building rapport with athletes.
Such negative experiences may result in a young person's low self-esteem, involve them in negative relationships, encourage poor sportsmanship, permit aggression and violence, allow racism, perpetuate gender discrimination, or expose them to psychological, sexual and commercial exploitation and abuse.
Early sports specialization has long been typical among children and teenagers in gymnastics, swimming, diving and figure skating, especially if they have aspirations of being competitive at elite levels.
Unfortunately, the data does not prove that specializing as a youth will be enough to make a child into a successful athlete later on (Latorre-Roman, Pinillos, & Robles, 2018).
[17] In 2018, after the death of an apparently healthy but exhausted teenage athlete, the government of Puerto Rico required that all youth sport programmes be regulated.
[17] As of 2020, there is widespread sentiment that the overall system must change, but programmes in each of the regulated sports, and the coaches and other staff whose pay depends upon operating these lucrative tournaments and expensive travel teams, are lobbying for exemptions that will permit their own businesses to continue as before.
[17] Global South nations tend to have less access to organized sports because the politics of their countries do not have the resources to have leisure and entertainment influence their lives.
[18] Children in Global South nations have less opportunity to attend school where majority of organized sport takes place.
[19] In Global North nations, the evolving and complex youth sport system requires significant resources such as time, access, and money to develop as an athlete and play competitively.
The single greatest predictor of whether a child will start playing organized sports young, is whether their household income exceeds $100,000 per year.
[21] Gender conditioning often starts at an early age where boys and girls are taught behave differently and participate in certain activities.
There are also several social and cultural barriers faced by youth living in the global south that impact sport participation.
[26] The Sport for Development and Peace organization was found in research by Simon Darnell to have positive outcomes on the twelve-year-old boys participating in the program by promoting time management and personal responsibility.
The social gospel movement, "found sports to be a useful tool to draw inner-city youth to their churches, which often housed gymnasiums.
[31] At Hull house, "they also provided a gym and sponsored athletic teams for both boys and girls, both as part of the acculturation process and the broader goal of improving the social, mental and physical well-being of inner-city residents.
[32] This shifted to adults organizing youth sports programs, which was exemplified with the advent of Little League Baseball by Carl Stotz.
In 1965 Coleman wrote, "if it were not for inter-scholastic athletics or something like it, the rebellion against school, the rate of drop-out, and the delinquency of boys might be far worse than they presently are.
"[33] Also, youth athletics were a way for Jewish immigrants to disprove the stereotypes that they were bookish and weak in the early 20th century.
[34] Some Jews pursued professional careers in sports, which provided young Jewish Americans with role models who showed, "the possibility and benefits of assimilation,"[34] which encouraged more participation in youth athletics.
"[35] Overall, both Catholics and Jews were attracted to youth athletics, to "demonstrate American-ness and experience a sense of belonging in the United States.
[38] School sports such as track and field, basketball, and wrestling were activities that some Native Americans felt pride in when they participated.
[39] Former resident of a boarding school for Native Americans, Jeff McCloud's experiences in sports, "helped him to critically read the pain and degradation of contemporary life on and off Indian reservations as something other than a flaw in Native American character or the inevitable outcome of historical progress.
Female youth athletics was advocated for in the early 20th century because it was, "believed that sports improved young women's health and beauty, promoted self-confidence, and offered a source of enjoyment.
[40] During the early parts of the 20th century, some people felt that sport might reduce a girl's femininity and produce too much competitiveness.
[32] It has been stated that, "among the many forms of sexism in sports, perhaps the most pervasive and devastating is the lack of equal opportunities for girls to compete in programs similar to those offered for boys.
