Research, Policy & Practice SupplementBringing Together ExperientialEducation and Youth Sportby Lisa Meerts-Brandsma(The University of Utah)

Youth sport has the potential to change lives, often in positive ways, but its success in doing so frequently lies in deliberately facilitating development, not only coaching. Otherwise, sport as a tool for youth development can be double-edged, potentially leading to detrimental rather than positive outcomes. One of sport’s strengths is the natural hook it provides to draw in youth who are excited to be involved; the fact that it can then be a platform for positive youth development (PYD) is a convenient byproduct. But taking advantage of sport for PYD requires that leaders be prepared to leverage experiences on the field into meaningful developmental opportunities. In general, youth sport leaders (YSLs) have had few concrete tools available to them that could help them consider how to best accomplish goals, such as supporting the development of life skills, through structured activities.

More specifically, YSLs often stumble into beneficial outcomes for their participants without a theoretical framework to guide them in creating transformational experiences. A theoretical framework would help practitioners think about how to orchestrate experiences that bring what happens on the field to students’ lives after the game ends. While this already happens in some

A summary of Newman, Alvarez, & Kim (2017). An experiential approach to sport for youth development. Journal of Experiential Education, 40(3), 308-322. doi/10.1177/1053825917696833

Bringing Together Experiential Education and Youth Sport

Introduction

cases, articulating how to link sport experiences to life off the field would make it easier for youth sport leaders to support their athletes in attaining positive developmental outcomes. Newman, Alvarez, and Kim (2017) have called for the use of experiential education as a platform for sport-based positive youth development (PYD). They argue both share common design features that make education a natural bridge to sport-based PYD.

The Nuts and Bolts of Experiential Education

Experiential education is often thought of as learning by doing, and many people summarize it as a four-step process where individuals create a plan, enact the plan, reflect upon what they did, and revise future plans based on that information. One of its strengths is drawing attention to what people may not even realize they are doing. In the case of sport, Newman et al. argue that leaders already practice many useful techniques with their students, but an experiential education framework would help make what they do more intentional. The resulting outcome would be a more focused, and likely better, experience for more participants. Or, in terms of experiential education, it could move them from having an intuitive or unconscious knowledge of why they use certain coaching practices to developing practical consciousness about why they do what they do.

Bringing Together Experiential Education and Youth Sport

Newman and Alvarez (2015) created a Coaching on the Wave model for youth sport that is influenced by experiential education. It provides six steps coaches can use to think about how to take an athlete through an experience with the goal of teaching them specific skills. The six points are moments where a coach can make an explicit plan and reflect upon that experience with their participant to determine whether desired outcomes were achieved. The major change within this model is that it adds reflective moments to a process that is already happening; i.e. it is bringing consciousness to otherwise unconscious moments. The process begins by identifying where the student is presently at developmentally (assessing their history) and considering how sport can enhance their trajectory (attending to the sport context) and creating a concrete plan with specific skills the youth can improve and what the YSL needs to do to support that (determine skills needed and match coaching/facilitation strategies). Next, the activity occurs, and the YSL debriefs what happened (debriefing the experience) and uses that information to consider how they might make changes (evaluate the process).

As an example, a coach might identify a youth who struggles with perseverance. At home, this looks like the youth not completing homework assignments when they become difficult. On the field, perhaps the youth quits whenever they do not quickly succeed at a particular skill. After making this

An Example of Experiential Education in Youth Sport: Coaching on the Wave

Bringing Together Experiential Education and Youth Sport

assessment, the coach needs to think about opportunities in sport where the youth could build perseverance. The coach could set a goal with the youth to practice a skill a certain number of times or until they reach a degree of proficiency, making sure that they provide encouraging feedback if they notice the youth lagging. After completing the skills practice, the coach could sit with the youth to consider where they were successful, what led to their success and what changes they might consider in the future. The debriefing thus leads into the evaluation of the process and next steps.

Implications

The key takeaway from Newman, Alvarez and Kim (2017) is that using an experiential education model can help youth sport leaders make intentional decisions about how they work with athletes in order to teach them how lessons learned through sport apply to life overall. It offers a way for coaches to articulate why they do certain activities with participants that may lead to more beneficial outcomes for youth. Additionally, the broad framework of experiential education can be applied in a variety of settings among a variety of YSLs, the result of which are YSLs who employ a pedagogically “informed” model.

References

Newman, T., Alvarez, A. (2015). Coaching on the wave: An integrative approach to facilitating youth development. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 6, 127-140.

Newman, Alvarez, & Kim (2017). An experiential approach to sport for youth development. Journal of Experiential Education. 40(3), 1-15. doi/10.1177/1053825917696833

Lisa Meerts-Brandsma is a Doctoral Student in Parks, Recreation and Tourism at The University of Utah.

The Research, Policy and Practice series is designed to disseminate research to a wide audience. If you are interested in contributing to the series, please contact jee@aee.org. Researchers seeking toincorporate ideas reflected in this summary are encouraged to reference the original article, found at http://journals.sagepub.com/home/jee

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Read the entire article! You can find it in JEE issue 40(3), page 308.