The Importance of Sports

Rosemary Rivera

Building social skills and character in young children of all socioeconomic backgrounds, race and genders through junior golf programs.

Golf is a game of learned behavior and learned skills. When youths are taught golf, it enables the weaving of junior golf and character building activities into lessons that help prepare kids and teens to perform better in the real world. This is due in part to the core values instructors teach and develop in junior golfers that are incorporated throughout junior golf programs. Parents are encouraged to reinforce these behaviors through reflection and discussion, covering the topics and lessons learned in the program. Junior golf programs like The First Tee teaches participants integrity, teamwork, communication, and a handful of other valuable skills via hands-on activities and reflects Albert Bandura's social learning theory in that through observation or direct instruction can help children learn. (Thesis Statement)

Games that require them to implement skills like integrity and honesty are seen through the tallying of their own score and determining if their ball stayed within the boundaries of the course. The junior golf program places emphasis on teaching life lessons through golf. While learning golf skills, juniors learn how to handle loss, how to win gracefully, how to become self-reliant, and how to feel confident and focused. The program is available for kids and teens 5-18 years of age and is accessible to both genders creating a sense of equality among the sexes and giving healthy options to youths that come from working-class families and do not have the means to enjoy after-school activities.

A major contributor to psychology, Albert Bandura developed social learning theory, a theory that postulates learning as a cognitive process taking place within a social context may happen purely via direction instruction or observation, even when there is lack of direct reinforcement or motor reproduction. This theory helps explain how an activity such as sports can help youth learn how to develop various skills that will lead them to an improved and positive sense of well-being."The Health Belief Model, social learning theory (recently relabeled social cognitive theory), self-efficacy, and locus of control have all been applied with varying success to problems of explaining, predicting, and influencing behavior" (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988). In addition to observations of behavior, an individual can learn through vicarious reinforcement or simply put, observation of rewards and punishments. Expanding on traditional behavioral theories, this is the basis from which programs like junior golf can have their success explained.

A way Bandura was able to formulate such a theory came from analyzing the results of one of his most famous experiments, the 'bobo doll experiment'. "Children observed as adults modeled either violent or passive behavior towards the doll, and this observation was found to influence the manner in which the children subsequently interacted with the dolls. Children who observed violent behavior behaved violently toward the doll" (Psychology Today, 2016). If applied to sports, by youth witnessing others behaving in a certain way, like keeping honest scoring, practicing good sportsmanship, they learn what to do in these situations and can then take it and transfer it over to their everyday life. Several articles show how sports provide a solid foundation of ethics for children and teens.

A 2014 study examining the negative and positive impact of an urban youth sport organization saw results that proved success in the program teaching social skills and things like emotional control, teamwork, and leadership through sports. "The results indicated that the participants found the program to be socially rewarding, inclusive, and enjoyable and kept them out of potential trouble while helping them to stay on track personally and academically through teaching both sport and life skills" (Bean, Whitley, & Gould, 2014, p. 3). This evidence supports the idea that sports programs can serve as a way to teach social skills to underserved youth and provide usable knowledge for these youth to take with them into life and school. Examining the study from a perspective of socioeconomic backgrounds, gender and races, the study reveals the usefulness of youth sports program to encourage and motivate youths from impoverished backgrounds to participate in healthy activities. Urban youth typically are black and Latino and from working class families. They do not have access to many after-school activities and sometimes instead involve themselves in negative situations that can damage their academic and career potential.

Golfing programs can offer youth a way to learn skills that can help them in the future. These skills do not just involve sports skills, which can be lucrative, but social skills like teamwork and communication that are crucial in every aspect of any career field. Another study revealed findings that point to the success of The First Teelife skills programme in providing positive youth development. "Findings provide initial data-based evidence that The First Tee is having a positive impact on promoting youth development in the golf context and in the transfer of life skills to other domains" (Weiss, Stuntz, Bhalla, Bolter, & Price, 2013, p. 214). Girls for example, when they participate in sports programs, experience higher self-esteem and learn to be competitive and assertive in the field. Confidence gained from improvement in these programs also teach self-reliance, a key component to success in adulthood.

Youth sports also provides a means for females to change the way they view themselves and introduce a more balanced ideology as described in Messner's 2011 article. "Youth sports has become a key site for the construction of soft essentialist narratives that appropriate the liberal feminist language of "choice" for girls, but not for boys, thus serving to recreate and naturalize class-based gender asymmetries and inequalities" (Messner, 2011). While boys learn life skills as well, girls benefit more from these programs because of the emphasis on females in many societies to adopt the role of the caretaker and think selflessly. Junior golf teaches participants to be competitive, to be the best they can be, and feel confident.

Many activities in society that are meant for women do not teach these fundamentals. They teach passivity making females play a supportive position instead of taking on the role of leader and entrepreneur. The same can be said of children from minority and low-economic status families. These children are often placed in situations or choose situations where they do not feel good about themselves and it often leads to poor performance in school, work, and their personal lives. Sports helps creative a positive environment for children to improve and gain the skills necessary to succeed.