Team Sports and Individual Sports
Learning to play team sports is an important part o f a child’s education. Do you agree or disagree? Practicing sports provides athletes with opportunities to develop their social skills during the academic portion of their life. Nowadays, the effect of practicing on children is very significant in a way they practice individual sport or joining a team. But is learning to play team sports an important part of a child’s academic portion? I personally agree and think that team sports are a much better option for the following reasons:
First, there is no better alternative than learning how to be peer helper in your community, especially in a friendly environment. Practicing with a team will create an important relationship between the teammates that will know you and can direct your learning and adapt the pace of the practicing in a way that is more suitable to your capacities. Individual sports don’t generally offer this type of flexibility as you don’t really interact physically with the others. What you basically have is a set of instructions, by your supervisor, that you have to follow alone.
For example, if you have an exercise with a given discipline, when you are being in individual sport all you can do is to do it again and again alone and try to understand. You can maybe make it to succeed during the training but still that doesn’t guarantee that you will get it in an official competition. But when you are with a group at your disposal, you can easily ask your mates and they would provide more information on the desired task from other perspectives that would definitely help you to understand better and get the idea.
Another reason is that team sport, as opposed to individual sport, fosters the development and sustainability of social relationships between teammates. This is a very important point because learning after all is not only about acquiring information, but it is also about learning to interact with peers, forming social relationships, being socially apt to live in a society of different individuals. Teamwork role is to prepare the members for an outer world, a society where having social skills and being able to form relationships is very critical.
Individual sports contribute very little to the development of such a skill, as young athletes will be practicing alone in a very limited context while such skills are acquired through the physical interaction with other peers. If we take the example of a kid who practices with a team and another one who practices alone, we would clearly see differences in their personalities: The “team” boy would have a more extravert personality while the “alone” boy would be more introvert.
There are no doubts cast on which one of the two boys will perform better in society. For these reasons, I believe that team sports are very important for the academic development of children, rather than individual sports. Even if the academic experience, the amount of information could be the same but team sports teach skills that cannot be guaranteed during a training of an individual sport, skills that are essential in the development of the individual later on in the society.
