Needs Analysis

The group I will be working with will be 8-9 years old.

Within the Composite Youth Development (CYD) model (Lloyd and Oliver, 2012), this is classed as middle childhood. Within this model, it suggest that children will be at different levels of ability. Some need to be working on fundamental movement skills, (FMS) but some may be excelling and may need to start looking at sport specific skills. Within this period, the model also states that they rely on peer relationships which could influence what pathway they will go down. On top of this, they also need to have more control over what they do to give them a feeling of empowerment.

At this stage of development, participants also need to feel like they belong which can be helped by a coaches positive attitude to creative thinking or initiative (Erikson, 1950).

Children also need to be intrinsically motivated, and can feel this through relatedness, competence, and autonomy (Miller, Deci and Ryan, 1988). By giving them choice on actions allows for a higher amount of autonomy, thus providing more independence which encourages them to perform better.

Through our first observations and within our first few weeks coaching the group, we realised there are children who are progressed more then what we expected. Around 5 to 6 of the participants have excelled our expectations, and when placed in competition environments, will always win against the rest of the group and have already started developing good levels of sport specific skills.

However, we also observed that about 20% of the group may be underdeveloped in terms of fundamental movement skills. We came to this number during our first observations of the group, when we all watched around 10 participants each and watched how competent they were performing the skills the teacher prescribed, and compared it to how we believed that age range should be able to complete it.

As we know, the group should be transitioning between fundamental movement skills into sport specific skills, but some of the group struggle when it comes to general co-ordination and simple skills that they should be able to complete.

References

• Erikson, E. (1950). Childhood and society. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Lloyd, R. S. and Oliver, J. L. (2012) ‘The Youth Physical Development Model: A New Approach to Long-Term Athletic Development’, Strength & Conditioning Journal (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins), 34(3), pp. 61–72.
• Miller, K., Deci, E. and Ryan, R. (1988). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Contemporary Sociology, 17(2), p.253.