If sports are to be truly meaningful for young people in St. Albert, the focus must be on development, not wins and losses, according to a group that got together over the weekend.
The City of St. Albert and Mayor Nolan Crouse facilitated a roundtable discussion among coaches from a wide variety of local sports organizations Saturday at Servus Credit Union Place, with the talk centring around the influence coaches and sports have on kids and how they can contribute to bringing them up well in conjunction with the city’s 40 Developmental Assets program.
Sean Aggus, president of the St. Albert Rams Lacrosse Association, said the discussion was incredibly valuable and “eye-opening.”
“It could really help our organization, changing the way we look at coaching kids. Are we all out for winning or are we out there to develop role models for society?” Aggus said. “Ultimately, I think we’re out there to develop role models for society. We want our kids to succeed, not just in the win and loss columns, but succeed in life.”
The 40 Developmental Assets program is designed to give young people the tools they need to avoid high-risk behaviours and grow up to be healthy, caring and responsible adults.
Coaches from skiing, gymnastics, soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, biathlon, martial arts, swimming and ringette all turned up for the session, and Crouse — who himself spent time coaching hockey at the junior A and junior B levels throughout Alberta — was pleased to see such a varied turnout.
Aggus said he was glad to meet other coaches and hopes the roundtable will lead to future opportunities to co-operate.
“It’s good to see the challenges they face with the city and how the city addresses them and share ideas,” he said. “Some of the ideas people had about instant messaging and social media: although we say it’s on the tip of our thought process, bringing it to the forefront with some of the examples shows the value in that.”
One major issue that came up during the discussion was the specialization of athletes early on in their sports careers. Some coaches lamented that since kids are focusing on one sport they are not learning other skills from other sports that could be useful later on, and are also burning out and dropping out of sports altogether by their early teens.
Tied to that is the spontaneity of sports, like the pickup street hockey games that seem to have all but disappeared from local roads.
“We’ve become a very structured society, and [there is] this need for spontaneity — get us out of some of that structure or give us options,” Crouse said. “We all have an obligation; even the mayor has an obligation to help figure it out.”
But the hurdles in opening up facilities for spontaneous, drop-in use exist in the form of legal and insurance issues, others said, asking the City for help in breaking those barriers down.
With the roundtable in the books, Crouse said there is still lots of work for the City to do, both on specific concerns raised Saturday morning and on the 40 Assets program itself.
“I think we’ve influenced maybe 15 more people who will take the message out to their groups, and our staff have some follow-up relative to the spontaneity — looking at the bookings we have and is it spontaneous enough,” he said.
Aggus plans to take what he learned Saturday back to his organization and hopefully effect change in the coaching ranks.
“[We need to] give assets to our coaches to get them to realize that, yeah, we’re developing lacrosse players, but more importantly, we’re developing successful citizens,” he said. “We need to look at those goals rather than the goal of bringing home a provincial championship.”
