Negative Aspects of Sports Activities

Negative aspects in sports are certainly violence in stadiums and doping, but what I would point out as the most common and therefore having the widest spectrum of negative impacts is a bad coaching approach.

Unfortunately, a bad coaching influence is most commonly found when working with children. In most sports organizations and clubs in Serbia, working with children is entrusted to former athletes, and even worse, they are not pedagogically trained to work with children. Training children at an early age should primarily be related to play and socializing through which they will develop basic motor skills such as coordination, balance, etc. Working with children should primarily be entrusted to a person who has a pedagogical approach, a highly qualified person. A major problem with clubs in Serbia is exactly the poor work with children, which later reflects in a lack of athletes who should compete for the senior national team. The problem is then solved by buying players, while the real issue lies in the bad approach to working with youth categories. Hence the saying "without youth categories in the club, there is no first team".

There is a low probability that the majority of children from a group or training session will become elite athletes, but they will all one day be adults who are employed and have families. Thus, children should develop social traits, team spirit, and learn how to lose and win through play and socializing, which will be of great use to them later in life. In today's work with children, the goal of most coaches is achieving results instead of the comprehensive development of their personality, which can lead to children quitting sports and failing to develop these traits. Achieving results at an early age as a goal is not only the coach's idea but also the parents', which is perhaps even worse.

Another issue in the coach's approach occurs at a later stage of the child's life: early specialization in a single sport or even a specific position on the team. Specialization depends on the sport, but it should generally occur around the age of 17. Early specialization results in poor physical development, a short career, or even severe injury. In any case, it leads to prematurely quitting sports, which is never the goal of either the athlete or the coach. This is also a mistake that can be attributed to the unhealthy ambition of parents wanting their child to become an elite athlete. For a child to become a top athlete, many things must align, starting from the coach at an early age, the child's dedication, genetic factors, and sometimes even luck.

If specialization begins too early, it will lead to prematurely reaching a peak in the training process. Consequently, an athlete in a team or individual sport might record their best results at a very early stage of their career, e.g., 17-18 years old, after which their form begins to decline.

Specialization is a complex process based on multilateral development. Ozolin (1971) believes that training methods or specialized methods have two natures: 1. Sport-specific exercises and 2. Exercises for the development of biomotor abilities. The first refers to exercises that mimic the movements of the specific sport, while the second refers to the development of strength, speed, endurance, etc. The ratio between these two groups of exercises differs in each sport depending on its characteristics. For example, in long-distance running, nearly 100% of the training volume consists of sport-specific exercises, whereas in the long jump, sport-specific exercises account for only 40%, and strength and other exercises make up the rest.

Children must have a multilateral development of all motor skills in early childhood, especially basic motor skills. Basic sports include athletics, gymnastics, etc.

There are two sensitive (most suitable) periods for the development of each motor ability (Table 1). The first is in early childhood, between 5-9 years for boys and girls, and the second is in puberty, between 10-15 years for girls and 13-16 years for boys. The second sensitive period, during puberty, gains significance if the first sensitive period was properly utilized. The greatest potential for progress in motor movements is precisely during this period. In the sensitive period, it is crucial for children to solve diverse motor tasks and not be limited to a single sport with monotonous movements.

Within the sensitive period, there is a "critical phase" of development in which the stimulation of certain motor abilities must occur in order to achieve the desired effect.

The next problem in the coach's relationship with children is the coach's behavior towards them. Very often, we see coaches yelling at children because they didn't do something right or didn't fulfill a task. What coaches fail to realize is that a child's mistake on the court is usually a consequence of the coach's mistake in the teaching methodology during practice. So, in their ignorance, they blame the children (or athletes later on) for their own mistakes.