Sports Development Continuum

Sports Development Continuum

The main aim of the Sports Development Continuum is to provide oppurtunities and links for young people to progress with their sporting ability/participation. The Sports Development Continuum has four stages of hierarchy and the size of each stage represents the number of participants.

The Foundation Stage

• This has the most amount of participants of all the stages.
• Participants include young children who are taught Primary School P.E and complete beginners to a sporting activity.
• At this stage basic skills are taught (catching, throwing), which can then be developed into more specific sports such as cricket and rounders.
• Their is a lot of emphasis on fun to encourage people to continue their participation in the future.

The Participation Stage

• People join this stage when they chose to participate on a regular basis.
• Sports Development contributes significantly to this stage by offering after school clubs, school/clubs links and multiskills clubs.

The Performance Stage

• The stage emphasises improvement by regular participation and practice, competitions or skills training.
• At this stage some individuals who express talent within their given sport may be selected to take part in trials or gain a place within an academy. They may even recieve sponsorship to train.
• Those who achieve highly at this stage progress to the excellence stage.

The Excellence Stage

• This is where sports are at National and International level
• The individual is preparing for competition around the world
• Governing bodies become responsible for the sporting individual
• Its the most narrow point of the continuum as it has the fewest participants
• It is the peek as getting to this point represents sporting succes.

What is the Purpose of the Sport Development Continuum?

Sports Development can have two functions:

• Can be structured to help progress skills, training and tactics through the levels of the continuum.
• some focus on increasing participation through confidence-building and social well-being.

The Appropriateness

Most Sports Development are very specific in their approahces- they are designed around other factors and influences to make sure that they are effective and pitched at the right level- this is appropriateness.

Cross-cutting Agendas

All Sports Development programmes and schemes have the power to implement many areas of society. They can help to benefit social, cultural, health and economic problems- these aims are known as cross-cutting agendas.



Sports Development programmes and schemes can be used inorder to help improve different areas of society:

Pro-health

• Pro-health is trying to encourage people to understand and improve their current health. Sports Development may do this by working with and educating young people in order to improve their health and their attitude and understanding towards it.

Pro-education

• Pro-education look into educating people into the rules of fair play and showing how a mixed cculture society can work and compete in sporting competitions harmonously. Another use of pro-education is to use sport in order to encourage young people to improve their attendance and attitude towards education.

Anti-drug

• Anti-drug schemes try to highlight the dangers of substance abuse and aid those suffering back into everyday activities such as participating in sport.

Anti-crime

• Anti-crime schemes try to encourage young people to stay away from criminal activity and to instead take part in sport and physical activity.

Regeneration

• Regeneration has been put in place throughout many cities that suffer from urban deprivation. They try to improve the area to make it better for both the surrounding community and visitors. An example of this would be london: they improved the surrounding area by adding parks and cleaning up prior to hosting the London 2012 Olympic Games.