Why sports activities should be promoted in the formal education system?
There is a common stereotype that students who are poor academically are interested in sports or physical activities. More so, there are chances that they excel at it. An intelligent and supposedly nerdy kid is someone who won’t be visible on the playground. Realistically, that is a narrow perspective. Children intrinsically lean towards play. They feel the intuition to volunteer in games more often. They gain natural satisfaction with any physical activity as it enforces a competitive spirit and has a reward system attached to it.
This stereotyping has further resulted in giving less importance to sports activity as the child grows and is surrounded with more academic pressure. Playing equates to wasting time. This notion does not benefit the overall physical and mental growth of students. They succumb to indoors and constantly hustle for better academic performance leaving all the games aside, impacting their body posture, flexibility, and even mental and emotional stability severely.
How can active participation in sports activities help students maintain a healthy lifestyle? How is it not another way of drifting away from productivity but in fact a catalyst in activating body and mind in better ways? This blog is an attempt to answer these questions and support the necessity of indulging in playing games regularly.
What is Sport education?
Sport Education is a curriculum and instruction module designed for delivery within physical learning. It includes all types of indoor as well as outdoor games. Modifications in the curriculum are done according to age group, activities, and space or weather settings.
A good educational institution serves ample opportunities for students to showcase their talent in multiple-level sports events. It encourages them to pursue the same as their career, if they want, with the right guidance and ensures that he or she gets the appropriate facilities for training and execution.
Having an organized syllabus and resources to take up and practice any sports is an important aspect of this learning. Moreover, an experienced and passionate coach can have a great influence on students’ performances. They can either flourish in the right direction with the right guidance or get demoralized by the lack of it and lose the motivation to continue playing any sport for the sake of it.
Benefits of Sports Education
- Encourages to have a healthy fitness regime – It’s a given that any sports activity requires one to be physically fit. The more one participates in such activities, the more one gets to know where one has to improvise physically and mentally.
Sports education provides the opportunity to build a hygienic routine. Students become conscious and thoughtful about their nutrition.
- Releases stress – Body movements are incredible stress bustors when done rightly. Playing can bring some relief to the otherwise hectic routine of studies and all kinds of performance pressure. In this case, sports should be looked up as a way to release some sweat, burn calories, but also produce feel-good hormones like adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin.
- Building social skills – Team sports hugely encourage these human skills and makes one focus on organizing, managing and understanding other people too who might not belong to the same socio-economic-cultural background.
Sports education can be a great way of bridging the gap between folks in a playful competitive way. Teammates usually have to help each other and work together to achieve the intended goal. Remember ‘Chak De India’? Yes! With the proper supervision of a coach or faculty, students can develop good social skills through sports and not only flourish on the playground as a team but otherwise too. Moreover, it is a good field to cultivate leadership skills.
What about individual games then? Where an athlete is sprinting alone competing all others? Or a badminton player who has to win the battle individually? In such sporting events too, a student is trained how to communicate with others and maintain his or her integrity in front of others.
Social skills necessarily does not require a person to be always talkative and initiate a conversation. It can also be defined by your body posture, gestures and behavior you display when you are not talking. Playing any kind of sport requires immense discipline and humility. It can train the student to acquire these qualities well with practice and time.
- Nurture emotional stability – Winning and losing are part of sports and a person participating in competitive activities is used to such incidents on regular basis. It becomes a habit to face failures and success, big or small, and helps in building resilience and patience with time.
Sports education has the ability to make students persistent and also motivate them to work harder. It helps in building strong self-esteem. It is important for a child to explore various sports activities and not get stuck to one. He or she will gather what interests them more and continue pursuing that to get better at it.
- Time Management – Practicing sports education helps students to learn the art of juggling both academics and games. It enables them to manage their time better and allot tasks accordingly. Time management skills are a lesson that will help students reduce their stress levels. This quality is helpful in all aspects of their life.
On concluding note, we believe in promoting sports more than ever due to the digital and all sorts of technical intervention increasing in our life, that has made us stuck to screens throughout the day. Students are hence encouraged to spend time outdoors and do some workout by participating in sport activities of their choice. Our coaches are well-trained and extremely supportive to pupils who showcase extreme abilities in such activities.
We ensure that every child, no matter if he or she is into any particular sport, gets to nurture themselves through mindful games. We project the importance of physical exercise and motivate them to have a routine of their own for same for their own holistic development. This approach will only help our students to perform better academically as well.