Posted on: October 4th 2019
The start of a new sporting year is a good opportunity to revisit our rationale and aims for our sporting fixtures. We play fixtures to support our pupils' physical, mental and emotional development. P.E. lessons are excellent opportunities to challenge, support and develop our pupils but there is no replacing the excitement of playing another school.
Sport, and fixtures, in particular, are excellent ways of supporting Norfolk House values and ethos. It is easy to see how fixtures help our students be more reflective, open-minded, resilient, principled, ambitious, caring and improve their communication and thinking skills.
This ties in with our sporting aims;
Enjoyment
Participation
Development
There is a huge body of evidence that shows that children and adults play sport primarily for the fun of it. We all, therefore, have a responsibility to ensure that fixtures are enjoyable.The Director of Sport at Norfolk House aims to arrange fixtures with schools that share that ethos and allow our pupils to enjoy the fixture. No one enjoys being humiliated in a match, so the school strives to ensure that our opponents are as evenly matched as possible. The staff, parents and players also have a responsibility to ensure that everyone can enjoy the game. Winning and losing are linked and we need to accept both scenarios with good grace. Fundamentally, we don’t play sport to win, we play to enjoy ourselves.
The participation element is simple - everyone has the opportunity to play. Where this gets more complicated is when we look at pupils’ readiness to compete (rugby or cross country for example), the point in the fixture list and the level of competition. Entering a pupil into a high-level event where there is an opportunity for them to be humiliated negates our major aim of enjoyment.
The third point is, perhaps, the most important one. As individuals and as a team, are we getting better? This can be hard to judge and the worst yardstick that can be used for children is the win/loss ratio. As coaches, parents and players, we should be asking players “did you enjoy the game?”, “did you play well” (as an individual and as a team) and “what did you learn, and what are you going to do better next time?”. We should not be focused on whether or not we won.
With all our Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 girls playing their first football matches of the year this week, let's focus on how much they enjoyed the game and not the result.
