I received an email from a distraught parent recently. She described a scene where the coach screamed at the girls after a loss. She was beside herself at how he treated them. He was demeaning, loud and frightening, and he had completely lost perspective on the age group he was coaching.
At one point, he barked: “You’re not here to have fun! You’re here to work!” He felt the girls weren’t trying hard enough, weren’t fully engaged and didn’t want to win as badly as he did. The worse they played, the more frustrated he got.
The girls were eight years old.
This mum was terrified that one experience would turn her daughter away from sport. She wanted her daughter to share her own lifelong passion for the game and have the same great memories. She wanted her to have fun first, and worry about “work” later.
She asked me: “When do children shift from having fun to being competitive in youth sport?”
We get asked this a lot, by parents of children aged 8 to 18. Our answer is:
They don’t. Fun and competition are not mutually exclusive. Youth sport should be both.
The myth of fun versus competition
There’s a widespread myth in sport that fun and competition can’t coexist, and that at some point we have to choose between them.
It simply isn’t true. From youth sport to the professional game, the two go hand in hand. Look at some of the world’s greatest athletes and ask yourself: are they having fun? Ronaldinho was always smiling. US football star Peyton Manning had so much fun he made adverts poking fun at the ultra-competitive world of professional sport. World Cup and Olympic champion Julie Foudy told us on our podcast that there was never a game when she didn’t end up laughing hysterically. No one doubts these athletes’ competitiveness, but they clearly had a lot of fun along the way.
Fun and competition aren’t at opposite ends of a scale. For children, they can be the same thing. Fun isn’t about getting pleasure from every moment. It’s about enjoyment.
Enjoyment versus pleasure
Have you ever run a marathon? Between miles 20 and 26, did you feel much pleasure? Probably not. You likely had cramps in muscles you didn’t know you had. But you can still enjoy running.
Sport doesn’t always have to be pleasurable. It can be demanding and challenging, and still be enjoyable.
We’ve written before about three key ingredients of youth sport: enjoyment, autonomy and intrinsic motivation. Enjoyment is the foundation. It comes from the satisfaction of improving, achieving goals and being in the moment.
Enjoyment is also linked to autonomy. The more control people have over an experience, the more they tend to enjoy it. That ownership leads to intrinsic motivation: doing something for yourself, not for anyone else, because it gives you a deep sense of personal satisfaction. Does that mean every moment will be pleasurable? Of course not.
Some people think children won’t stick at sport through a tough training session or a hard-fought loss, because it isn’t pleasurable. Others worry that making sport “fun” means children will never learn to grind out a hard game. But pleasure isn’t the goal of making sport fun. Enjoyment is. And with the right approach, tough challenges can be hugely enjoyable.
Children define fun differently from adults
Fun is the main reason children play sport. Survey after survey, and every time we ask children ourselves, fun comes out on top.
Adults often think fun for children means messing about, not listening and not taking things seriously. Children don’t see it that way. Researcher Amanda Visek asked children to define fun for her FUN MAPS research, and they came up with 81 different factors that make sport fun.
So how do they define it? Fun is working hard. It’s being challenged and competing. It’s learning a new skill, being with friends, and having a coach who cares about them, praises them and respects them. It’s learning from mistakes, working as a team, using a skill from training in a match, improving to play at the next level, playing against evenly matched opponents, getting playing time, and yes, winning.
Winning is part of the fun for children. But it isn’t the most important factor. It ranked just 48th out of 81.
Children’s definition of fun is broad. It covers almost everything we, as adults, hope sport will give them. If we made sport about fun, using their definition as a roadmap, we’d meet their needs and ours. Children would play more, play for longer and play better.
Lack of fun is the main reason children quit
Visek’s work also explores what children find “not fun”, because when sport stops being fun, children quit. From what she has shared with us on our podcast, much of what children find “not fun” comes down to the adults.
If we squeeze the fun out of youth sport, we risk losing children altogether. And if they’re not playing, we lose the chance to use sport to teach life skills and strong values, and to give them great role models.
If sport is fun, will children compete less?
Why would enjoying something more make you compete less? The secret to competing is an environment where athletes can give everything without fear. That looks like:
- An environment that allows, and even encourages, mistakes
- Positive team dynamics
- Respect and encouragement throughout the team
- Shared values
- A coach willing to give players ownership
- And, of course, enjoyment
Dig deeper into Visek’s research and you’ll find children describe fun as competing, being strong and confident, playing hard, setting and achieving goals, being challenged to improve, playing practice matches, playing against evenly matched teams, playing in tournaments, and even winning medals and trophies. That’s pretty much how we’d define competition. It’s everything some coaches fear is lost when we focus on fun, yet children tell us these things are fun.
Squeezing the fun out of sport won’t make children compete more. It will make them compete less.
Six ways to make sport fun and competitive
- Play lots of games in training. If you want players to compete at match intensity, make training look like a match. Aim for at least 60–70% of training to be game-based. Add defenders or constraints and coach through the game, and players will compete.
- Focus on values like fearlessness and accountability. If players aren’t afraid of mistakes, and are held accountable for their effort and focus, they’ll compete harder. The best professional coaches work this way, and you should too.
- Stop shouting at players for technical errors. Nothing stops a player competing faster than being shouted at for every mistake. If they give 100% focus and effort and still get it wrong, that’s called learning.
- Play for something. Let the winners in training earn something, such as the losers collecting the cones, a quick fitness challenge, or the winners choosing a rule for the next game. You could even let the players decide. Give them something to win, and they’ll compete.
- Stick to time. Players can’t give everything if they don’t know when an activity or session will end. Short, intense activities work better than long, drawn-out ones.
- Give them ownership. Let players choose a game, decide the session’s focus or lead the half-time team talk. When children feel ownership, their enjoyment grows, and so does their competitive fire, because they want to prove their ideas right.
Sport is play
Can sport be fun and competitive? Absolutely. In fact, it should be. If sport isn’t fun, children quit, and if they quit, we lose the chance to have a positive impact on their lives for decades to come. That should worry us more than anything.
As coaches, our greatest fear shouldn’t be losing a game we could have won. It should be losing a child we had the chance to help transform.
Make your training sessions and matches a lot of fun. Add competitive games. Find the right level of competition. Let them compete. And when the game is over, move on.
Sport isn’t work. It’s play. It’s fun, and it’s competitive, but it’s play. Let children play, and they will compete.
