Movement, Mastery and Magic: Discovering the Fun in Sport

Why we play sports? Why does every school in the country compel pupils to play games?

Any discussion can't get very far before concluding that it's fun. Or it can be fun. Or it should be fun. Or it must be fun. That's the purpose of sport. Without enjoyment as the outcome, what's the point of it all?

All this begs the question, what is fun? What has to happen for humans to experience enjoyment through physical activity? Lots of things...

One of the priorities for any custodian of sport in a school is the difficult issue of quality control. With anywhere between half a dozen and a hundred coaches delivering sessions within a programme, ensuring that they are all of a minimum standard is certainly a challenge.

Is it therefore possible for a school to adopt a consistency of approach that goes across all sports, all age groups, both sexes and all ability levels? Would there be any value in this, or would it simply emasculate the creative capacity of individual coaches, and apply a restrictive influence...

Most teachers and coaches faced with the question of whether children best learn games by listening or doing, would have little difficulty in opting for the latter. Faced with this fairly unanimous conclusion, it would not be unreasonable to expect to find school games coaching dominated by high levels of pupil activity, and relatively rare bouts of teacher interruption. And to find Directors of Sport obsessed with driving up coaching standards, and seeking ever higher levels of pupil activity within sessions. At the very least, the measurement of activity levels, and contrast of talk levels, would seem fundamental to the...