Education through organised youth sport: The results of four Dutch studies

The main goal of this series of four studies was to examine the contribution of organised youth sport to adolescents’ antisocial and prosocial behaviour, and to gain insight into educationally relevant factors that were hypothesized to explain differences in antisocial and prosocial behaviour among athletes that could be attributed to characteristics of the sporting environment were studied in three cross-sectional studies, using multilevel regression analyses, followed by an intervention study. A total of N = 1030 male and female athletes, aged 9 tot 19 years, who were members of 54 competitive swimming, football, basketball, athletics and taekwondo clubs, participated in four consecutive empirical studies.
Summarising the results of the four studies, we concluded that organised youth sport substantially contributed to the behaviour of the young athletes. Moral reasoning, moral atmosphere and fair play attitude were identified as factors having a positive educational value for young athletes, but the coach was found to exert the greatest socialising influence. The final conclusion is that efforts to enhance the educational quality of organised youth sport should focus on equipping coaches with the skills to develop and to maintain good relationships with their young athletes.