This shall be the fourth post and shall be the last post I will post today. I will talk about the several brawls that happened during the sports competition in Singapore and the ways to curb this problem.
I was shocked and appalled when I got to know of the brawl between ACS (I) and St Andrew school. I cannot imagine this happened to such prominent schools in Singapore as they are thought to be both intelligent and morally stable.
Because of the immense pressure faced by the school and parents to win the match, players nowadays are fixated on medals and only have the “must-win” mentality in their minds. They do not care about the sportsmanship values that they should possess during their competitions. They think that by winning these matches, their school and parents will feel proud for them and favour them more. However, they are totally wrong as I feel that win or lose does not matter in the game, instead the important part is where players get to learn from setbacks, sportsmanship values and know more friends. There are several violent incidents such as the Judo Finals involving St Joseph Institution which caused a Judoka to be sent to the hospital ICU. From here, we can infer that most of the Singapore players lack sportsmanship values as they cannot respect themselves.
I do understand that teacher-coaches do not play a great part in teaching their teams hard skills because of their busy curriculum schedule. Thus, the external coach does most of the teaching and he may not concentrate on teaching them the correct sports values that the players must possess on the arena. The external coaches only care about the teams winning the matches because when the teams win, it means higher salaries for them. But so what if the sports team get the medals, do they end up with the right set of values eventually? No, they do not.
I feel that teacher-coaches are in the best position to inculcate values of sportsmanship to their players, rather than external coaches who only focus on the teams’ hard skills. To achieve this, rules and regulations are not the best way because this will prevent the players from failing on their own and the true objectives for learning these sports values. Of course, some rules must be implemented, such as no fighting on the arena so that accidents can be prevented. Implementing rules like caning the players if they act violently are compulsory during the competitions. The best way to impart real sports values to them is by teaching these players, just like how classroom teaching is done in schools. We should explain to them the importance of sportsman ship so that they can practice it on the arena.
Another case study will be the players in India. Most of the Indian players will touch the arena ground with their hands before they start competing so as to show respect and give the assurance that they will practice sportsmanship during the match. I am not saying that Singapore players have to do the same thing as the Indians, but at least they should show respect to themselves and also to their opponents. By respecting the opponents, violent incidents and strained relationships will not occur. Also, our national youth soccer team is made up of players from different schools, and this shows that players from different schools can still be friends after their match, and not enemies like the ACSI and St Andrew players.
Being the teacher-coaches for school players, they not only have to teach them the hard skills used on the arena, we also have to teach them moral values that can last them their lives. As said by a retired coach in a news report, coaching players is a full-time job as we have to teach the players both physically and mentally.
In conclusion, sportsmanship is essential for the game to be carried out smoothly. If the Youth Olympic Games participants do not posses these values, do you still think the event will run smoothly? Hence, to train our players for international competitions, we need to impart the hard and soft skills to them. For this, teacher-coaches play the most important part.
No comments:
Post a Comment