Youth leadership in sport

Website design By BotEap.comIt has been said that leadership is the most studied and least understood topic in all of the social sciences. Leadership is the process of providing direction, energizing others, and gaining their willing commitment to the leader’s vision. A leader creates a vision and goals and influences others to share that vision and work toward the goals. Therefore, leaders are concerned with bridging change and motivating others to support that vision of change. As scholars state, “management is about coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with change.”

Website design By BotEap.comLeaders can be found at all levels of a sports organization, but not all of them immediately stand out from the crowd. Different situations, different cultures, different organizations, at different times in your life, call for different characteristics and require different skills in a leader. A young man can be great at leading his volleyball team, but lousy at leading in another setting. This happens all the time. Some great young sports leaders don’t lead their school projects or other types of clubs they may be in at the same time, not only because they choose not to, but also because they don’t know how. Those other environments have different sets of norms, different authority structures, and different sets of adaptive challenges that the child may not be familiar with.

Website design By BotEap.comOn the other hand, power is the ability to influence the behavior of others. Regardless of their age, leaders wield power, and effective leaders know how to use it wisely. The types of power used by a young leader reveal much about why others follow that child. One of the most useful frameworks for understanding the power of leaders was developed by John French and Bertram Raven. They identified five types of power: legitimate, rewarding, coercive, referent, and expert power.

Website design By BotEap.comBut in addition to the different forms of power that leaders can use, there are several different characteristics that describe how effective young leaders influence others. These features have been classified into four categories of models: trait, behavioral, contingency, and transformational. There is no single or simple answer to which leadership style works best. Fifty years ago, leadership trait models were popular. Gradually, as evidence accumulated, trait models were replaced, first by behavioral models and later by contingency models. Today, the transformational model has many followers, reflecting the efforts of many leaders to transform outdated forms of organizations into more competitive ones. Trait models are based on the assumption that certain physical, social, and personal characteristics are inherent in leaders. According to this view, the presence or absence of these characteristics distinguishes leaders from nonleaders. Some of the key traits are physical origin, social and personality traits. There is some common sense behind the notion that effective leaders, young or old, have certain characteristics. However, research has not shown that traits consistently separate potential leaders from non-leaders. For example, the physical characteristics of a young baseball athlete do not necessarily correlate with his ability to achieve successful leadership later in life; they relate only to perceived leadership ability.

Website design By BotEap.comIn short, as the current world pace quickens, leadership styles applied over the past century, or even twenty years ago, differ substantially from those that need to be applied today or in 2020. To illustrate this, consider the young members of a school. baseball team that, if they don’t want to or can’t perform, the school’s coach will definitely have to follow the autocratic leadership style. However, as long as the trainer applies proper motivation and training techniques, young subordinates gradually become willing and able. Therefore, the situation is changing. This denotes that leadership must also evolve from the autocratic to the democratic style. In short, the leadership style must “adjust” to the evolution of the pending situation. As the example illustrates, sports organizations, especially those involving children, must face the future and learn from past practices by continually adapting to new and evolving instructional programs.