Are we setting up student-athletes for future sporting success in our schools?

When you have the responsibility for overseeing the sports program for an entire school, the first priority is creating opportunities for young people of all abilities and all ages to participate in a wide variety of sport. We want to give them a chance to learn to love sport and understand the importance and benefit that it can have in their lives. I also strongly believe that from here, we need to offer further opportunities for the more enthusiastic and advanced ability student-athletes to be successful in our schools.?

I have created and continue to provide a variety of sports programs for student-athlete development that provide chances to participate, to compete in organised fixtures and tournaments, and more recently to develop as an elite athlete. However, when it comes to school sport at an elite level, I’ve always been very cautious about labelling a student-athlete as being elite or high performing. Why? Because we are talking about young people generally from ages 11 to 18 in our schools and I always ask myself can they really be high performing athletes at these ages and particularly, in these environments? To me, the answer to this question can vary depending on what you are aiming to achieve within your programs and what you define for, or preferably with your athletes, as being elite and high performing.?

I’ve been involved in educating and coaching young athletes for the best part of the last 30 years. Initially with rugby clubs in New Zealand when I was still playing and coaching junior teams, but predominantly in schools as part of my teaching roles at home and now in Singapore.

For the past 16 years, I have been based in Singapore teaching PE and coaching expatriate kids that have come from all corners of the world with a huge variety of sporting skills sets, experience, knowledge and ambition.?These students attend private international schools that are exclusively for expatriate children and when involved in their school teams will compete in fixtures with other international schools in Singapore, attend tournaments within the South-East Asia region, and also often play against local Singapore high schools.?

Any young athlete living in Singapore has access to many, many opportunities to train and compete in their chosen sports both in their schools and a large number of club options that their parents can pay for them to join. Bear in mind the families of these young athletes are paying up to SGD45,000.00 a year for their private schooling and then anywhere up to SGD700-800 to join a 10-week club season.?

With a plethora of opportunities to develop a passion for a particular sport, access to quality facilities, and (usually) a good standard of coaching, many of these students enjoy individual and team success on a regular basis. For some, they have developed reputations for their performances and a name for themselves as being high performing athletes and future stars of their sports. By setting and breaking school records, standing out in inter-club tournaments for being dominant players, training with or playing for Singapore National age group and in some cases senior teams, these players then start to set their sights on higher honours post high school because it is clear to everyone that in their school and club sporting environment, they are elite high performing athletes. As it has turned out (for the majority of these individuals), it hasn’t been and still isn’t that easy once they depart Singapore.

About seven years ago I became aware of a sad but familiar pattern that occurred with many of the student-athletes that attended international schools. I started to take note of the pattern that was emerging with these young athletes after they had graduated their last year of high school and either returned to their home country or moved to another country of their choosing to attend university. With their desire to continue to chase their sporting ambitions at the highest levels after being so successful in Singapore, reality soon gave them a quick kick in the butt. Allow me to share a story I can vividly recall from a few years back.

I can accurately recall discussions I have had with senior basketball players at an international school here in Singapore who confidently told me their dream was to play in the NBA. The NBA! The NBA in America??!!

Now, firstly I love the fact that these young athletes were dreaming big, in fact, I encourage the athletes I work with to do exactly that, set their sights high. But...the chances of actually making it to the NBA? Let's have a look... From playing for their high school team in Singapore these young men would next look to be picked by an NCAA university in the US, the odds are one in 35 players or 2.9%. From there the chances of being drafted into the NBA are less than one in 75 or 1.3%.

Unfortunately for these young men, they were hyped up as superstar basketball players within that school and the wider island basketball environments. They were continuously told that they were high-performing basketballers because of their stats throughout the season. They were also playing in a basketball competition where they were beating the weaker teams by 50 points but also getting beaten by 50 points when coming up against the ‘top schools’. Despite these big losses, the continued hype given to them by their coach, their parents and their friends (especially after winning games with big scores), blurred their sense of reality. The common cliche was that these athletes were big fish in a very small (sporting) pond.

The fact is that the competitive environment they were exposed to on a day to day basis whether it was their training sessions or their matchplay, was not at a level that would allow them to realistically compete against players in other countries ie: the USA; who had personal and social situations that were harder to deal with, who were being pushed harder, who were working harder, and who had to fight harder for their successes in life and in sport.?

The pattern was all too familiar across all sports, not just basketball. It was the same for rugby, netball, touch rugby, football (soccer), swimming.? Once they arrived at their institutions for tertiary education the majority of these young athletes failed to make an impression on the university coaches and struggled to make any of their university top teams. In fact from the very, very limited informal research I did about seven years ago amongst the international schools in Singapore, I wasn’t able to find any evidence of a single athlete across a multitude of sporting codes that had gained selection in any university team higher than the third or fourth (C and D) squads when they had been playing in an international school the previous year.?

From my experiences, I would suggest that the sports culture amongst high school athletes is not strong, or at least, the high-performance sporting culture is not strong. Certainly, there is an appreciation of sport and for certain sporting codes high participation rates, but as high performers, again, in my opinion, athletes here have a long way to go to match similar aged athletes in more sports focussed countries. Consequently, the level of performance of young student-athletes is often hindered by the lack of competitive sporting environments.? Student-athletes, therefore, gain an unrealistic perception of their abilities, their skill sets, their knowledge, and their future in the sport they love.

So, how can we fix it?

I think we need to be honest with our student-athletes right from the start. But also, and just as importantly:

- be honest with yourself as a coach.?

- be honest with the parents of your student-athletes.?

- be honest about the environment your athletes are competing in.?

Identify and discuss your current sporting environment with your athletes. There will be some things that you don’t have any control over and cannot change but you can create an environment that pushes them to develop consistently high standards for their personal habits, for their development and for their performance above what is normally acceptable. Keep raising the bar for them. Keep demanding more from them. Keep pushing them harder so they have to develop the mindset and strategies to deal with being uncomfortable, to deal with failure during training. Set them up to struggle and then talk to them about the process of being better, the sacrifices, the commitment, the discipline. Set goals with your student-athletes, lofty but realistic goals, then develop the action steps needed for the short, medium and long term achievements. Make them accountable for those actions and work with them on a day to day basis to keep them on task and to keep things real for them.

If you are not constantly changing the sporting environment you are offering your student-athletes so they are challenged and forced to adapt, then you are not giving them a chance to at least compete from the same start line once they leave your program with ambitions of being successful.

There is no denying that within our international school environments there is a wealth of sporting aspiration and talent. As teachers, as coaches, and as mentors, we have a responsibility to put the athletes first by keeping their expectations in check and then by guiding them through their dreams with realistic support and encouragement rather than build them up with false hopes only to be shattered once they leave our institutions and our care. If you are not prepared, to be honest with your athletes or put the time into creating competitive training and playing environments that will allow them to develop a new normal, then be very careful about the expectations your athletes have about themselves when they move on from your schools.? For me, far worse than the shattered sporting dreams of a young athlete is the real possibility that their love for playing sport at all, is also shattered.

DANNY TAUROA. November 2021

I am an educator, coach, and mentor for student-athletes. I have held positions as Director of Sport and Head of Physical Education for a number of years in international schools, and I have experience playing and coaching sport at an international level for New Zealand and Singapore. I have built a strong network of sporting specialists and am using my experience, knowledge and connections to provide challenging training and learning environments to support aspiring elite student-athletes.

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