From the beginning of Term 4, multi-sport has been introduced as a weekly session within the football program for both primary and high college students. This session enables students to experience different mainstream sports as well as hybrid sports within their training groups and alongside the football program. Multi-sport has run for six weeks and across the board students and coaches alike have noticed the positive effect these sessions are having within training groups.
Within football, individuals assume distinctive physical movements in order to complete football related tasks. These actions are mastered within the football program through skill acquisition sessions for primary and game training sessions for high college students. There is however a limitation of some key movements that aren’t frequently called for within football.
A big factor for the coaching staff introducing multi-sport is to create situations where these ‘forgotten’ movements are more frequently triggered. We believe that from mastery of other physical actions, students will become more competent in some of the quirkier actions that may arise within a football match. Along with this, we believe that it will reduce the number of injuries sustained among students as they will be more ‘physically literate’. For example, if a player is involved in a strong challenge, instead of taking the force of landing on their shoulder – they may be geared with the competence to land in a rolling motion, thus reducing the impact on their body.
Obviously, as this is a football college there is a lot of football on offer for students. For example, high college groups experience three game training sessions per week on top of football completed outside of college. For young people and older people alike – in order to complete a great amount of a certain thing each week and to be successful doing so, we need to break up our week a little bit. This reduces problems such as stress and anxiety, which can make us less successful at what we do along with reducing the amount of enjoyment and fulfilment we gain from completing a task. Within sport, this is often labelled as ‘burning out’ and in extreme circumstances can lead to players dreading the thing that they have always loved to do – play football! Our week has now been broken up with the implementation of multi-sport. As coaching staff, we have seen more enjoyment than previously in our football sessions due to our students being happy and keeping mentally fit.
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