The notion of sport for development refers to the use of sport, or any form of physical activity, to provide children and adults with the opportunity to achieve their full potential through programs that promote not only their subjective-wellbeing [1], but also contributes more positively, towards their personal and social development [2]. In this sense, participation in sports is a potentially important arena for the developmental outcome of youths [3]. In recent years, there has been increasing attention and commitment to organized sports for youth well-being and development. The underlying premise guiding these interest and commitment is that youth’s participation in sports affords multiple psychological and social benefits [4].
The growing approach to youth research and practice, which is called positive youth development (PYD) Damon [5] has been associated with indicators commonly known as the 5Cs including, competence, confidence, connection, character and caring [6]. Research indicated that the sport education environment, characterizing sport-based positive youth development [7], is a salient context for developing the 5Cs [8, 9].
Moreover, sports participation has been linked with a range of educational and developmental benefits such as higher academic performance in high school, greater likelihood of attending college, and greater autonomy and satisfaction with job experience [10]. Also, many psychosocial health benefits in youth are attributed to sports participation [11].
Enduring and healthy participation in any sport is more likely when the participant is optimally functioning and experiencing subjective well-being [12]. Psychological needs satisfaction (PNS) or life satisfaction is the cognitive component of subjective well-being and plays an important role in developmental outcome [13]. Study findings show that the existence of support systems, engagement in optimally challenging activities, the happenstance of positive life events, and high-quality interactions with significant others contribute to the development of PNS [14]. Through a well-designed sports education programs, young athletes experiences more positive than negative behaviors [11], and uses own strengths to fulfill pursuits and contribute to society [15]. As a result, he/she leads a healthy, satisfying, and productive life as a youth, and later as an adult [16].
PNS is one of the essential ingredients of young athlete’s participation and commitment in sports education and sports performance. The PNS theory is a theory of motivation, as Deci and Ryan [17] describe the ‘‘energy, direction, persistence… aspects of activation and intention’’ that addresses the why of human behavior. Hence, motivation is vital for learning and development in sports. Numerous studies have confirmed that intrinsic or more internalized forms of motivation are associated with increased interest, engagement, effort, learning, and satisfaction in life [18]. Deci and Ryan [19] identified three basic needs conducive to the development of highly internalized motivation. These are autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Autonomy is an internal perceived locus of causality, which has the ability to posit that choice and autonomy enhance intrinsic motivation [20]. Competence is conceptualized as a sense of self-efficacy, and it is an important tool in any motivating scenario because people adopt activities that make them feel their actions affect outcomes. Relatedness is described as ‘‘the need to feel belongingness and connectedness with others’’ [21]. The desire for interpersonal attachments is a fundamental human motivation, which is inherently intrinsic in nature [22]. Yet, research findings support that involvement in sports associated with higher developmental outcomes [23], and satisfaction depends upon a variety of programmatic and contextual factors [8], and on school and family support systems [9].
Youth athlete behaviors such as psychological readiness, attendance to the regular program, and time spent for personal training are critical factors for success during the academy years. The term “psychological readiness” describes a set of behaviors and thoughts that youth athletes engage in prior to a scheduled performance of a specific sport skill or competition. Psychological readiness is effective as it helps young athletes to focus on task-relevant information and block out distractions, thus increasing young athletes’ concentration and confidence [6]. Also, the level of attendance to a regular scheduled sports program indicates the level of interest the young athlete has for that program. Research has indicated that the time youth spend in their sports participation, play a role in how sports participation is linked to youth development [24]. Most often, youth coaches provide valuable feedbacks on the quality of young athletes performance only during ongoing practice [25]. Hence, regularly attending a scheduled performance session is very important.
Young athletes with a “hard work ethic” commonly possess a vision of what it takes to succeed and spend extra time for their own sports training [26]. Thus, they consistently invest high levels of effort into training over a prolonged time [16]; sacrifice their social lives; and accept challenges without giving up or dropping out of the sport they want to excel in [27].
Rationale
The term developmental outcome has captured the general sense of desirable consequences in youth as a result of structured programs [16]. Over the last decade or so, there has been increasing interest in how organized youth sports can foster positive developmental outcome [23]. In view of this, more attention on developmental outcome and its correlates in sports academies seems justified. Sport may be associated with improved psychosocial health above and beyond improvements attributable to participation. Specifically, team sport is associated with improved health outcomes compared to individual sports [15]. Furthermore, athletes playing individual sports had higher scores on "planning" and "effort" than team sport athletes, highlighting the importance of differences between types of sport [28, p. 901].
PNS-based research has shown that satisfying youths’ psychological needs may promote positive developmental outcomes [29]. Participation in organized sport has been linked with a range of educational and developmental benefits [10, 30]. For example, a study found that satisfaction of young swimmers’ needs for competence was positively related to their developmental experiences [31]. However, there is minimal research investigating the benefits of elite young athletes’ participation in organized sports in the sports academies setting.
In the present study, we focused on three developmental outcomes that may be significant for youth athletes better psychosocial functioning and happiness. First, we considered gains in personal and social development, as well as, gains in higher-order cognitive skills because these are key facets of affective outcomes for youth to lead a healthy, satisfying, and productive life as a youth, and later as an adult [15, 16]. Second, as overall satisfaction is integral to successful psychosocial functioning and sports performance [23], we examined the extent to which young athletes are satisfied with the developmental experiences they have had in the sports academies. Moreover, given that feeling of PNS has been highlighted as a predictor of developmental outcome in earlier studies of adolescents and youths [29, 32], we focused on the measurement of PNS as well as the extent of its relationships with developmental outcome. As variations in sport type (team vs. individual sports) [15], as well as gender impact youth sports experiences [33], we also studied PNS and its relations with developmental outcome from these perspectives.
In many areas of sport, young people differ from one another in their accomplishments and in the affluence with which they achieve performance excellence. Empirical evidence supports varying degrees of innate talent among individuals [34]. Also, the individual difference in athletic performance may result from variations in the mechanism and processes leading to performance excellence. As Howe, Davidson [35] argues ‘differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of performance excellence in many areas of expertise, ranging from music, dance, art, and literature to sports, and others’ (p. 399). In line with the discussion, young athletes’ sports excellence requires both talent and a system to establish a conducive environment to maximize young athletes’ development to the elite level [36].
Most of the literature addressing talent identification and development in elite young athletes has focused on physical and physiological factors and how these relate to age and maturation [37,38,39,40,41]. This focus confines talent development as an exclusive function of physical and physiological factors, leaving aside the multifaceted and dynamic nature of sports talent and the potential contributions of other factors. Regardless of this, athlete developmental pathways are supported and restricted by the contextual-social environment and psychological characteristics. As Bronfenbrenner and Ceci [42] expressed, 'if proximal processes [such as individual-environment interactions] are the engines of development, it is the characteristics of (the) person and context that provide the needed fuel' (p. 584). This implies that factors related to elite athletes’ talent development should be analysed from multiple perspectives.
There remains a consensus that traditional cross-sectional talent identification models are likely to exclude many, particularly those late maturing, ‘promising’ children from development programs. Guth and Roth [43] propose a conceptual framework that acknowledges the mutual influences of genetic and environmental factors on sports talent. According to this framework, sport talent identification and development should be dynamic and interconnected, considering the contributions of genetics and environment and the potential to develop. However, the relative importance of genetic versus environment factors on athletic success likely varies widely between sports as every sport has unique physical requirements and these requirements maybe dramatically peculiar for one sport than others [44]. Hence, there is a need for optimizing genetically driven physical and mental traits with the ideal environment for the specific sport [45].
In line with this, a researcher clarifies dynamical systems theory as a multidisciplinary theoretical rationale for capturing how multiple interacting constraints can shape the development of sporting talent among elite young athletes [46]. According to this theory, young athletes’ talent development programs should emphasize the individual nature of talent development pathways to sporting excellence and identify the range of interacting factors that impinges on the sporting potential of individual athletes. This could mean that elite athletic performance is the cumulative result of ‘a favourable genetic profile of an athlete, combined with an optimal training environment’ [43, p. 1].
Regardless of this, studies on the talent identification and development pathway of young athletes have tended to be, in the words of Phillips, Davids [46], ‘mono-disciplinary, typically adopting genocentric or environmentalist positions’ (p. 271). Accordingly, talent development programs emphasize the notion of common optimal performance models, capitalizing on the importance of current performance on anthropometric and physical characteristics tests referenced to group norms [47]. This is against the contemporary perspective that emphasizes the complex nature of sports talent [48] and the range of interacting factors influencing the sporting potential of individual athletes [37].
Moreover, little attention has been paid in the literature to the other factors such as contextual and psychological factors, the limited studies identified that these factors together significantly influence the talent development of elite young athletes [49, 50]. For example, considering the multidimensionality of sports talent, Tribolet, Bennett [51] tested a multidimensional talent selection approach. The results show significant age-related differences in Australian Football players' anthropometry, fitness, and coach skill ratings. Also, Murr, Feichtinger [52] conducted a systematic review and found results supporting the predictive validity of some psychological variables for young soccer players. As the authors reported, those results complement Murr, Raabe [53] previous review of the predictive value of physical and physiological characteristics.
In line with the discussion, in this study, we focused on the capacity of elite young athletes and the psychological and contextual factors that underpin this process [54]. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the contextual factors associated with the PNS and the predictability of the PNS components, together with the contextual factors, on the developmental outcomes of elite young athletes in the Ethiopian sports academies, and further discover differences in the perception of PNS from a comparative perspective. More specifically, the study addresses the following three research questions:
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1.
Do young athletes differ in the levels of PNS attained depending on the kind of sport types enrolled in the Ethiopian sports academy context?
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2.
Do contextual factors predict PNS among young athletes in the Ethiopian sports academies?
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3.
Do higher levels of PNS predict higher levels of developmental outcomes after accounting for the difference in the contextual factors among young athletes in Ethiopian sport academy?