Sharing vs Competition - My thoughts

The thing I like most about this unit is that is not the same as other coaching units I've done in the past. The almost unorthodox way the unit presents content challenges my ideas and has me questioning my coaching pedagogy each week.

Ive always assumed the more competitive a game, a sport or a league the better the quality and enjoyment of that sport would be. When I play a sport and it gets competitive the game gets exciting; everyone plays their hardest and the results of the game are more important. Competitive spirit also effects sport in a similar way when I'm just watching. When I know two opposing teams really want to beat the other team, or even hate the other team, its always an exciting game to watch.

Some of the ideas in the lectures and practicals this week has challenged my ideas on competition. We need each other to progress, learn and evolve as humans and as athletes (social learning theory). Sports team could all be better if they shared information and helped each other to get better but the intense desire of competition to win stops this sharing of information for fear of making opponents betters. The problems is though if we didn't have any competitive spirit there wouldn't be a want to win and the quality of the game would also decrease.

I found in the pracs on Friday that once we all helped each other with skills we all became better and the fairness of the game became greater too but the competition of the game didn't decrease, in fact i believe it increased. Just like with my example above about watching an exciting game, if one team is obviously less skillful the game isn't competitive or exciting at all.  I think the key is for everyone to share and help each other become better, which will lead to a fairer, better quality of game which in turn will actually make the game more competitive and exciting.