The Developmental Model
Overview
The developmental model combines the best parts of free play (or kid-directed play) with ideas from organized programs. It trades some of the efficiency in sports-specific skill development and the general abilities needed for top performance found in professional academies for more personal freedom. All children can participate to the level they want, so there's no worry that ten years of sacrificing other opportunities can suddenly vanish because of someone else’s decision. However, they are not limited by the size of their local community or the available knowledge of their chosen sport. It also encourages parents to spend more time helping their children rather than supporting youth sports activities that do not benefit the family.
There are six main components in the developmental model framework: Assessment, Appropriate challenge, Skill acquisition, Guided discovery, Modified games, and Performance. The table above describes each component. Although these components are sometimes distinct, it is important to understand that multiple components can be included in the same activity. The foundation of the developmental model is the appropriateness of challenge, which helps develop key psychological skills. Most importantly, it is vital to the “fun” youth sports programs that claim to provide it.
Assessment
The foundation of the developmental model is assessing the child's current state. If all you care about is the outcome of a team, you only need a rough measure of each child’s ability compared to others. However, if your goal is to help the child improve, you can't effectively implement interventions without a clear understanding of the child’s current capabilities. Continuous, accurate assessment is crucial for the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of nearly every individual and group outcome. Primary caregivers play a critical role because they have the most intimate understanding of the child.
Appropriate Challenge
The most critical aspect of the developmental model is the appropriateness of challenge, as this facilitates the acquisition of many fundamental psychological capabilities, as explained in the first section of the book. Yet the extent to which adults underestimate differences in children's capabilities of the same age often approaches an order of magnitude. The fact that recreational programs prioritize matching teams' abilities over the appropriateness of the challenge for the children in those teams is the root cause of their poor performance across many areas.
Skill acquisition
Every sport has a specific combination of skills required for play. A baseball player must learn how to catch, throw, and hit a ball. Over 150 years of trial and error, baseball players have refined the best method for performing each skill, and coaches have coalesced around the optimal way to teach these skills to their players. The developmental model helps organize the sequence of appropriate training tasks and provides feedback on the improvement needed to transition to more complex and challenging tasks. However, the biggest difference is that, with the developmental model, every child is taught how to pitch, not just the coach's kid or the older kids most likely to win the next game.
Guided discovery
Most youth games resemble a fishing trip where the captain steers the boat to a spot on the lake likely to have fish that day, chooses the best bait, sets up the poles, and trolls the water. Then, when a fish bites, he hands the “fisherman” the pole and takes a picture to record the catch. In almost every youth baseball game, adults make all the decisions because their experience greatly increases the chances of their team winning. However, most things are best learned through failure, while others are so counterintuitive that experts in the field have gone decades without discovering them. The process of guided discovery helps children learn without wasting time unnecessarily.
Modified games
At its core, baseball is primarily a battle between the pitcher and the hitter, where some players on the field can play very little, or even no role at all. Yet because each team has nine players, plus redundant bench players, the game itself is a very inefficient teacher. Game results are what are emphasized. As a result, in some leagues, teams start playing games before they even practice, and many parents only bother to take their children to games. In recreational five-on-five basketball, the best players on each team effectively play one-on-one against each other with the rest of the players on the floor acting as human cones, while the remaining players who aren’t even that good at being being cones sit on the bench. Wouldn’t the players learn more and have a far better experience if they played three three-on-three games or nine one-on-one games instead?
Performance
Games are designed to be inherently enjoyable and serve as a benchmark for assessing how the children have developed compared to other children. Playing the professional version of the game acts as a capstone activity that integrates and applies the knowledge a mature teen has gained from playing the sport. However, one completely unnecessary aspect of youth sports is having fixed teams. In many of the biggest spectacles in sport – from the World Cup, the Olympics, and All-Star games – teams are formed right before the competition begins. Furthermore, college all-star football games, or those at professional combines, are better at exposing true players' abilities rather than how well they fit within the schemes used by their college teams.