When it comes to parenting, raising a healthy child is a top priority therefore parents often choose physical activities to ensure their child is moving towards the right direction.
Football for most people is considered a physical activity which makes kids exercise, burn calories and stay active. However, football can be the wisest guide for any kid with any social background. Young individuals can learn more about life while spending time at a football club than the time they spend at school.
Here are the top five life lessons which kids can learn from playing football.
1. Importance of teamwork:
No matter how skilful a player is, he/she can not win a football match on his/ her own. Football is a team game with lots of members, and each member must play it’s role well for the team to succeed. This is similar to a business unit with different divisions; all members must function properly to get results.
2. There’s no such thing as “Fair” in life
” But coach it’s not fair! The referee is on their side!”.
As a coach, we regularly hear kids complain about the fairness of the game. They are right as most of the time they deal with unfair situations. A professional football coach can only educate his/her players on how to respond to these unfair moments by focusing on their task.
3. Managing pressure:
The more a player plays, the more people expect from him/her. Expectations go from one level to another. Parents, coaches & teammates are always demanding the right action from the player. To progress the player must manage everyone around him/her regardless of his/her age.
4. Success only comes with hard work:
Young footballers want to show off with their skills these days. The only way to attain such level of skill is to dedicate hundreds of hours of practice! Same applies to any other skill in life such as learning a language or mastering to play the piano. If a young individual can commit to thousands of hours of football training at a young age, then he/she can show the same commitment to anything else in life.
5. Learning from failure & listening to feedback
Football is a game of trial and error. Players continually make decisions which leads to mistakes or success. To become better, a player must reduce the errors and increase the right choices.
There are two ways to do this: first is for the player to realise his/her mistake, this takes plenty of time & has high costs. The other way is to pay attention to the feedback from the coach.
At the first glance football might look like just any sport, but in reality, it can be the best teacher any kid can ever have. Football will act as a person’s life guide for decades.
Its teachings go beyond the football pitch and stay with the player forever.
