The Role of Coaches in Play-Based Learning During Childhood Sport

This chapter provides an overview of the literature regarding the contribution of children’s play to athlete development. It specifically focuses on the processes involved in play behaviors, culminating in a proposed conceptualization and application of different types of play in children’s sport activities available to coaches. For this chapter, children are defined as individuals aged 12 years and younger, and the terms youth and children will be used interchangeably to describe this population. We argue that various forms of play represent a valuable but neglected aspect of childhood activity in sports, with wide-reaching physical, psychosocial, and developmental implications for learning and athlete development. We examine the advantages of play-based learning as a coaching approach, ranging from purely child-directed activities to adult-guided and scaffolded play activities. To derive the potential benefits of various types of play, we introduce the play pendulum as a continuum of play activities that vary from child-directed to coach-directed. We propose the play mixer as a practical method to help youth sport coaches incorporate different play activities into their practice. Finally, we apply the principles of Transformational Coaching as an ideal framework for interacting with athletes and delivering play-based learning activities. We contend that, rather than competing with more structured sport activities such as deliberate practice, play uniquely contributes to children’s development in sport due to its flexible content and delivery method.