Positive Youth Sports Development ( YSD) is a policy perspective that emphasizes providing services and opportunities to support all young sports people in developing a sense of a competence, usefulness, belonging and empowerment.
YSD strategies focus on giving young people the chance to form relationships with caring adults, build (top)sport skills, exercise leadership, and help their communities.
YSD is both a philosophy and an approach to policies and programs that serve young sports people. The underlying philosophy of youth sport development is holistic, preventative and positive, focusing on the development of assets and competencies in all young sports people.
The following are essential features of effective learning and sports environments and settings that facilitate positive youth sports development for young people inside and outside of school. These features of positive developmental settings and characteristics of successful positive youth sports development staff can be used for training staff, designing programs, and developing standards and assessment tools:
Physical and Psychological lifestyle – Lifestyle and health-promoting facilities; practice that increases safe peer group interaction and decreases unsafe or confrontational peer interactions.
Appropriate Structure – Limit setting, clear and consistent rules and expectations, firm enough control, continuity and predictability, clear boundaries, and age-appropriate monitoring.
Supportive Relationships – Warmth, closeness, connectedness, good communication, results, support, guidance, personal (sports) development, responsiveness.
Opportunities to Belong – Opportunities for meaningful inclusion, social inclusion, social engagement and integration; opportunities for socio-cultural identity formation; support for sporting competence.
Positive Social Norms – Rules of behavior, expectations, injunctions, ways of doing things, values and morals, obligations for sporting results
Support for Efficacy and Mattering – Youth-based, empowerment practices that support autonomy, making a real difference in one’s community, and being taken seriously. Practice that includes enabling, responsibility granting, meaningful sporting challenge. Practices that focus on improvement rather than on relative current.
Opportunities for Skill Building – Opportunities to learn physical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, social and sporting skills; exposure to intentional learning experiences; communication skills, and good habits of mind; preparation for adult employment; opportunities to develop social and cultural capital.