As often happens at the beginning of each school year, there is much discussion about the role of teachers, parents, new rules regarding smartphone use, and everything that doesn’t work well in our Italian school system. I’ve already written several blog posts on this topic.
When it comes to educating young people, we are well aware of how much sport can serve as a tool for growth and development if used in the best way. The question remains: who is responsible for training coaches and instructors? Graduates in sports science leave university with a significant body of psychological knowledge, but they haven’t developed the ability to apply it during their studies. The conflicts between CONI and Sport Salute have drastically reduced training opportunities and the number of courses. The remaining training activities are carried out by individual federations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, hampered by numerous constraints that a National School of Sport used to overcome in terms of both the quality and quantity of training proposals, as well as the experience and expertise of the instructors. Additionally, it has been several years since the only Italian journal of sports science was last published, apparently due to these institutional issues.
It is also unthinkable that sports like soccer, volleyball, athletics, and swimming—just to name a few—have different training programs when the basic principles of an educational path aimed at young people are essentially similar, regardless of the specific sport involved.
It is interesting to note that in the most widely practiced sports, it is often the sports clubs themselves, which have an in-house psychologist, that provide on-field training support to their instructors and offer assistance to families and young athletes. This is common in tennis and youth soccer, as their respective federations formally require the inclusion of a psychologist within each club. In the tennis and padel federation, these psychologists must have qualified through a first-level mental coach course, open only to psychologists. In the soccer federation, the psychologist must have completed a master’s degree in sports psychology.
As is often the case in Italy, institutional shortcomings are directly overcome at the grassroots level by those who work directly with young people.
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