Character-building in High-Performance Youth Sports

It is claimed that athletic youth programs often fail their responsibility to be engaged in the personal development of their young athletes as many coaches dismiss this as an intangible factor which can¿t be measured, despite the associated connection between strength of character and performance outcomes. The purpose of this book is to investigate what profound character traits are needed in high performance soccer and how those characteristics can be expressed and cultivated. For this purpose, theories of achievement, motivation, and coaching are discussed and their application in sports is investigated. In this intervention players of the age group U12-U13 took part and were distributed into one of three groups (IG, CG1, CG2). It could be demonstrated that the intervention increased player¿s incremental beliefs about their intelligence as well as their strength of character. Analysing player¿s experiences and lessons from the intervention, a considerable connection to the core values of the initial conceptualisation can be observed. This implies, that the project has been successful in conveying and transporting those core values to the players.