Focus on fun: At Young Hoopers we love basketball and aim to provide a positive, happy and safe environment for your child to develop the same enjoyment from the sport.
Basketball as teacher: Basketball and sport in general provide opportunities to learn various important life skills. With Young Hoopers classes being delivered in a relaxing setting outside a classroom, it allows children build their skills in a fun, team-based environment without the pressures many children face at school.
We introduce our players in situations where they need to work together as groups, to learn to communicate with one another, to overcome challenges and develop new skills. Through these activities our participants will learn and build teamwork, effective communication, listening skills, leadership, sportsmanship, confidence and resilience, qualities that intertwine with our daily lives.
Building Confidence, Self-esteem and Positive Body Image: We aim to empower children in our program through facing and outcoming challenges in a supportive sporting atmosphere. Our activities are designed to engage with and simultaneously challenge participants and through these activities our players build confidence and self-esteem We want our players to grow comfortable facing challenges both physically and mentally -whether it be making a difficult type of shot, mastering a dribbling activity, learning how to defend another player or running that last lap. By learning to overcome these challenges our players develop their confidence and self-esteem.
Secondly, we want our participants to develop both a positive body image and positive association with physical fitness based on their ability to master the physical tasks and skills associated with basketball. Evidence shows that healthy and active children are much more likely to become healthy active adults, we want our players to have a positive start to their sporting journey.
The Importance of Mistakes: Mistakes are one of life’s great teachers, in the words of Michael Jordan – “to learn to succeed, you must first learn to fail”. We teach our players not to be discouraged by mistakes and that making mistakes is a key part of the learning process. A player or person that is afraid to make mistakes will only do things they are comfortable with and, thereby, limit themselves.
Our coaches teach players to challenge themselves and make the mistakes and, in making these mistakes, give themselves the chance to improve. We want players not to say ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘this is too hard’ but instead look at activities as a challenge and the mistakes they make as opportunities to grow.
Inter-acting with their Peers, Building Friendships and Sportsmanship:
One of the great aspects of basketball is its team-based nature, which helps players improve interpersonal skills, learn cooperation and leadership and make long-term friends. At Young Hoopers we teach the importance of working together to achieve a shared goal, learning to communicate in a constructive manner and being able to positively interact with your peers in team and competitive settings.
Young Hoopers uses a range of teamwork and communication-based activities from simple relay races all the way to full 5v5 basketball games to encourage players to engage with each other. We want our players to be able to work together and compete against each other in a positive and sportsmanlike manner – be that learning to lose without becoming too emotional for our younger players or learning to able to communicate and instruct teammates during games without negativity for our older players.
