CWA Blog Archive-Youth Development & COVID-19 Tips To Adapt Your Youth Programming

Youth Development & COVID-19 Tips To Adapt Your Youth Programming

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This article applies the Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model to help coaches adapt youth programming for participants affected by COVID-19 disruptions. It reprises LTAD's goal, ensuring the quality of sport and physical activity and keeping participants engaged in sport and recreation for life, and argues that as programs moved in and out of lockdowns and restrictions, coaches must consider how the COVID experience may have impacted participants, particularly regarding their growth and development. The article's key insight concerns social and developmental regression. Many children hadn't had the opportunity to socialize with friends, and where a typical 9-year-old would normally place great importance on friendships, months of virtual learning might leave the child behaving more like an 8-year-old, preferring to work in pairs rather than a larger group. This illustrates the LTAD premise: ensuring what you offer, and how you offer it, is appropriate for the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development stage of the participant. That developmental matching has real safety implications, the article notes you wouldn't let a 6-year-old belay because you couldn't be certain their attention span would be adequate to complete the task safely. The throughline is that the pandemic may have altered children's developmental progression, especially socially, and coaches applying the LTAD model must account for these shifts to keep programming appropriate and effective.

Asset Caption

This piece applies the LTAD model to pandemic-adapted youth programming, noting COVID may have set back children's social development, a 9-year-old might behave more like an 8-year-old, preferring pairs to groups. It urges coaches to match activities to participants' actual developmental stage, protecting both engagement and safety, like age-appropriate belay readiness.