Sports during Pandemic: “luxury” or “need”?

The COVID-19 pandemic period is accompanied by a general differentiation of daily life in each area of ​​human activity, to the point where we now refer to a “disruption of normality”. The effects concern the suspension of activities or their conditional start. In this environment, sport seems to seek its role, from complete cessation or even abstention to its full development.
Especially for children’s sports, the trends that are developing vary, expressing opposing views regarding its operation.
By putting sport “at the service of children”, it is a field that assists in education for prevention, as well as the school and every field of children’s activity. There is a view that sees sports as a means of stimulating health and shielding the body, as a means of preventing the cultivation of fear in children, as a means that “declares” to children the maintenance of normality and therefore the stability and “safety” of the environment.
The danger does not cease to exist, however, with the period we are going through having no expiration date, it seems that the solution is not to avoid sports. Training in the observance of hygiene rules, from time to time and places of health protocols, the development of skills of adaptation and cultivation of data for dealing with difficult situations, is what the period “passes” requires, so that the sports activity does not stop but and to “win” children in matters of education and prevention.
Otherwise, the long-term and non-expiring abstinence will lead the athletes to lose motivation, to get used to a different reality by staying at home for several hours, dealing with screens, adopting sedentary living patterns. At the end of the season it will not be at all easy to “convince” the children to return to the activity ……
The method and seriousness in dealing with the pandemic will need to “take into account” the future of the children, whether it is school or sports, or any other activity as everyone wants to continue to develop or in through or after the pandemic….
Yiannis Zarotis
Psychologist-Sports Psychologist