Youth Sports - Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators

I really enjoyed our discussion about youth sports in the beginning of this class and recently read an article called Self-Confidence and Intrinsic Motivation by Richard H. Cox. I thought that this article tied in greatly with everything we talked about in the debate. The article talks about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for kids in youth sports. Intrinsic motivators are ones that come from within the individual. Some examples of these and youth kids participating in sports are: wanting to make friends, want to get better at the sport, and wanting to improve fitness level. As for extrinsic motivators, the article states that these are motivators that come from outside of the individual- a person does not have total control. Some extrinsic examples of kids not being able to compete in youth sports are: time commitment, money, and parental attitudes. These are all things that the child has no control over. I think that these two types of motivators are important to look at when we talked about the manning theory. When it comes to children who have the positive intrinsic motivation to want to play sports it is not fair to them if they only get to play that one quarter in the game while everyone else is playing 3 or 4 quarters. This may cause the child’s intrinsic motivation to turn negative and they could not have internal reasons why they do not want to play the sport anymore. I feel that the goal of youth sports is to keep these children’s intrinsic motivators positive so that they can continue to enjoy the sport.