Two weeks ago, we wrote an article about what having fun meant at Shaws Little League. We briefly discussed the factors that make our children’s sports programme fun – participation, improvement, opportunity, not keeping score, effort, engagement, thinking and keeping it real. This week is about how we go about improving your children and it’s not just about sports.
Constant improvements, no matter how small, can win the race. It’s not about getting it perfect the first time, it’s about getting yourself up after a bad day, learning from failure and going back to try again – and maybe this time you’ll see just a little itty-bitty improvement. It’s these little improvements, time after time, that build into big improvements; the big improvements that help to develop your children’s confidence and belief in themselves.
One of our favourite quotes is by sports’ most beloved figures, Vince Lombardi: “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” That’s exactly what New Zealand did in the America’s Cup Yachting Race, by chasing perfection they achieved excellence and more recently Roger Federer at Wimbledon. This concept is exactly how we treat all of our little sports champions at Shaws Little League.
It’s with this approach that we start our days here at Shaws Little League. Each child has their own natural talents, gifts and abilities. Our interest lies in helping your children improve 1% all the time.
You have all seen your children hit lots of balls off the baseball tee. Whilst it is lots of fun and very tiring hitting so many balls, each of those fun children’s sports moments is an opportunity for the children to improve their hitting skill and coordination. It also provides an opportunity for our coaches to observe your child and offer tangible, relevant and small doses of sports advice that will help your child develop further.
Being able to hit the ball off the tee is not the end goal, we want all of the children to be able to step up to the plate, face our coaches’ fastest pitching arms (we do practice) and imagine what it would be like as an MLB player.
Why do we focus on 1%? Because it is easier for the children to understand. Our sports programme is not about showing you all how knowledgeable and talented our coaches are, but it is about doing appropriate things that will help your children improve. A series of 1% improvements over a period of time makes for quite a high amount of improvement overall.
Imagine if as parents, employers, employees, athletes, coaches we improved 1% each week for a year like our children do in our sports programmes – how good we would be at our chosen sport, profession or even parenting? And how happy and fun would it be to achieve that level of improvement?
See you all soon at Shaws Little League for some Singapore Children's sport fun.