Sport for Life

Sport for Life (S4L) recognizes sport's contribution in Canadian society and its importance in everyone’s life. S4L promotes each child’s healthy and logical development in a sport or physical activity as well as providing a model for athlete development.
 

A child’s desire to play a particular sport should always be the most important consideration when deciding to enroll him or her in a program. However children should be guided to try a variety of sports throughout the year and avoid focusing solely on one sport for more than one or two seasons (fall, winter, spring, summer) until the fundamental movement skills have been acquired.

Click the image on the left for a  brief summary of how participants should be engaged in sport.

Parents and care-givers should encourage pre-schools, schools, community recreation and sport organizations to offer quality physical activity programs. One way to do this is by asking appropriate questions. If you are wondering what a particular sport should or could be doing, check them out here. Parent checklists are available for schools, coaches and quality individual sport. If you want to rate your Provincial Sport Organization, there's a PSO scorecard for that! Lastly, but not least, True Sport has developed a matrix which identifies ethical literacy standards for all ages and stages of S4L.

The Coaching Association of Canada's Long-Term Athlete Development Information for Parents brochure provides an overview of  LTAD, describing each of the seven stages in easy-to-understand language. It gives solid and concrete advice on what parents can do to encourage their child’s current physical and athletic development and suggests tips to help them assist their child as they move into the later stages of development. Summary articles on S4L are also provided through the links below.

For further information about appropriate sport involvement, and to understand what may be done to promote a child's best interests in staying active and healthy, visit www.sportforlife.ca.

XCZONE.TV with National Sports Organizations and the LTAD authors created an instructional product to help teach children. The LTAD core manuals provided the narrative and XCZONE.TV synchronized the video, to bring the concepts to life. To view this video, click here. We also encourage you to view these short volleyball, hockey and soccer videos.