Young sportsmen dropout is related mostly with development of their sports career. Often it is a consequence of an early specialization. If an individual is subject to hard sports training already from an early childhood, he loses out in joy, spontaneity, creativity, playfulness and he builds a poor self-image. He consequently experiences sport as something negative that is why he might leave it. In sports activities, which direct children into specialized workout and competitiveness, burn-out and dropout of youths in competitive sport are even bigger. Decrease is bigger also by those young sportsmen, who started to train earlier.
In masters` degree issues, related to dropout of young sportsmen in competitive athletics, are discussed. Intent of the assignment was to find out size of dropout, regarding the most promising young athletes in Slovenia, aged between 13 and 15 years. Sample was created on the basis of IAAF (=International Association of Athletics Federation) scoring tables from 1993 till 2004. We took 10 best young athletes from every chosen discipline. We were curious if there exist differences between complexes of those disciplines (sprints, jumps, throws, middle- and long-distance runs) and what percentage of young athletes (U16 = under 16 years old) manage to achieve visible results in absolute age category on national and international level. We also studied dynamics of individual`s development of sports career and dynamics of dropout, namely the transitions to different age categories. We were checking statistical importance of differences between groups with calculations of 2 and Cramer`s V coefficient.
The main finding of the research is that dropout in Slovenian competitive athletics is very big. We proved some more facts: (1) decrease is not influenced by the complex of disciplines; (2) competitively the most successful young athletes (first 5 on the scoring tables) insist in chosen sport longer, more often take place on greater international championships and more frequently hold national records in comparison with those youths, who are not on the top in age category U16; (3) furthermore very young (13 and 14 years old) and at the same time very successful athletes also more frequently reach the absolute age category and are achieving better results on national as well as on international level.
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