Sports Skills at The Little Gym

It’s Summer Sports Week at The Little Gym. This week, we incorporate a few activities from our Sports Skills program into our Preschool/Kindergarten and Grade School gymnastics classes.


Our Sports Skills program is designed to develop basic sports skills and create a foundation for positive athletic experiences. It’s for 3-6 years old boys and girls, broken out by age groups, and uses a variety of innovative sport exercises, lead-up games and drills to teach the basic understanding of the rules and strategies associated with specific sports.

This week in our gymnastics classes, we’ll introduce the basketball chest pass, work on soccer dribbling, trapping, and kicking, football throwing and catching, and tennis (as well as including gymnastics).

Being an instructor at The Little Gym for over 4.5 years, and leading many Sports Skills classes over those years, I’ve seen the benefits of our Sports Skills class first-hand in many of the children who have been in our sports program. One of my favorite semesters was when I had only 4 children enrolled in a summer class – Mini Jacks, for 3-4 year olds. Two of the children were boys who had an amazing amount of energy and a comparable lack of focus. The other two children were girls that were completely the opposite. From feedback after classes, I understand the parents in the lobby were getting quite a kick out of the weekly “show” of me trying to engage all four children appropriately. What seemed to work well for the boys was when I pretended that we were doing racecar baseball, or dinosaur soccer.

It was hard to see the growth in those 2 boys from week to week, but they loved the class and their parents kept them in the sports skills program for several years. Eventually they became the “rock stars” in the class, learning the skills, and (eventually), improving their focus and concentration. One of those boys joined our advanced 5-6 year old class, (and also one of those 2 girls as well!).

Parents wonder if their child should do one semester of sports skills. We do mix up the sports each semester, with the Fall concentrating on soccer, football, and basketball (with a little bowling, and volleyball added). And in the Winter/Spring we focus on hockey, golf, and baseball (with a week of track & field, and Frisbee). As with any sport, repetition builds skills and confidence. So yes, as with any of our programs, it truly is a 2-3 year timeframe to get benefits of the program, learning the skills, and building a soaring sense of confidence. And those children who do spend 1-2 years in the sports program will have an increased ability in all of those sports.

I think I’ve given the example of my son a bunch of times. He just turned 6 a few weeks ago. Blaise spent several semesters in the sports skills class. That’s the class that helped him get out of his shell and join in the first 15 minutes of the class. He really enjoyed the various sports “games” we played, from dribbling the soccer ball around the parachute and then kicking the balll towards the cones in the center of the parachute, or our “Tower of Power” game where we throw footballs to knock a cone off a tower of “hot dog” mats.

This past spring, Blaise, agreed to join T-ball. Of course, after I signed him up, he freaked out, saying that he *didn’t* want to do T-ball. I insisted that we come try the first practice and see how it goes. Blaise was by far not the strongest player on the team. He has not been very interested in playing ball with me on the weekends, so I was impressed when he followed the coach’s directions and started playing catch with the other boys on his team. And he started to love going to his (*many*) practices and games. Even though I think it rained every day this past season, he loved going and playing T-ball with his new friends.

I loved it too. My pride in Blaise grew each week. The last 3 weeks of the season, the coaches started pitching to the kids. If they didn’t get a hit after about 4 pitches, the coaches would bring out the batting T. Blaise always got the T… until the last game. His first at-bat, he hit the first pitch from the coach. And I *saw* it!