Participation in Physical Activity
Discussing enablers and disablers of involvment
An Enabler - Quality of team
In football something that helps me play/participate is the quality of those around me. See I'm in a good team and am a good player and for me it's fun to get serious and actually practice hard and be serious and then we can muck around after training. If I were to have to play with lower quality players, it makes me participate less because I'm thinking "What's the point in playing with these guys I'm not going to get anything out of it. It's just a waste of time." So that is a really big enabler for me and my participation the thought that I'm with the best in my age group, that it's a challenge and I'm getting something from it. So playing with people at the same skill level as me is an enabler for me. This effected me well because it meant that I was into the sports I was playing most of the time and it made me want to get better than those around me because I already knew some of these guys were class so this affected me positively in the way that I would get really into sports if people were at the same level because I wanted to be better than them.
Above - Me and a team up in Auckland for the Nike Cup 2015
A Disabler - My Opinion
Alright so a huge disabler for me is whether or not I like/enjoy the sport. If I enjoy a sport I'm extremely into it and enjoy it very much but if I'm not it just goes downhill. If I don't enjoy a sport I just don't participate as much. Let's say shot put. So every year in athletics we had to do shot put and I hated it. I didn't see the fun in throwing a big lump of metal as far as I could while I had teachers yelling at me for better technique (which is why I prefer football, you have your own style of doing things) so every year I'd give it a half hearted push and get it done with. This had a negative effect on me, I'd want to not try as many sports and just stick to my guns because I'd have a look at the sport and think "No, that looks really boring I'm off." So yeah, that was a big disabler for me because I didn't end up trying anything different and when it came to me having to do swimming sports or shot put or discus and so on, I'd suck.
A Disabler - Media
Alright some people might not think skateboarding is a sport but I'm going to count it as one because I think it is. So right my friend started skating a year back and after a month he convinced me to buy a board. So I started mucking around home learning tricks and all that but I sort of didn't want to go down to the skatepark to practice even more. This was because everywhere in the media there are bad reflections of skateboarders, they're either drug addicts or drug dealers. They tag everything in sight and are extremely rude people. So I was like "Yo, if I go down there some dude is gonna give me some weed" or something along those lines. But in the end I went down and these guys were all really nice, chill people. I think this stuff I'd been hearing had a negative effect on me. It just slowed me down in skateboarding and made me overthink stuff because I was to worried about someone forcing me to have drugs, or something like that. When really there's guys like Christopher Chann (above) who are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet.
I think that the media has a fairly negative impact on sports. There's a bunch of stereotypes that media gives off like netball is a girls sport or footballers/soccer players are a bunch of diving babies. So I think media has actually negatively impacted my thoughts on some physical activities.
Overall
Overall I think that the quality of the players around me has had the biggest impact on me. I think that this enabler has led me to participate way more than I would've had I always been playing with guys who didn't care. It made me want to challenge myself to become better than those around me and helped me get better at football and tennis. So yeah I think that this really has had the biggest impact on me and helped me progress at the sports I play.