Children’s Perceptions of Basketball*…

An Attempt to Explain our Love and Enthusiasm for the Sport of Basketball…

EBAG has been established about seven years ago with the main intention to help European basketball to grow and further increase its popularity. Besides several different positive aspects and reasons for our commitment to basketball, our main driver has been the solid belief that sports in general, and basketball in particular, can thoroughly touch kids’ lives and have a huge positive impact on them.

This is genuinely what we think as the main reason underlying our passion for the sport of basketball. We also believe (and to a certain extent clearly observe that) for (almost) everyone engaged in basketball, there is a story which led to the creation of an enthusiastic and (almost) unconditionally positive feeling towards basketball, in most of the cases stemming from the childhood.

A recent scientific publication* that was written by three members of the Faculty of Sports Sciences at Gazi University in Ankara/Turkey provide quite interesting insights into children’s perceptions of basketball through metaphors and drawings. Nagihan Caredar, Aylin Özge Pekel and Cagdas Özgür Cengizel performed a quite interesting and insightful study into the world of children aged between 7 and 12 years old.

A phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in this study to determine the perceptions of children who receive basketball training in sports schools through metaphors and drawings. This research method aims to reveal perceptions and events in a realistic and holistic way in their natural environment.

Some of the children used the metaphors of “life” and “success” to describe what basketball means for them:

“Basketball is like/similar to life because we always have to strive to achieve something, even if we can’t achieve, we must strive.”

“Basketball is like/ similar to life because it is a part of you, you can sleep with it and wake up with it, your future depends on it.”

“Basketball is like/similar to success; because in basketball believing is more than half of the success. If we believe in ourselves, we can achieve it; even if it is difficult.”

Below are some further examples of how children see the game of basketball whihc are directly cited from the above mentioned study.

"Basketball means the world to me." “What I am trying to explain is not a ball we hold in our hands, but a source of excitement, stress and action because there is so much, we can do with that ball, I see basketball as a world inside a ball, rather than a sport.” “Participant 14 (Figure 3a) drew children figures to demonstrate the happiness brought by the success they achieved at the end of the struggle with her or his friends.” “Participant 50 (Figure 3b) drew a picture of himself and his coach speaking during the basketball training. When we observe the drawing carefully, we can see concretely how motivating the participant vocally benefits her or him.” “Upon examing the drawings of participants 40 and 49 (Figures 4a and 4b), it can be seen that they drew figures of children having fun while playing basketball. We can state that the happy facial expressions of the characters in drawings are concrete examples of how playing basketball entertains them.” “Participant 32 (Figure 2b) reflected the practice drills during basketball training, her or his knowledge of the variety of basketball training and the importance of working hard to achieve it by putting a note under the drawing.”

In our opinion, this study is yet another proof that basketball is not just a “game”, but rather a very powerful means to have a positive impact on the lives of children.

All photos above are taken from the study. *) Full paper can be found here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4083514

We thank the authors of this study for putting together such an authentic and interesting analysis of basketball’s emotional aspects perceived by children.

EBAG