SIRC articles provide evidence-based and actionable insights from sport researchers, athletes, coaches, sport organizations and thought leaders to advance sport in Canada.
Concussions and Confidence: Why Mental Readiness Matters in Recovery
For most of her career, Jen Kish was known as one of the best and most fearless female players in rugby sevens. She captained Canada’s women’s team to an Olympic bronze medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics. And, she also endured more than 30 concussions with only five of them formally diagnosed. “Your brain health…
Aaron Koenigsberg, Jesse Korf, and Lou Farah, York University
Early Talent Identification (TID) describes the process of identifying, evaluating and selecting athletes for sport programs in early adolescence (ages 10-14). This practice has created a contentious issue in sport. On one hand, early selection may eliminate late bloomers from...
Project summary Youth development research has examined the antecedents, processes, and outcomes that occur in sport contexts. One common finding that consistently emerges is that influential adults, such as teachers and coaches, play instrumental roles in facilitating the developmental process....
Project summary Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a full contact combat sport that integrates striking and grappling techniques from a variety of other combat sports (i.e. martial arts, boxing, sumo, wresting, karate, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, and Tae Kwon Do). MMA...
Project summary Sport Canada’s Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model acknowledges that there are limitations to ensuring appropriate development of team sports, especially with regards to selecting into chronological age (CA) bands. Adolescent of the same CA can be 4...
View the summary of this research here. Project summary Deselection (or being “cut”) is the elimination of an athlete from a competitive sport team based on the decisions of a coach. Given the competitive sport structure in Canada, it is...
Project summary The purpose of this research was to study extra-curricular activity (ECA) involvement in a broad range of Canadian youth, and to examine how this might vary by age, gender and geographical context (e.g. rural vs. urban settings). Of...
Project summary Given the rate of children’s physical inactivity, it is important to identify strategies that assist individuals in self-regulating their physical activity behaviors. Imagery is one such strategy. Children’s use of imagery has been investigated in sport, but not...
Background / Context / Objective With growing societal concern for youths’ healthy development, extensive literature suggests organized leisure activities serve as optimal contexts to foster positive youth development (Larson, 2000), and sport has consistently been found to be the most...
Project summary The main purpose of this research program was to help build more meaningful and relevant sport and recreation-based programs for Indigenous youth through the examination of a series of multidisciplinary analyses and case studies (mainly the Promoting Life-skills...
Background / Context / Objective The benefits of sport participation among youth are well recognized, yet little work has focused on understanding sport participation among very young children, despite growing participation at increasingly early ages. The first objective of this...
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