Contribution of Organized Sports to Physical Activity Level: A Middle School as a Case

When physical education (PE) classes alone can not secure adequate time of moderate and vigorous physical activity (MVPA), physical activity (PA) engagement beyond PE classes becomes important. The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in PA level in a randomly selected school day between adolescents who got involved in organized sports and those who didn’t. The Self-Administered Physical Activity Checklist, a valid instrument (Sallis et al., 1996), was administered to 138 middle school students (72 girls and 66 boys) in an urban area. The information regarding participants’ current involvement in organized sports and their sport skill and interests in PA/PE was collected with survey sheets completed by PE teachers and/or participants. Forty-five participants (21 girls and 24 boys) were classified in organized sports group and 93 (51 girls and 42 boys) in non-organized sports group. A 2 × 2 (gender × organized sports involvement) multivariate analysis of variance yielded the highly significant differences in favor of the organized sports group in each of four PA variables: (a) minutes of PA (M: 143.80 vs. 74.70, F_{(1, 134)} = 20.06, p = .000), (b) minutes of MVPA (119.22 vs. 44.14, F_{(1, 134)} = 34.48, p = .000), (c) MET score (13.72 vs. 6.07, F_{(1, 134)} = 25.46, p = .000), and (d) MVPA MET score (12.32 vs. 4.34, F_{(1, 134)} = 33.19, p = .000). Further, the results of Chi Square tests indicated that eighty percent of the participants in organized sport group reached the criterion of 30-min cumulative MVPA as opposed to 46.2% in non-organized sports group (c² = 14.13, p = .000) and that much more participants in the organized sports group than in the non-organized sports group were rated as “high sport skills” (73.3% vs. 19.4%, c² = 37.93, p = .000) and “high interest in PA/PE” (84.4% vs. 36.6%, c² = 27.87, p = .000). The results suggest that the involvement of organized sports contributes to adolescents’ PA level considerably, and that high sports skill and high interests in PA/PE are related to the involvement of organized sports. The results, however, also raise the problems of how to enhance daily PA level for those with relatively low sports skill and low interests in PA/PE and of how to have every student master sport skills and become competent in participating in sports and PA.
Keyword(s): middle school issues, physical activity, youth sports