Football participation in the primary school playground: The role of coordination impairments

Children with movement impairments, as identified by the Movement Assessmen t Battery for Children (Movement ABC), have been shown to be more isolated than others in the school playground and to play team games such as footbal l less often than others, The goal of the present investigation was to exam ine whether early coordination impairments were related to later football p articipation in the school playground. The participants were 64 boys, 32 in a movement impaired group and 32 in a non-impaired group, who were divided into groups of those who were often alone and those who were not, The not- alone group was further subdivided into those who played football for consi derable periods and those who did not. There were 10 boys with poor scores on the Movement ABC who were not often alone and who played football for co nsiderable amounts of time. Analyses of the subscales of the ABC indicated that the balance subscale was significantly related to participation in foo tball, but that some boys with relatively poor balance scores did play foot ball. Only extremely poor performance on the balance tasks of the Movement ABC was related to non-participation in football. Some of the key differenc es between groups of children with movement impairments in terms of their i nclusion in social and physical games like football may not relate to hand/ eye coordination and manual control, but to the ability to maintain posture while carrying out other movements, particularly when balance skills are e xtremely poor.