A COUPLE of weeks ago I spoke to one of the underage coaches at our club and enquired about any potential stars of the future and he said that if gaelic could be played by using their thumbs then we would be county champions in no time at all.
All sports including our own are now facing the epidemic of the Xbox generation, where children are rushing home from school to press X and Y on a game console rather than heading outside for any level of exploration or exercise.
A few years ago my son shouted at me to come in and look at the goal he scored against Barcelona while playing for Real Madrid alongside Ronaldo where he had beaten three world-class defenders and volleyed an overhead kick into the top corner.
The following night I watched as he played centre forward for Camlough Rovers and hit a penalty that didn’t even trouble the goalkeeper. I immediately thought that if he had a console controller in his hand he wouldn’t have missed.
Thankfully he has left the console behind and has developed somewhat into a gaelic footballer but this does not disguise the fact that by the time children have decided to take up a sport these days their coordination and fitness is nowhere near the levels they were for kids 20 years ago due to prolonged inactivity or lack of any real form of exercise.
I watched on holidays last year as a father and mother lay by their pool in lovely sunshine trying to coerce their three children to get in to the pool to no avail as each child was engrossed either in a mobile phone or some form of tablet with their heads buried under a towel, while mum and dad left them to literally their own devices.
The same can be said about school as children are entering P1 minus a lot of the basic educational skills of their predecessors.
While their speech and capacity to read may be limited the minute you hand them an iPad, they all of a sudden become more adept than their teacher, which I suppose is symptomatic of the electronic age we all live in now.
After 25 years of teaching and coaching football in primary schools I can definitely see a serious decline in children’s coordination, fitness and skill levels which will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect on their health later on.
And yet if you pass a gaelic field anywhere in Ireland on a Sunday morning you will see pitches filled to capacity with young children being coached all the skills and getting a decent bit of exercise.
The GAA is right at the forefront of the battle against obesity and inactivity amongst children and even though they are receiving more and more time from our Association’s great volunteers, it seems that this, allied with the schools, may be the only exercise the children are experiencing.
Years ago when you passed a football field when no training was on you would find groups of boys playing in the goalmouth whether it be headers and volleys or any other activity but now, when no activities are organised, it is empty.
Children used to cycle or walk to training, while now the traffic jam at a football field from parents dropping them off (including myself) can be tortuous and time consuming, especially when you will be returning in less than an hour in most cases.
A green area in any housing estate would have been filled with youngsters playing for hours in the evening with matches using jumpers as goalposts that would have had 30 or 40 goals and a few bust-ups, while now you see boys and girls lounging around in groups looking at mobile phones and not even communicating with each other.
In my younger days we had fewer training sessions but we would have stayed behind after training for hours for our own shooting practice or penalty competitions heightening our skill levels which would inevitably be the most enjoyable part of the evening. Now, the minute training is over it’s back into the car and home and probably the next time they will hold a ball or a camogie stick in their hand will be the same time next week.
A recent study into Irish children’s physical activity levels has somewhat borne out what I had already assumed given that 25 per cent of all children tested are either unfit, overweight or with elevated blood pressure.
Around 80 per cent of primary school children were not getting the daily recommended dose of exercise to maintain a healthy level, with many parents wrongly assuming that only overweight children were unfit.
However, one particular statistic stood out against the rest was when they discovered that less than one per cent of children met the health recommendation of less than 120 minutes of sedentary screen time during daylight hours.
Put simply 99 per cent of children are either watching TV, on consoles or on the internet or mobile phones for longer than two hours every day.
I can see it in the classroom with tired, pale faced children coming to school and I can see it on the playing fields where the skill levels in all sports are decreasing every year.
This issue cannot be left at the door of just the schools or the football clubs.
I am not coming from the Good Prophet Benny angle, as my own house is every bit as guilty and I realise we now live in a digital age, but if we want to see improved fitness and skill levels and healthier and happier children then we probably need to go back to basics and get them outside and active instead of inside and dormant. If we don’t, the Xbox generation will only continue to grow.
