The article “Promoting Healthy Competition Using Modified Rules and Sports from Other Cultures” (Strategies, 2014) presents how overemphasis on competition and winning has resulted in more negative than positive impacts but competition is still a valuable life skill. Thus, there is a need to educate students healthy competition. The author, associate professor Phoebe Constantinou, expert of physical education pedagogy, also proposes relevant modifications that can be made to traditional sports to promote healthy competition.
Constantinou establishes that competition and cooperation have similar meanings. They complement each other as skilful competitors challenge and help each other to achieve the highest level of performance. However, the overemphasis on winning has distorted this original notion of competition which includes respect, honesty and graciousness. Instead, it has led to aggression. It is especially prominent in contact sports which can cause students to lessen their moral reasonings and become more aggressive. Thus, author explains that it may not be suitable and effective to teach competition to students through contact sports. She rationalises that competing healthily is still a valuable life skill. Healthy competition focuses on self improvement and achieving one’s full potential. Losing becomes a challenge that can be addressed with more hard work and commitment. To promote healthy competition, author suggests modifications to traditional contact sports. The rules include limiting
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Firstly, by first demonstrating the non mutually exclusive relationship of competition and cooperation, she argues that today’s competition is no longer the ideal. She follows up by explaining the benefits of healthy competition and lastly the way to teach it to the students. The flow of article allows readers to grasp the development of the main idea and how it is supported along the