| Children are the hope and future of any society. Their growth and education are the most important concerns of parents, teachers, coaches, and all who surrounding them. This concern is often a source of pressure that causes stress for children. Recreational youth sports programs can provide good leisure activities for young children to ease this pressure and cope with it. While having fun through participation, youth also learn to work with others, engage in positive social activities, practice sports skills, face frustration, and cultivate habits to improve their physical fitness. The purpose of this research was to study the feasibility of developing a recreational sports program for boys and girls between the ages of 10 to 14 in Taiwan.;Descriptive research was conducted in this study. Four self-constructed survey questionnaires were developed as instruments for data collection. Subjects included physical education (N = 95) and general education (N = 149) teachers in elementary and junior high schools, students in 5th and 6th grade and Year 1 and Year 2 (N = 938), and their parents (N = 209) in Taipei, Taiwan. The effective rate of return was 65.1% from students, 80.6% from parents, 88.0% from physical education teachers, and 88.2% from general education teachers. The overall effective rate of returned survey questionnaires was 80%. The overall external reliability and test-and-retest reliability were between 0.72 and 0.86, which showed the stability of the results. The Statistical Package of Social Science (SPSS), version 15.0, for MS Windows was employed to conduct a statistical analysis. An alpha level of p < .05 was used throughout this study.;The support of teachers and parents and the participation of students were essential to the success of the community recreational sports programs for youth. The results found that over 67% of the teachers, regardless of gender, that responded to the survey believed that the hours allotted for physical education in schools were insufficient. Both parents and teachers agreed to allow their children to participate in off-campus/after-school recreational sport programs. Physical education teachers were willing to serve as volunteers and parents were willing to pay for such programs. It was surprising, however, that most of the students (56.1%) thought that they had sufficient hours for physical education in school and 58.6% of the students responding to the student version of the survey were not interested in off-campus/after-school recreational sports programs. It was also found that 69.3% of the students went to Buxiban (cram school) and many (43%) went for three or more days per week.;The results also reveled that gender was not an issue among all subjects. As the Ministry of Education in Taiwan has recognized the importance of promoting physical activity for students, if the organizers for the off-campus/after-school recreational sports programs were right, sports events favored, and location/facilities convenient, this would be the right time to develop recreational sports programs for youth in Taiwan. |
