| The aim of this study was to determine the capability of children and adolescent swimmers to identify the errors they make while swimming. Twenty-eight subjects (15 female, 13 male) were moderately competitive swimmers aged 7 to 17 years, and were asked to swim 50 yards each of freestyle and backstroke while being videotaped from two angles simultaneously: an underwater sagittal view and a frontal view from above the water. Afterwards, the subjects completed a 30 item checklist (15 items for each stroke) in which they attempted to identify which aspects of the stroke they performed correctly and incorrectly (Appendix A). The checklist included questions regarding head position, kick tempo and consistency, location of arm entry, and elbow form during recovery. Three coaches of different experience levels served as expert raters and analyzed the videotapes; and completed the same checklist for each subject for each stroke. Correlations between the swimmers' responses and each coach's response were analyzed using an analysis of variance. Correlations between the raters were also compared. Chi square tests were then performed on all of the responses for each of the 30 checklist items. Although the effect of age showed a trend toward older swimmers being more proficient in detecting errors than younger swimmers, it was not statistically significant (p=.092). Overall, the three coaches did not significantly differ in their evaluations of the swimmers on either stroke. However, the coaches did agree much more often when rating freestyle compared with backstroke. Also, the coach with the most experience agreed least often with the coach who had the least amount of swimming experience. The results show how age may be related to the way in which children and adolescents learn and understand their own errors. Contrary to intuition , experience level in swimming did not significantly affect how swimmers detected errors. Finally, the ability and experience level of a coach did have an impact in how errors are detected. These results have important implications for understanding how children and adolescents know and understand the errors that they make in sport, and for understanding how important a coach's experience may be in teaching sport. |
