Passion

Passion is defined as an intense emotion compelling feeling, enthusiasm, or desire for something. But how important is passion in the participation, coaching and study of sport?

The best experiences in sport often come when we attach a fair amount of personal meaning to things. This is where the passion comes in. The living and breathing of it. Sure, motivating yourself to train or play at your best isn’t hard because you bleed the sport, but what about those teammates that turn up, do the minimum and then leave. This can taint your sports experience. What is it exactly that makes you love the sport? It can be all different reasons, but together, you and your teammates share a bond.

Being a passionate supporter of a team can be wonderful. Walls covered in posters, jerseys and memorabilia, face paint and temporary tattoos on every possible occasion, and the countless pieces of merchandise that you own. This may be the team you have grown up with, a team built on superstars, or colours that you like, whatever it is that makes you so passionate about them. But when it all goes wrong for your team, scandals, losing streaks and financial struggle, it separates the fans from the fanatics, the ones who like the idea, from the ones that would move mountains to make a difference.

Trying to coach unmotivated and unpassionate players can be a huge challenge. It becomes so wearing on you, test after test they resist everything that you try to throw at them. Soon enough it’s no longer fun for you, because you are sick of chasing, sick of trying to make them do something they won’t. This negative energy becomes a weight on you, and it gets passed onto the other players as well. But how do you break that cycle without it breaking you? The key thing to understanding these people is to decipher why they play the sport and what they like about it.

Studying something you are passionate about makes staying up late and spending weekends doing assignments all worth it. You learn so much because you want to gain as much knowledge as you can on the area. Not only that but you get to do it all with people that have all the same interests, and you can learn endless amounts of information from.

From all of this, we can see that passion is a key ingredient in the sports industry, whatever role you play.