Browsing by Subject "nuori urheilija."

Finnish Olympic Committee has developed lower secondary school training camps to ensure and support lower secondary school students to combine their goal-oriented sports and studies. The term athlete’s dual career is used to describe this sort of combination. Athlete’s dual career ensures elite athletes’ possibilities to study without distracting their professional sport career. The lower secondary school training camps are organized widely in Finland even though the activity is in its early stages. This thesis studies the experiences of the lower secondary school training camp and athlete’s life skills since there is little or none prior research available. This study is a qualitative case study that examined what matters were found useful about The Sport Institute of Finland Vierumäki’s lower secondary school cheerleading training camp regarding goal-oriented sports and studies. This study also examined youth athletes’, coaches’, and teachers’ views on athlete’s life skills and how the life skills were taught during the training camp. The data was collected using semi-structured interviews, questioner, and observation. The method of analysis was qualitative content analysis. Based on this study the lower secondary school training camp was found to be positive experience, but some development areas were also found. Research results show that youth athletes are motivated for both their studies and sport training. However, during the training camp the youth athletes felt they needed more support on their independent studying. This was observed also from teachers. The lower secondary school training camp’s sport-specific training was found successful. Youth athletes were able to develop their cheerleading skills and the coaches emphasized on guiding the youth to meet their own goals. The athlete’s life skills were found very similar among this study’s subjects. The most important athlete’s life skill was day-to-day management and taking care of oneself. The results suggest that the lower secondary school training camp needs teacher’s input on developing the independent studying. The concept is overall rewarding and, in the future, there also needs to be diverse range of opportunities for youth athletes to combine their goal-oriented sports and school.