Fraternity feels the National School Games have a broader role in sporting development

SINGAPORE – The National School Games (NSG) were again hurled into the limelight recently, as the sporting fraternity engaged in intensive debate on their function as a pathway for elite athletes or as an avenue for character building and promoting a wider sporting culture.

It all stemmed from comments made by Singapore National Olympic Council (SNOC) secretary-general Mark Chay, who termed disciplines without a pathway to the major Games as “dead-end sports”.

Currently, there are 29 sports, which are mostly featured in major Games, across the primary, secondary and tertiary levels in schools – including rope-skipping which is offered only at the primary level – on the NSG roster.

There are several emerging sports – such as sport climbing, tchoukball and ultimate frisbee – whose national sports associations (NSAs) have been trying to lobby for their sport’s inclusion in the NSG over the years.

Singapore Sports School (SSP) principal Ong Kim Soon believes that, although the NSG can be the primary platform to unearth future national athletes, it should not be the main function.

In an interview with The Straits Times, Ong said: “To the Ministry of Education (MOE), the NSG is more for character development.

“Even co-curricular activities are a character-development strategy and platform, and it’s important… It’s really about character in sporting excellence.

“To a primary school kid, that may be the first taste of success, and then they get a bit more hungry, go to secondary school, and they get even more excited, then they eventually give them that aspiration to represent Singapore.”

According to MOE, the NSG are a platform to provide opportunities for students to participate in inter-school competitions and “encourage character building among student-athletes” as they pursue sporting excellence.

Ong added that it was important for children to “try a variety of sports” as the exposure allows them to develop a broad foundation of physical skills.

He added: “If you go and specialise too early, and say, ‘I’m just going to do bowling’, for example, at Primary 1 and you bowl for the next 20 years… (it is) not the best way to develop your multidimensional physicality, as well as your interest and movement skills.

“So that’s why the whole multi-sports thing goes back to fundamental human body development that is important and critical.”

Benedict Tan, former Olympic sailor and clinical associate professor of the Department of Sport and Exercise Medicine at Changi General Hospital, agreed with Ong.

He said that development “follows certain phases” and one should be exposed to different sports to build up foundational skills such as peripheral awareness, coordination and reflexes.

“Because every sport is different, so in general, the best time to specialise is in the mid-teens,” added Dr Tan, who won a gold in the Laser class at the 1994 Asian Games.

“Generally for NSG, it’s not an age where you want kids to fully specialise, but our job is to help them go through the development such that at their peak, they become better athletes and better people.”

Dr Tan said: “Sport is a huge ecosystem… MOE’s role in the ecosystem is a very big one because, if you look at the sports pathway, everything starts from the school system and then branches out.

“After the school system, you can just do sport recreationally, you can go into non-competitive sports or competitive sports. And among the competitive sports, there’s the Olympic sports and non-Olympic sports… You see how it branches out so broadly.”

In the ST article published on April 15, Chay was asked about the potential inclusion of tchoukball into the NSG roster and his statement had stirred up a hornets’ nest.

Delane Lim, general secretary of the Tchoukball Association of Singapore, was among those who responded to the comments on social media.

In his post, Lim said: “Not every student is on a high-performance trajectory and not every sport needs to lead to the Olympics to have value.

“Sports such as tchoukball and other emerging disciplines play an important role in engaging students who may not otherwise participate in traditional sports.”

Since then, Chay has reached out to Lim to clarify his position, while an SNOC spokesperson said the body acknowledges and values the role that all sports play in the community of Singapore’s sporting landscape.

“We emphasise that every sport, regardless of its presence on the major Games programme, has intrinsic value,” added the spokesperson.

“Sport plays an important role in fostering character development, community bonding and lifelong participation, particularly through platforms such as the National School Games, which serve as a key foundation for broad-based engagement and talent identification.”

Subhajeet Parida, president of the Singapore Flying Disc Association, feels there is a mismatch between school sports and elite sports.

He said: “The biggest incongruency which exists is that the objective of school sports is character building, and for SNOC, the objective is athletic excellence.

“So how do you build an athlete pipeline? We are obviously a resource-constrained country and at the same time, sports like us (can help) build the pipeline from a younger age. And for us, the NSG system is one of the ways we can do that.”

Former shooter and pentathlete Shermaine Tung believes that the NSG should not be restricted to just sports with a major Games pathway.

“The international sporting landscape is very volatile, so sports like modern pentathlon and even canoeing disappear from the SEA Games roster unpredictably,” said the 31-year-old, who won a bronze in modern pentathlon at the 2019 SEA Games in the Philippines.

“One day it’s in and one day it’s not… So we cannot whip up athletes like soldiers on a battlefield only when a major Games medal is available. Elite performance is really built on years of holistic development and social support.

“By keeping the NSG broad and inclusive, it allows students to express their interest fully, find their community and, most importantly, build transferable skills.

“When a student-athlete eventually leaves the NSG with a sense of community and elite physical literacy, I won’t consider that a dead end because that student will eventually go on to contribute to Singapore’s success in other arenas.”

Former national hurdler Dipna Lim-Prasad believed that it was a “poor choice of words” by Chay and feels that sport plays different roles in each phase of life.

She added: “On the broadest perspective, we want sport for life. Playing sport from a young age helps inculcate this active mindset.

“At the same time, some choose to pursue sport on an elite level – there must be avenues to support that.

“The NSG has to balance many considerations to provide good opportunities for our young athletes to have a healthy relationship with sport.”