Sport et développement : l
es effets de la participation au programme Sport-études sur le développement des élèves-athlètes

Sport as a means to foster youth development is fundamental to this research project. In regards to the growing popularity toward organised sport practice among youth (ParticipACTION, 2015), a new trend has arisen: the proliferation of highly specialized sport programs, built and thought of as a way to maximise youth’s performance potential, regardless of their long term sport participation or personal development (Côté & Hancock, 2016). In Québec, the programme Sport-études saw the light in the mid-80’s with the sole purpose of addressing a fast growing need in the sport community, that is: to help youth committed to excellence in sport pursue their goals without hindering their educational process. As time passed, this program grew to a point where, yearly, more than 5 000 student-athletes (age 12 to 17) benefit from the special circumstances within which they can fully commit to a single sport. If that intensive training regimen is well integrated to the student-athlete’s daily school schedule, we question the early specialisation and investment that seems to be encouraged by the program’s own settings. Therefore, we seek to understand what the impacts are of programme Sport-études’s participation on youth development?  The developmental process is the heart of our interests. To assess it, we align this project within the bioecological model of human development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). Also, we integrate knowledge from the positive youth development literature (J. V. Lerner et al., 2009) as well as the Developmental Model of Sport Participation (Côté & Fraser-Thomas, 2016). Combined all together, these conceptual tools will help us effectively describe program’s orientations, the sport’s environment as well as student-athlete’s developmental experiences.  To answer the main question of our research, we first conducted an analysis of documents that sport federations need to submit to be admitted as a part of the programme Sport-études. By doing so, we confirmed that this program firmly supports the sport expertise development pathway. Thereafter, we distributed an online questionnaire to 226 students-athletes aged between 11 and 17 years old (M=15.08, SD=1.46) from two different schools. This questionnaire helped us evaluate sport’s setting, sources of enjoyment (Wiersma, 2001), developmental experiences (D. J. MacDonald et al., 2012) and perceived coach-autonomy support (Hagger et al., 2007). To complete our methodology, we organised focus groups of student-athletes in their final year of the programme Sport-études (N=15). For these groups our in-depth discussion focused mainly around some of the items from questionnaire, as well as the relationships with parents in the sport’s settings.  With regards to the settings of the sport, we noted that the program Sport-études indeed encouraged an early specialization and investment approach. Even if such an approach can be beneficial to attain sport expertise in certain sports like gymnastics (Law et al., 2008), literature pinpoints that it can be detrimental for most of the others, notably reducing health and inducing stress (Hecimovich, 2004), two elements that emerge from our analysis. That said, even within these settings, student-athletes still reported more positives experiences – initiative and goal-setting as the most important – than negatives and seemed to draw the enjoyment mainly from intrinsic sources. Other than that, we noted that relationships with parents and coaches were both positive and, as expected (Côté, 1999, 2002) evolved over time. One of our main findings was a significant difference between the perception of the environment of athletes involved with individual sports and those who participate in a team sport. Generally speaking, the first had a much more positive perception than the latter. To explain that, we hypothesize that the environment within the program Sport-études are well suited for individual sport, but failed to meet the needs of team sports – too much practice, too early in youth’s sport development, we might suggest. As a concluding comment, if the main purpose of program Sport-études is to offer a way to combine success in school and sport, and all that with something of a life equilibrium, it is partly working. To ensure the maximum benefit of sport participation – performance, long term participation and personal development – a higher consideration of the setting of the sport must be taken into account, especially to be better tailored on each sport’s need in terms of development.

Keyphrases: sport, performance, Programme Sport-études, Positive youth development, developmental experiences, sources of enjoyment in youth sport, athlete development