Answer).. Sports as an activity can be traced back to the earliest existence of human beings, for as long as they have been active and sportive. It is a great way for people to master the benefits of nature and their surrounding or environment for that matter. By studying the history of sports, we can learn about the social changes that man has gone through in the past as well as the transformations that sports in itself has undergone. These changes are mostly evidenced in the changes of the rules that govern the various sporting activities as well as in the manner in which they are played. It involves the development and exercise of natural human talents and skills as opposed to exercising them for their importance.
Sports has mainly been a preserve of those in their youth as that is the point at which one still has the strength, agility, mindset and the motivation to be actively involved in it. In most sporting activities, one is said to be at their prime in their youth. Sports can be broadly categorized as either team sports or individual sports. Team sports include soccer, basketball, netball, hockey, baseball, volleyball among others. Individual sports include games like badminton, tennis, squash, table tennis, darts, scrabble, and chess among others. The other classification of sporting activities can be physical or non-physical. The physical sports are those that require movement of the body muscles for which fitness is of the essence. Majority of sports fall in this category. Non-physical sports include board games like chess, draft, scrabble among others; these are mostly played in the mind but nevertheless are still sports.
All over the world, sporting activities have provided great entertainment for audiences. The 2006 FIFA football world cup in Germany alone had a cumulative television audience of 26.29 billion in-home and 2.1 billion out –of-home viewers (fifa.com). Football is not in this category alone, sports like basketball, baseball and other mainstream sports have been known to have a lot of their tournaments declared sold out due to over subscription by fans intent on going to watch their favorite players thrash their opponents. The entertainment provided by these sporting activities ensures people spend their free time progressively instead of wasting it on activities that will in the end not add any value to their lives.
Sports among the youth is a key factor that has been noted to promote prosocial characteristic traits among individuals. According to Bar-Tal, (1976) and Bierhoff, (2002), prosocial are positive forms of social behavior that are not motivated by personal obligations, rather they are voluntary and they have positive results. These include; cooperation, sharing, respect, altruism and many others (Larrieu & Mussen, 1986). Sports among the youth is therefore a very important tool through which individuals, especially the antisocial ones can hone their social skills through interaction with their team mates as well as the opposing players. Through this interaction, one’s communication skills are also enhanced and developed and these are acquisitions that will benefit the individual later on in life.