The bonsai effect
6-Feb-2010

Physical prowess in sport is a function of many things – some personal and some structural. Personal factors include diet, inherited genes, exercise, and intelligent application.

Structural (or more sociological) factors include national aptitude, supply of material resources, the material resources themselves, family support and so on. The combination or interaction of these groups of factors affect how well people do at physical activities.

While we rightly focus our efforts on personal factors, sometimes they can obscure the importance of sociological or structural factors which set the context for personal sporting excellence.

National aptitude is generally the outcome of long historical and traditional factors.

For example we can think of Canada and ice hockey, England and soccer football, Japan and sumo wrestling, Ireland and Gaelic football, America and baseball or basketball, Australia and Aussie Rules football, and so on – each cultural setting providing a national aptitude for a particular sport. In Fiji, we may think of rugby.

Of course, the introduction of new physical activities into particular cultural settings brings with it new tastes and eventually further national codes and affinities.

In this respect, the political (and indirectly the electoral) support for a given code of sport is a function of financial incentives, the introduction of new immigrant cultures with their own preferences and traditions, colonial imposition, sport administration, and so on. One can think of cricket in India, and rugby in the Pacific in this regard.

Material resources are also critical in that they are the outcome of private enthusiasm and dollar support, and available and assigned public funds. Hence sport equipment, playing arenas and related public facilities come to mind.

How well a national team will do at any given sport is therefore found at the intersection of many factors, but predominantly in the degree to which a national aptitude is organizationally correlated, politically supported, and materially matched.

Consider then, our national aptitude for rugby, but our lack of international prowess when it comes to the 15s version of the code. Is this shortcoming due predominantly to personal factors which are so often emphasized – our lack of fitness, inadequate diet, lack of training and so forth? Or is it perhaps, more obviously due to structural factors and in material resources in particular?

Consider, in this latter regard, the size of the majority of Fiji’s rugby fields – are they world standard sized or undersized? They are overwhelming the latter. What effects then will playing on undersized rugby fields - from childhood through to adulthood - have on one’s physical prowess for sustaining the game for 80 minutes? The answer seems obvious. (It also may explain why we excel at the Sevens form of the code).

In Australian Rules football, by contrast, playing grounds are between 130 and 180 metres in length and between 110 and 150 metres in width.

From junior football ages of 8 years and up, Aussie Rules tournaments are played on standard sized grounds – there is no concession for age or size.

Children learn right from the start that aerobic fitness is required of them; they have a lot of ground to cover.

If they were subjected to form their playing habits on smaller undersized grounds, the adult version of the code would suffer.

By the same measure, it is almost certain that if Fiji’s rugby players are not prepared as juniors to play their rugby on full sized international standard fields, they too will not be adequately prepared to sustain the game in its 15s version for a full 80 minutes.

Every village, town, city and settlement in the nation is littered with undersized rugby fields.

The structural effect of this shortcoming on our national players’ abilities to succeed in the larger version of the game would thereby seem obvious.

No one wants to discourage any of our children from pursuing the game they love, from early ages through school and into adulthood.

But if they are to better perform at it, we need to rethink our preparatory training years in terms of field sizes.

Only by enlarging our formative base can we enlarge further our on-field successes.

Otherwise we may be inadvertently stunting our own abilities – the bonsai effect.