In sports, we expect good players to have a high level of intelligence – football IQ, basketball IQ. Sports IQ is something you can develop just like academic IQ, but you must be trained in how to get it. You look at the raw materials for developing academic IQ and see that there is no difference in what is needed in having a good sports IQ. or anyone that has attended college or university classes in the US, these words will be very familiar – critical thinking. Critical thinking is base of all university courses. It is what helps individual students develop academic intelligence. The base is to be able to problem solve, be creative, make sound decisions, think strategically, have organizational planning and be open. Nigerian athletes have a very high deficiency of good or adequate sports IQ. I use the word athlete to cover all our sports persons in every sporting endeavor we participate in. Let me dwell on our just ousted U20 football team from the World Cup. This team is considered a golden generation – they won the U17 World Cup in 2013 and paraded the best player in the tournament.
The team from 2013 was relatively kept together for the purpose to win the U20 this time around. The team not only failed but they were really unimpressive in the four matches they played. As many have posited, the team lacked creativity, never made good decisions and could never solve the problem they faced. I would add that the team also looked strategically impotent and lacked any kind of a ‘Plan B’ or what I called nock them down passes that we use to know them when they played in U17 again. coach is prepared to coach youth football; the fact that a coach wins at the U17, where we cheat to win does not make him a good coach. The likelihood of winning U17 when you have overage players is always going to be high, but the likelihood diminishes at the next level (U20) and it gets worse and have taken time to prepare a team that will trash them. This article is not about age cheating but about developing coaches that can teach base football concepts, concepts that will allow our players become independent of coaches on the field. Players that have good football IQ will always be better than players that have none
Everyone reading this remembers very well how he or she started in arithmetic: first learn to count, add, subtract, multiply and then divide. Not many, if any of our coaches understand this concept of teaching; a method that allows for students or players to understand base concepts of football and gradually develop an adequate IQ that will lead them into doing more complex things. The rest of us, spend many hours before an exam trying to understand the course and at the first twist with a question in the exam, we fall apart. Our Nigerian football situation is no different from what I have described – we have coaches that cannot teach base concepts of the game, so we spend a lot of time in camps in preparation and at the first strong test in competition, we fall apart, we lose. The good thing is that sports IQ can be developed and that should become our new focus. Critical thinking is our key to developing the mind of every youth, in class, on the field and in life. Let me remind my readers again of those students who we all know; the ones that did not read all night before an exam. The ones that will pass with high marks, yet he spends very little time before an exam studying. There was a reason to that student’s madness, he grasped the base concepts of subjects and could apply them to more complex issues in the class. In short he had acquired adequate IQ.
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