Both the sports and school context are characterized by the relationship between skill development and performance, where athletes and students learn and develop skills related to sports and physical activity respectively. The coach and the teacher are important contributors to ensuring the athletes development, but also the environments that the athletes/students and coaches/teachers are part of have a crucial role for their development. In this context, it is worth mentioning that for some, sports and school are closely intertwined through i.e. sport specialisation programs (SSPs) and elite sport specialisation programs (ESSPs) in upper secondary schools.

Athletes/students are themselves the most important contributors to their own development and performance. Important questions are therefore what characterizes their development and how parents, friends, coaches and teachers contribute to this development. In order to develop skills, athletes/students are dependent on knowing what’s expected from, what skills they should develop and which stage of development they are in. To what extent these requirements are clearly communicated to athletes/students (do they know?) can be discussed.

Our research group works extensively with this themes in both the sports and school context. Some of the topics that our research deals with are individual characteristics of the practitioners and the students such as; motivation, stress and perfectionism, and characteristics of the environments they are part of such as; communication, the importance of performance, motivational climate and coaching style.