For more than 35 years, Gail Wilson has shared a passion for physical education and elevated the standards of hundreds of teachers, coaches and sport leaders who adopted her pedagogical principles.
Next week, Wilson will be recognized for her success and positive influence on women and girls in sport. ProMotion Plus, a non-profit entity, as well as the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame and the B.C. Centre for Excellence in Women's Health, will honour Wilson and two other women at the annual In Her Footsteps event.
"Previous inductees, they are all accomplished and certainly leaders in the community and most of them have strong, high-performance records," said Wilson. "I'm grateful for this but I think my own strength is much more in the leadership area through the coaching_ and also through the courses I teach that are focusing on developing physical activity leaders for communities and indeed for schools."
A professor in the kinesiology department at the University of B.C., Wilson instructs the instruction of sports. She arrived in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»from Ontario in 1977 to complete her Master's. "The plan was to stay one year."
She coached the women's varsity field hockey team for 16 seasons until 1993, leading the T-Birds to five national championships. She was an assistant coach with the Canadian women's team and very recently re-designed the national program's youth development program, Fun Stix.
At the national college level, the Gail Wilson Award recognizes the CIS athlete who shows "exceptional human qualities such as putting the needs of the team first, consistently demonstrating respect, kindness, and concern for others and demonstrating dedication, commitment, and loyalty to the team both on and off the playing field."
Wilson's views have helped shape the notion that children should pick up basic, multi-sport abilities and learn fundamental motor skills before they begin to specialize in one single sport. Although critical of some applications, Wilson is supportive of what's known as the long-term athlete development model and refined her kinesiology courses around teaching principles her students have come to know as the acronym FIDOSPA or "Fido's pa."
"You'll come up with something that would match these words: fun, inclusive, developmentally appropriate, organized, safe, purposeful and active," said Wilson, who was inducted into Toronto's Sports Hall of Fame in 1993.
"If children are going to keep coming back-and that is the ultimate goal, to keep children active for the rest of their lives-then, first and foremost they've got to be having fun. If they're going to have fun, they need to have some degree of success. If they're going to be successful, activities need to be developmentally appropriate for them. If leaders aren't trained to make activities developmentally appropriate, then none of those things happen."
Teachers, coaches and volunteer parents at schools and community programs should be trained to recognize progress and know how to modify movement-basic and sport-specific-and give appropriate technical feedback.
Her realization that school and community coaches needed better training was immediate. It came during her first season coaching field hockey at UBC.
"These women came to this high performance program, and many of them were super athletes, but most of them had really poor basic fundamental skills," she remembered. "Of course this is a reflection of the experiences that these woman had had as younger children. What I call physical education in a global sense-whenever someone says phys ed, you just think about schools-but I believe children need to be physically educated whether they're in a school program or a summer camp, wherever they are there is an opportunity to physically educate them."
In addition to active, healthy Canadians who enjoy sports, wide-ranging instead of narrow physical education can also mean success at elite levels.
"The whole theory is this: if [children] do not have those broad base of generic motor skills, movement skills, then the development of specialized sports skills will either be delayed or will never happen."
In Her Footsteps is scheduled for 5:30 to 9 p.m. Oct. 27 at the SFU Segal Graduate School of Business. Tickets $25. Visit promotionplus.org.
To read more of Gail Wilson's physical education principles, visit vancourier.com/sports.
