Image Credit: Salman Hossain Saif
Recently, Singaporean badminton player Loh Kean Yew won the 2021 BWF World Championships in Spain. This is one of the biggest sporting news in Singapore this year.
Loh was born in Penang, Malaysia, and only migrated to Singapore when he was 13 years old. In Singapore, he attended the Singapore Sports School under a scholarship.
As a sport psychology scholar, I am curious if youth who left their home at a young age to pursue a sporting dream in another country would always have that something extra to be a champion. If they do, we need to learn about it more.
Incidentally, another Singaporean champion athlete, Olympic gold medalist Joseph Schooling also left Singapore for the United States to train more seriously when he was 13.
Maybe living away from daddy and mommy works in a mysterious way.
I dug further to see if there are other examples.
I found that soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo left Madeira for Alcochete in his teens to join Sporting CP's youth academy. Looking up the map, I realized that Madeira is an island, and the flight time to Alcohete is 1 hr 40 minutes.
Not as far as Singapore to the United States, but further than Penang to Singapore.
I am sure there are other examples of youth athletes leaving home at a young age to pursue their sporting dreams, and eventually succeeding at the world stage. It would be nice to speak to them all.
Could the experience of migrating young somehow shape one's resilience and determination, assuming the experience of leaving home did not break them?
One recent study by Gatt and colleagues in 2020 suggests, in part, that "migrant adolescents showed greater resilience resources than non-migrants". There are more findings in the paper that deserves attention if you are interested. Here is the link to the full paper. Anyway, such a finding suggests that migration as a youth can be done right, and it can shape resilience.
Since resilience is important in sport, maybe we need to know more.
But work done on this issue in sport psychology is currently scarce, based on my very quick scan of the literature.
In recent work, Garrett and colleagues (2020) interviewed several elite athletes studying in universities who had left the UK for the US to study and train, and found "positive reframing" as one of the themes uncovered from the interview. The participants in their study are not exactly youth adolescents, but it is interesting to see a tinge of explanation of resilience within.
Maybe in the future, a separate work on how adolescents cope with challenges at a tender age and how it shapes resilience and determination in sport would find more interesting results.
Indeed, this whole issue of youth migrating to pursue sports dreams seems to be an interesting topic that deserves further research. Hopefully, we can see more works in this area.
Perhaps that could add to another explanation as to why Loh, Schooling, and Ronaldo are successful.
References
Gatt, J. M., Alexander, R., Emond, A., Foster, K., Hadfield, K., Mason-Jones, A., Reid, S., Theron, L., Ungar, M., Wouldes, T. A., & Wu, Q. (2020). Trauma, resilience, and mental health in migrant and non-migrant youth: An international cross-sectional study across six countries. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, 997. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00997
Garrett, S., Vickers, E., Fletcher, D., & Taylor, G. (2020). Sport migration from the UK to the US: The student-athlete experience. Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education, 14(1), 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/19357397.2020.1736487
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