INTRODUCTION: Researchers have stated that life-skills are important in positive youth development. Life-skills Development Program (LSP) is revealed to be one of the essential components for the positive youth development framework. However, few studies have applied Life-Skills Development Interventions to Young elite athletes. We reported the results of LSP for three years to young elite women footballers. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of LSD, for three years, on athletes` psychological competitive abilities on young elite athletes. METHODS: Eighty-one female young footballers of elite academy in Japan, aged 13 to 15yrs, participated in the LSP for three years. the LSP was age-specific and consisted of several group-work lessons designed to develop psychological skills (goal setting, emotion control, self-recognition, empathy with colleagues, decision making, problem-solving, management for stress, leadership and career planning). The LSP was delivered to players in the classroom of their dormitory every other month. To assess their psychological skills, two questionnaires of life-skills were conducted about the daily life and the sport domain before and after the intervention. RESULTS: Wilcoxon signed-rank test were performed for the changes on both scores before and after the LSP. The scores of both scales in the two questionnaires significantly increased after the LSP(life-skills of Daily life: Z=4.13, p<0.001; Life-skills of sport domain: Z=3.368, p<0.001. Scores for several factors also improved after the intervention. CONCLUSION: Our results showed that the continuous intervention of the LSP had positive impacts on the psychological development of young elite athletes in both domains of "Daily life" and "Sport field". This finding revealed that LSP could enhance athletes` psychological skills in the athletic field. The results also showed that our LSP also had little impact on participants about several factors. Therefore, it is also suggested that we need to improve our context of the LSP. To achieve more effective intervention, practitioners of the youth development framework need to develop programs that adopt practical context based on their sport field.
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