The finding is striking precisely because all of the children studied were already participating in organized community sport, a setting often assumed to nurture the building blocks of physical literacy. Fundamental movement skills, often abbreviated as FMS, encompass the basic locomotor and object-control abilities, such as running, jumping, throwing and kicking, that underpin virtually all later physical activity. Decades of research have linked strong motor competence in childhood to higher levels of physical activity, better cardiorespiratory fitness, healthier body weight and sustained participation in sport and recreation through adolescence and into adulthood. Conversely, children with weak motor foundations tend to withdraw from physical activities, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of inactivity and further skill delay that public health researchers describe as a downward spiral.

To measure motor competence, the team used PLAYbasic, one of the Physical Literacy Assessment for Youth tools developed in Canada, which involves direct observation of children performing standardized tasks rather than relying on parental or self-report. Each child was asked to run, hop, throw, kick a ball and hold a balance, with trained assessors scoring technique against developmental criteria. In addition to the skill assessment, children completed the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Older Children, a validated self-report instrument known as the PAQ-C, while parents and guardians provided proxy-reported information on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, outdoor play, the mode of travel to school, parental education and participation in coached sport.

The statistical analysis centered on multivariable linear regression, a technique that allows researchers to estimate the independent contribution of each factor while holding the others constant. In the primary adjusted model, two variables stood out as significant predictors of total FMS scores: older age and participation in coached sport. Together with the other covariates, the model explained 47.8 percent of the variance in skill scores, a substantial proportion for research in this field, with an adjusted R-squared of 0.454. The association between age and skill is expected, since motor competence typically improves as children mature and accumulate practice. The independent effect of coached sport, however, is the finding with the clearest practical implications, because unlike age, it is a potentially modifiable characteristic that communities and policy makers can act upon.

One of the more technically interesting results concerned kicking. The researchers detected a significant interaction between age and gender for kicking performance, meaning that the estimated difference between boys and girls in this skill was not constant across the age range but grew larger among older children. This pattern suggests that gender-related gaps in object-control skills may widen during the middle childhood years, possibly reflecting differences in the types of sport activities, practice opportunities or social encouragement that boys and girls receive as they get older. The authors note that such interactions are important to document because averaged effects can mask diverging developmental trajectories that matter for intervention design.

Perhaps counterintuitively, physical activity levels did not hold up as significant predictors once other factors were accounted for. Both child-reported physical activity on the PAQ-C and parent proxy-reported moderate-to-vigorous physical activity were associated with FMS scores in simple bivariate analyses, but neither remained statistically significant in the fully adjusted model. This dissociation between being active and being skilled carries an important message: the quantity of movement a child accumulates may matter less for motor development than the quality and structure of that movement. Unstructured play, while valuable for many aspects of health, may not by itself provide the instruction, repetition and feedback that children need to refine techniques such as a mature throwing pattern or a well-coordinated kick.

The study fills a notable gap in the literature because most motor competence research has been conducted in large urban centers, and evidence from northern and small-city Canadian settings has been scarce. Geographic context can shape skill development in multiple ways, from the availability and cost of sport programs to the length and severity of winters, the distances families must travel to facilities, and the capacity of local organizations to train coaches. Prince George, the northern British Columbia city where the study took place, experiences long winters and serves scattered surrounding communities, conditions that can constrain year-round access to structured physical activity programming. Understanding how motor competence develops in such settings is essential for designing equitable interventions rather than importing models validated only in major metropolitan areas.

The work was carried out as part of the Physical Literacy for Communities initiative, known as PL4C, which was supported through the Healthy Canadians and Communities Fund of the Public Health Agency of Canada along with financial and in-kind contributions from Sport for Life and its partners. The researchers partnered with Engage Sport North, a regional organization that helped recruit participants and facilitated data collection, and they acknowledge the children, parents, student volunteers and research assistants who made the assessments possible. The study received harmonized research ethics approval through the British Columbia RISe system under protocol H22-01044, and written informed consent was obtained from parents or guardians before any data collection began.

For the authors, the central takeaway is that participation alone is not enough. Even among children already connected to community sport, motor competence clustered at the lowest classification levels, indicating that enrollment does not guarantee the developmental instruction and deliberate practice that skill acquisition requires. They argue that structured, developmentally appropriate opportunities for instruction and skill practice should be embedded within community sport programming, with particular attention to children who join programs late or who receive less coaching exposure. The significant role of coached sport in their models suggests that expanding access to quality coaching, especially in northern and smaller communities where such resources are often limited, could be a concrete lever for improving child motor development and, by extension, long-term physical activity and health.

The researchers are careful to frame their conclusions within the limits of the study design. As a cross-sectional analysis, the study captures a single moment in time and cannot establish whether coached sport causes better motor skills or whether more skilled children are simply more likely to stay in coached programs. The sample of 166 children, while adequate for the regression models employed, was drawn from a single city, and two-thirds of the participants were boys, factors that may limit generalizability. The authors call for longitudinal and intervention studies to clarify the causal relationships and to identify concrete strategies for supporting fundamental movement skills, motor competence and broader physical literacy in northern and small-city contexts. Until such evidence accumulates, the study stands as a warning that the assumed pipeline from community sport participation to physical literacy may be leaking badly, and that deliberate, well-coached skill instruction is the repair it likely needs.

Subject of Research: Fundamental movement skill competence among children aged 6 to 12 participating in community sport programs in a northern Canadian city

Article Title: Fundamental movement skills among children participating in community sport programs in a northern Canadian city: implications for equitable access and physical literacy development

Article References: Fundamental movement skills among children participating in community sport programs in a northern Canadian city: implications for equitable access and physical literacy development. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29440-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29440-4

Keywords: fundamental movement skills, physical literacy, motor competence, community sport, children, coached sport, physical activity, health equity, northern Canada, PLAYbasic, BMC Public Health, public health