A Brief Way to Classify the Sports
While walking down the street, if you get to pass by a park or playground, you can see a number of individuals involved in different activity. Some can be seen engaged in cycling; some are using baseball equipment, while someone is busy giving baseball instruction to the seemingly amateur ones. Almost every one is engaged in some kind of activity. It is pretty obvious that the young ones are more interested in physical activities rather than just sitting or playing board games. Yet, every individual likes a different kind of sports. When we think of classifying the sports into categories, the number of categories is unbelievable. From bat and ball sports to automobile sports, from boarding sports to cue sports, from water sports to sky diving, there are just too many.
Classifying such a number of sports in definite categories is definitely an arduous task. But roughly, we can manage to suggest few criteria that can put a sport in the closest possible category. Using these criteria, the categories that have been formed are as follows,
• Racing Sports: In racing sports, there are a number of competitors racing against each other and sometimes also in teams. The basic objective of a race is to be the fastest and first one to achieve a target. Racing sports can be subcategorized in to three types of sports; human powered sports like running and swimming, Human assisted like cycling and rowing and External powered such as motor sports and sailing.
• Opponent sports: These sports are generally a competition between two opponents where the scores achieved by the players decides the winner. The opponent sports can also be divided into three main categories Court sports are the ones that are played in a court such as tennis, badminton and squash. Combat sports are one on one physical encounter between the opponent like karate and boxing. And the Team sports are one in which teams compete with other teams example football and cricket. It is possible that a court sport is also a team sport.
• Achievement sports: Achievement sports can be taken as the ones in which the players show off their abilities. The categories might help you understand it more clearly. There are three types of achievement sports; Target sports are the ones in which the objective is to hit a target such as shooting and archery. Display sports are the ones in which the participants display certain ability or moves like in bodybuilding, gymnastics and diving. In strength sports, the participants show off their strength as in weight lifting and triple jump.
• Athletics: And finally, there are athletics in which the competitors have to show their abilities in a combination of different sports from above mentioned categories. We can roughly divide these into running, jumping and throwing. The players have to participate in a series of different games and the one with highest over all score is the winner.
This was only a rough categorization of sports, if you go into deeper studies of all these categories. Although, if you study each category individually, you will see that it can still be sub categorized into many other categories as well.