High school sports can help in many ways to help students in their academics and their future. For instance, it can help students develop time management skills, communication, organization, teamwork, and more. Doing sports in high school can help students mentally and physically. After a long day of school, most students want to rest. However, if students begin after school sports, their blood flow in their brain will improve as well as their behavior, memory, and overall school performance. This mostly helps count for them to have better grades as well. Instead of going directly home after school, a good amount of physical activity would allow students to improve their health and academics.
Students who are involved in sports are most likely to quickly learn about time management. As they balance between their practices, competitions, and school work, athletes have created time management skills for themselves that could help keep track of all these activities (ysnlive.com). Communication is a big factor in school and sports overall. In my own experience before I started sports, I didn’t communicate much with others or work often with others either. However, after joining a sport, it helped me become more communicative with other teammates and coaches. Communication is a key factor in school and is quite important to have. Most students have also found themselves to be more communicative and outgoing after joining sports and have become more involved in their school life as well. Leadership skills are a crucial part of participating in sports. Sports help students to take on leadership roles, such as captains or coordinators for events (ysnlive.com). The leadership experiences that students might get will help provide them with confidence and the ability to help guide others. These roles also help them to make decisions and to motivate other team members. In school, these skills can help students to do well in group projects and other group activities. This will also help them in the long run for any careers they’ll take on because they will already have learned to be well prepared to take on any leadership roles professionally.
Joining sports may also help students’ self-esteem. By participating in sports, they can give themselves a sense of accomplishment, resilience, teamwork, and improve their social skills. When students start seeing that their hard work is paying off, they start feeling more confident and give off a positive impact on their self-esteem. As students start achieving their goals and setting more goals for themselves, they start believing and working hard to achieve any other goals they hope to achieve in the future. Sports also help students learn how to cope with their emotions. They will experience setbacks, know how to handle competition, and manage stress (nordangliaeducation.com). Exercise is known to be a good stress reliever as well. School often stresses students out because of tests, homework, and the environment in general. Any physical activity will help people pump up the production of endorphins. A brain chemical that also boosts happiness and reduces the feeling of pain is called beta-endorphin. This can benefit students because if their mood improves, their mental health will improve positively, making them more likely to work better in school. Exercise also cuts down the negative effects of stress, for example, the fight-or-flight response. It helps the body practice to better work together. The positive effect of this is that it helps lower blood pressure and improve the immune system (mayoclinic.org).
Sports can also help students with problem-solving. In school, students need to solve many problems that are either asked by teachers or in their homework. In sports, they can improve their problem-solving skills by figuring out how they could be better and what strategies are best for them to do well in their sport. They try out different methods among their team to make sure they perform well in games. About every practice, teams try to come up with better ideas to try their best to win games. This skill applies to school because with the ideas and strategies they come up with, they can learn to better come up with new ideas in school to solve problems. Focus is also a major factor in school. When students are in sports, they tend to focus a lot more because it’s something they’re interested in. As students keep focusing on sports, it starts to become more natural for them. Physical activity is also known to improve focus because it challenges your brain and keeps it going. Since a major key in school is all about focus and being engaged, when students learn this skill in their sports, it also helps them learn this skill in their classes. This will also help increase their grades and overall performance in school. Participating in sports is also a great way to motivate students. Other teammates and coaches help motivate their players to do their best in the game and give them a boost to perform well. With people cheering them on, athletes start getting that boost of confidence and motivation to help them keep going. This can help students in school because it could provide them with a better sense of motivation to do well in projects or any other school-related work.
Student athletes joining sports in high school also make them more engaged and productive in doing good at school and getting good grades. If a student gets bad grades, they will be affected by not being able to play in their sport and won’t participate in playing until they get their grades up. When students join sports, they are setting themselves up for success in the long run, so when it comes time to graduate, they will have a history of good grades. A survey conducted by the Minnesota State High School League in 2007 and reported by the NFHS found that the average GPA of a high school athlete was 2.84, while a student who was not involved in athletics had an average GPA of 2.68 (publicschoolreveiw.com). This shows that students who participate in sports during high school are most likely to have a better GPA than students who don’t. Also, many student athletes have gotten scholarships for doing sports since their freshman year! Many student athletes who do high school sports often get scholarships to their dream schools just from progressing in their sport, and get recruited for scholarships. Another benefit to students joining sports in high school is that they can make lifelong friends from sports., Sports often require socializing and some even teamwork, and by being on a team, they can get to know everyone and even find people also similar to them, which builds friendship and makes the sport even more fun!
Joining sports in high school and/or at a young age also builds character for young student athletes. Not only can it make you physically strong, er but it also makes you mentally stronger and more ready for hard challenges. Many student athletes go through times where they make mistakes when playing their sport, a nd this builds a stronger mindset for young athletes because it forces them to learn from their mistakes to do better the next time. Making mistakes builds a stronger mindset because in order to keep playing the sport(s) that they love, they have to learn and understand that not every play will be perfect, and it builds them up to not give up when facing hardships and challenges.
Social skills are crucial for any adult or young adolescent, and participating in high school sports builds those skills more for young students who participate in sports in high school. Athletes are required to talk and at least get to know each other a little to help them perform better at a game. Some sports that require socializing with teammates are, for example, those where communication is crucial for timing and strategy, and football, where quarterbacks and linebackers use verbal communication to call audibles and adjust formations (sportsengine.com). Without communication,n players do not perform as well as when they communicate with each other. Other sports like basketball also use communication as a part of play, they use communication to set screens, call plays, and communicate defensive assignments. Every sport and team needs communication to succeed. Even individual sports like MMA or track/ running, even those sports need communication because they are still a team, and a team needs communication to win. All these things can benefit anyone, but more specifically, any student athlete and set them up for success in the future and lead them to take all the benefits that high school sports give them and implement them into their adult life, so they can use those benefits and skills to succeed even in their adulthood. Many student athletes can even make a living off of their sport in the future if they want to keep pursuing it after the collegiate level as well. As you can see, high school sports can benefit many student athletes for future success and lead them to become great, strong, and powerful individuals.
