The Importance of Being a Leader in Organized Youth Sports

Leadership Opportunities

• In sports, children are presented with the opportunity to act as both leaders and team players. Even sports that are technically individual competitions, such as swimming and track, depend on the athletes to work as a team to win points for each other. Within the team, leadership opportunities include being a team captain and making decisions on the field, pitch, track, or in the water that affect the entire team. A child has to learn how to take charge of a situation, react quickly and share the effort with other players, all skills that develop leadership and problem solving in youth.

Leadership and Team Work

• Leaders, in every capacity, depend on their team for success. Whether the team is a group of adults in a business, or children playing soccer, the leader can not succeed without a well organized and communicating team. Leadership in youth sports teaches children how to both lead a team, and work within one. The captain of a sports team, whether it be a swim captain or a cheerleading captain, has to learn how to recognize the potential and strengths of each team member to know where to most effectively play each person. After placing people, the captain must plan strategies for the team, and communicate everyone's role. This is a microcosm of the adult world, and teaches youth how to maturely work with their peers to achieve a goal.

Leadership Lessons Applied to School

• The lessons that a youth learns in sports about leadership and teamwork can easily be translated into a classroom setting. A leader in the classroom is a student who takes initiative for her own education by asking questions, researching topics and points of inquiry, working with other students and setting an example as a peer mentor. In sports, a student can learn problem solving skills and how to handle a high pressure situation that requires calm and quick thinking. This is commutable to a class where there is pressure from test scores, projects, essays and mixing a social life with an academic life. A student who is better prepared to handle this mix will fare much better and is far more likely to succeed than a student who is not.

Leadership Lessons Applied to Other Activities

• Children participate in a score of extra-curricular activities in addition to sports that range from music, to theatre, to Future Farmers of America to Model United Nations. There are a multitude of leadership opportunities in these activities, including being an officer, to a project leader, to a delegate. Students who have participated in sports have had to learn how to juggle their time to manage school, family, friends, and their activity, making them the ideal candidate to take on additional extra-curricular activities and fulfilling their obligations.

Leadership Lessons Applied to Careers

• After finishing school, students will enter the work force and be expected to work as a team, manage tasks, schedule multiple obligations every day, and lead their peers. All of these are elements of playing sports. Careers are also a competitive field, and students who have participated in sports will have already dealt with the emotional, and sometimes physical strain of competition, and will subsequently be better equipped to handle it upon entering the job market.