7 Sporting Advantages To Education
Playing Sport helps with higher education and carving out a career in the long term
A sporting mentality can boost your academics in several ways.
And there are plenty of well-known people who have achieved in both disciplines.
Tenley Albright was an Olympic gold medal winner in the 1956 Olympic figure skating contest and then turned down the chance to go professional in the sport. She became one of only five women to graduate from Harvard medical school in her year and went on to become a successful doctor.
And Roger Bannister was also able to achieve at sport and academics too. He was the first to break the four-minute mile, a feat many thought impossible at the time. Later he developed tests to detect the use of anabolic steroids in professional athletes showing his awesome academic ability also.
Here are 7 ways how playing sports can help with academic achievement.
1. Good sporting achievement together with good academic achievement can gain you an academic scholarship in a big college or university.
For example, in the United States, you could play in division 1, division 2, or division 3 college. The higher the division that you play in the more likely it that professional scouts will see you playing and offer you a chance to trial for a professional sporting contract.
2. Playing a sport requires you to have teamwork and this means that you need to understand that others are seeking to perform at their best. This helps you understand that competition in sport, as well as academia, is fierce.
By being around teammate that are striving to achieve in both their sporting and academic life you’re learning what it takes to be a dedicated and committed person.
The reality from the academic standpoint is that competition is the lifeblood of academic achievement. Getting the right answer most of the time is what sets great academics apart from good ones.
In sport, if you don’t play great then your opposite opponent usually does. Similarly, if you fail to answer questions correctly regularly that’s allowing others to gain a higher mark as many colleges or universities have a quota of students that they accept for college courses.
3. Playing a sport requires self-discipline and this can be transferred into the application that is required to study academically as well.
Before you can even put on a pair of shorts to compete in the sport you need to have practiced long and hard at the basic skills. Similarly, if you`re trying to write a successful essay, do a test, or complete a project you`ll need to have done your study. This all takes concentrated effort and not everyone is willing to do this to achieve.
4. Those who succeed in sport realize they’ve had to spend time training for their sport and time is also required to achieve academically.
And without that time spent you’ll fail. So, how much time is required? In reality, everyone learns at a different rate but several hours every day over a few years will help you begin to master the basic skills of a sport and also the prime objectives of an academic subject.
5. By being involved in a sport you are learning how to compete to win. To do so you must be open to learning. It’s the same for academia, as you’ll learn a lot from studying.
Although thousands of hours need to be spent practicing a sport before performance is nearly perfected and the same if not more is spent at understanding and memorizing academic works, you’re learning other skills too. This time spent applying yourself forces you to be more organized in the most efficient way possible so that you maximize your success in the short and long term.
6. Sports athletes do not always win they may lose a lot. And to be victorious in the future they need to accept that learning from failure is required.
And it’s the same for academia. You won’t always get top marks so you need to learn from your failures throughout tests and examinations.
For failure will always be your friend if you let it teach you where you went wrong. You may have prepared well for a game or a test, but if you didn’t perform to your full ability then the opponent or examination questions may make you fail.
But to make sure this failure is temporary; you need to learn from it so that you avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
7. A big sporting contest brings pressure to perform. It’s the same when a person is doing an important examination. The more you perform under pressure the better you get at handling pressure.
And that increases the chances that you’ll have at achieving the result you want to achieve. Because by practicing being in the limelight you`ll make yourself more aware of your performance when you`re there. That’s how you learn from your mistakes and give yourself the best opportunities to succeed more too.
