Playing sports helps you stay in shape, teaches you how to orginize your time, boosts friendships and builds relationships with your peers and adults. Through athletics, you gain skills that can best be acquired on court, track or field.

• Friendship
• Family
• Coaches
• Health
• School
• Leadership Skills

Friendship

Playing sports enables you to create friendships you otherwise might not have formed. Sports bring teens together from different schools, backgrounds, and communities. Many times, the friendships you create on the field remain intact even when you are not playing sports.
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Family

The fans on the sidelines are one of the most important parts of the game. The constant support of your parents helps you to feel good about yourself and strengthens your connection to them. As a teen, it is not always easy to find time to spend time with your parents. Sports give you and your parents time to appreciate one another.

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Coaches

Providing wisdom and encouragement, coaches can be very good role models. The relationship that you develop with your coach is very important to the success of the team. Positive coaching helps to bring the team together, and gives players the right tools to push themselves academically and physically.
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Health

Participating in sports improves your health in many ways. To be a good athlete, you must take care of yourself. This gets you thinking about what to eat and how to treat your body to achieve peak performance levels.
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School

It’s a common misconception that being both a student and an athlete is hard if not impossible. Participating in sports can actually have a positive impact on school. Sports force you to organize your time so that you can both go to practice and finish your homework. The key is finding a balance. If you can learn to organize your time then you can succeed in both.
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Leadership Skills

Participating in sports helps build leadership skills. Sports teams give you an opportunity to surround yourself with competitive people and role models, and learn from them both. You can demonstrate your own leadership through team captainships and individual actions to improve your team’s success.

Last reviewed March 2009

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