Athletic Leadership

The influence of athletics on student growth and development is significant. The core values, teamwork, and discipline often associated with participation in sports enables students to develop the personal and professional skills well suited to leadership positions. In addition to this benefit of athletics, many minority and female athletes are achieving positions of leadership. In large part, this is due to the reduced number of barriers to advancement athletics offers athletes compared to society at large with respect to gender and race. Gerber (2003) argues that team sports create leaders because of the following aspects of athletic participation:

Team sports create an understanding of teamwork and loyalty.

Team sports build players’ confidence.

Team sports teach how to fail and recover.

Team sports build competitive spirit.

This analysis will discuss the values and qualities of athletics that help promote leadership in individuals, including numerous leadership opportunities increasingly being won by minorities and women.

Knowing how to recover from failure, knowing how to win gracefully, knowing how to be a team player, and understanding sacrifice, hard work, and loyalty promote success are all qualities of an effective leader. So too, these qualities are inherent in the core values of athletic participation. High ethical standards, self-confidenc

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gues that when you consider the similarities between athletic success and leadership success, it is really little wonder that many high-ranking female executives have sports trophies sitting in their offices: If you think about it, it’s logical that many female executives come from athletic backgrounds. Business is, after all, about winning and losing. The lessons learned on a softball diamond or basketball court are often unavailable in a business-school lecture hall. Through competition with individuals or teams, athletes learn to deal with stress factors and failure. Sports are a great catalyst to the old adage, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. In the business world this is an invaluable lesson. (17) Women are not the only ones who have benefited from athletics ability to prepare students for leadership success. Arthur Ashe was a role model for many students because he was a unique combination of skilled athlete and admired scholar. Today the Williams’ sisters and Tiger Woods demonstrate there are no barriers for people of color in the sports or business world. Educational leadership in athletes is critical to promoting the values and skills in students that will promote future success. African America
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Approximate Word count = 2363
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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