What is one benefit of participating in an individual sport?
My love for sports started when I was a child riding my first BMX bike, throwing from the pitcher’s mound for the first time, and feeling my father’s excitement as he watched Monday night football. Sports are the great unifier. Sports unify people who differ in every imaginable way, yet share one passion: baseball, football, soccer, track, volleyball, golf, and so many other sports. They are one of the few places in life where performance triumphs over sex, religion, association, race, and culture.
The Benefits of Individual Sports
- Discipline
- Learn to be self-motivated
- Accept defeat without placing blame
- You learn to work when no one is watching
- The athlete must embrace competition
- Learn to manage stress on your own
- You can pave your destiny without many external influences (fewer coaches, trainers, and organization leaders that can control your future.)
Stereotypes and Sports
Stereotypes are very real to the people who think according to them, even though they may be based on limited or biased information. Because of stereotypes, some would assume that professional basketball players are black, gifted soccer players are Brazilian, great gymnasts come from Russia, and excellent swimmers reside in Australia. Although we may find some truth in these statements, this may only be part of the equation.
Sports as the Great equalizer
In American inner cities, for example, black youth can easily see the preparation and steps needed for athletic success. They are clear cut: practice, work hard, compete by the rules, and the results will speak for themselves. By contrast, in a corporate environment, the rules may be unknown or ambiguous; the competition may be objectionable, and the results difficult to measure without personal bias.
Black males succeeding in athletics has little to do with a predisposition or genetic makeup and more to do with what black males see as attainable. The very fact that they believe they can become a professional athlete is the reason many rises to that level. Some believe blacks lack intellect. Combine that way of thinking with a substandard educational system, and you will find a lack of success in business and academics. The results are low percentages of African American males in the corporate infrastructure and beyond.
NFL and Black Athletes
But look at an NFL playbook, which is usually over 1500 pages, easy. Ask an athlete to learn this entire playbook in a 4-6 week training camp. After learning the playbook, the athlete is required to make decisions in a matter of 2-3 seconds or less. From my experience playing football, I know that sometimes a missed play at the wrong time could cost you your job, which in turn would cost you at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yet athletes make split-second decisions under a tremendous amount of pressure based on playbooks they learned in 4-6 weeks. Talk about a stressful work environment! And the intelligence it takes to learn a playbook in a limited amount of time, that can vary each week depending on the plays, players, schemes, and coaches you face.
Intelligence and Effort
So black athletes have intelligence; it is just where it is applied. Sport is the one industry that rewards performance over politics. Incorporate the environment and other circumstances, politics, and the social class of society tend to rule.
Individual sport is the opportunity for the disciplined athlete to seize control of their sports career. This is not new, as Rich Williams and Earl Woods, the fathers of Serena and Venus Williams and Tiger Woods, have done. People do not realize the reason they chose these sports was to eliminate all the bias, racism, sexism, and ambiguity.
A weak predisposition to learn in an academic environment is not the basis for such a small percentage of African Americans in corporate America. The cause is simply a lack of examples and equal opportunity in the corporate infrastructure. Just like Brazilian soccer players, Russian tennis phenoms, and the like, their athletic success has more to do with what they believe is attainable and the opportunities provided to them once they meet the standard qualifications. Given good odds, they think they have the chance to succeed if they put their heart, body, and soul into a chosen field.
The key to success is believing that if I put my mind to it, I can do it.
Qualification and Individual Sports
It is not the educational system failing urban youth or lack of intelligence in young African Americans, but the opportunities available to these young people once they’re qualified. I’m not talking about any kind of plan to keep African Americans out of corporate America, but rather, I am talking about having a systematic approach to providing opportunities within corporate America.
You are asking what this has to do with individual sports?
We all have used the phrase, “it’s not what you know, but who you know.” And if there are low percentages of women in upper-level management positions and small percentages of blacks in the corporate environment, wouldn’t it make sense that there are most likely low percentages of opportunities for them in those areas? Most people hire not only who is qualified, but who they feel comfortable with, who they understand and who they are more likely to hang around.
This is why success in corporate America is so complex and somewhat ambiguous. When you look at the cultural makeup, lack of women in upper management positions, low percentages of Hispanics, and blacks at all levels, success becomes more complicated for these groups. Not unattainable, but complicated. Qualifications are not the standards, but rather the ambiguous likability factor, which changes day by day.
The Reality of Individual Sports
I am a big supporter of individual sports that eliminate or decrease the need for referees or outside influences, such as swimming, golf, tennis, track and field, motocross, and bicycling. With the issues coming out about bias in coaching, referees, and recruiting, it is evident that entities outside of competition can make a player ineffective. In team sports such as baseball, basketball, and football, a coach, agent or scout must say you have the ability to play and give you an opportunity on the field. This, too, can become a very biased and ambiguous process that, at times, won’t make sense. In individual sports, talent, hard work, perseverance, and dedication are always rewarded because failure only arises when you choose to quit.
The reason why you should love individuals sports is that if everything else fails, you still have a shot. You have shot…You can set your mind, body, and soul on a path and be the person that decides your fate. Individual sport allows the disciplined, intelligent, determined, hard-working, person to determine their outcome without the ambiguity of bias and corruption. Of course, there is always some element of politics and external influence, but it is limited in individual sports.
Lastly, games by themselves do not build character. This is just a setting. Strong personality, work ethic, discipline can be learned and sharpened while being in a sports environment. The right sports environment can build character, but only if the situation is healthy, safe, planned, and overseen by highly qualified coaches that are balanced, intelligent, discipline, empathic, and of the high character themselves.
This is especially true for the youth sports development stage.
The goals of all youth sports programs should be to train, nurture, and develop young people. Healthy athletic environments will have girls and boys that are achieving at a high level. Track and field is a perfect example of a balanced environment that provides individual and team success. Youth athletes should have healthy fair coaches that have a history of working with children. This is why parents are often the best youth coaches. This is not always the case, but good parents will usually be good coaches at the youth sports development stage.
The 14 Best Individual Sports
- Golf
- Tennis
- Cycling
- Mountain Biking
- Boxing
- MMA
- Swimming
- Motorsports
- Track and Field
- BMX
- Surfing
- Skateboarding
- Skiing
- Snowboarding
Why I Love Golf: This is the reason I love sports — or specifically, golf, because with all things being equal, individual performance is always rewarded. Don’t Stop The Swagger – Play like Arnold Palmer…Prepare your Mind, Body, and Soul for Peak Performance.
I am not against team sports, as I am an advocate for all games. But if you are concerned about being treated fairly or if you have the discipline and makeup to be a self-motivated athlete, individual sports may be a way to go.