The correlation between playing team sports and academic success

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Being an athlete as a child typically means the child will have to spend extra hours throughout the week to practice, and playing on a team usually adds sports events to the child’s schedule where the child would have to miss school to attend. On top of these extracurricular activities, homework is usually required to be done at the same date it is required for non-athlete students. These factors may be thought of as an added stress children nowadays have to face, and it may be expected for athletes to have subpar academic achievement compared to non-athlete students. However, this is far from the truth. Recent studies have shown that athletes actually perform very well in school, even with this added stress. According to Medina (2008), what may seem as unusual academic performance of athletes may be tied back to the lifestyle of early human ancestors. Fifty thousand years ago, the ancestors of humans were constantly on the move, with the men walking daily up to twenty kilometres, and around half that for the women. They were always moving for many reasons: in search of food, escaping from predators, and exploring and learning about their land. Because of this, they did all their learning while being physically active. This, combined with the fact that our brain evolves extremely slowly, contributes to the hypothesis that the human race does its best learning while getting exercise. According to an article by Rosenkrantz (1997), in addition to the effects of exercise on the mental capabilities of a person, it is also believed that exercise in the form of team sports is beneficial to an individual. Playing on a team teaches valuable skills that may not be obtained in school or other places in a child’s life. These skills includ... ... middle of paper ... ...ccording to Singh, these studies must focus on using objective measures to record physical activity along with studies that explore the effects of the dose-response relationship that exists between physical activity and academic performance. Even with the absence of a good number of high quality studies, Singh believes a significantly positive connection has been discovered between physical activity and academic performance. The next step in confirming this hypothesis is to figure out how the two are intertwined. Works Cited http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/232899567/14174687A9774AA81B6/14?accountid=9358 http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/218184887/1417459703F558EB26E/1?accountid=9358 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1746-1561.2009.00454.x/abstract http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=doctoral

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