During the recently concluded Weird Pandemic Year, it seemed like there was an uptick in the number of student-organized events on campus, mostly over Zoom, presumably in an effort to stave off boredom. One of these was a panel, organized by some students from the women’s basketball team, asking faculty and staff who had played sports in college to talk about the benefits of that for their careers.

This probably sounds like a weird idea to many faculty, because they feel athletics detract from academics (to the point where a lot of them are reflexively anti-sports). It initially seemed an unlikely topic to me, as well, because academia isn’t all that overtly sporty– career benefits from playing sports seems like more a Thing in the business world, where my finance-industry friends from college cut deals on the golf course, and so on. On thinking about it a bit more, though, before and during the discussion, I think there are some really positive features that are at least in part traceable to my past playing sports.

On the more trivial end, there are things like an attention to rules and structure that come from playing sports. I’m usually good about hitting deadlines for things, in large part because I played basketball back in the day for coaches from the “When I say practice starts at 5, that means you have to be done with the 15-minute pre-practice warm-up routine by 5:00” school. That really fixed the idea of needing to be ahead of the official schedule in my head, and it’s stayed there all these years (which is sometimes socially awkward…) Similarly, I generally like having athletes in class, because for the most part, when I tell them that a certain thing is due on a certain date, they will produce (a version of) that thing by that date. They might have as much time to devote to it as some other students, or assign it as high a priority, but they’re much less likely to beg for extensions or otherwise view the rules as fully negotiable.

Similarly, there’s a tolerance for a certain degree of adversity that comes from having to fight through getting good at a sport that comes in handy. For one thing, nothing Reviewer 3 says is ever going to upset me as much as stuff I’ve had yelled at me in basketball practice. And there’s a bit of the “Confusion Is the Sweat of Learning” attitude (tm-Rhett Allain) in there, too: I know what it’s like to suck at something and then become good, and recognize that the process involves a lot of false starts and mis-steps along the way. Again, this is a trait that I appreciate when I have athletes in class, who often are a bit more chill about not getting something right off than students for whom school has always come very naturally, who can get upset when they hit harder material that they don’t grasp right away.

(There are, of course, athletes for whom sports come very naturally, who struggle when they hit a higher level of competition, and don’t deal well with that. They’ve mostly washed out by the time they would get to us, though; we’re much more likely to see students hitting the academic version of that problem for the first time.)

The biggest thing that’s served me well, though, that comes out of playing sports for many years, is a kind of competitive attitude that’s a good antidote to impostor syndrome. In order to get good at sports, you have to challenge yourself by playing against people who are better than you are. And that necessarily means you will occasionally find yourself taking the field against somebody who at first glance it seems like you have no business competing with. The secret to success is finding a way to compete anyway, to raise your game to something more like their level.

(When The Pip was worried about his baseball playoff games, I told him a story about the coach of some famous underdog team (I remember hearing it as Jim Valvano of NC State, though couldn’t confirm that on Google) who was asked “Do you really think your team has a chance to beat [Favorite]?” and replied “I think we’re the only ones with a chance to beat them, because we’re the only ones playing.” That’s the right attitude to take into any competition.)

That refusal to be cowed is incredibly useful in all kinds of non-athletic contexts, too. I’ve had a lot of occasions where I’ve found myself on a list of panelists or invitees to some event and thought “What are they thinking putting me in with these people?” One of the ways I get through that is to draw on the same stupid competitiveness that makes me take the court and match up against guys 20 years my junior who are better athletes than I ever was. If that’s what I’ve got to do to be in the game, well, I’m going to do my damnedest to find a way to be better than I’ve been before.

Now, I’m not saying that sports is the only way to get these kinds of results– in particular, I suspect you could get a lot of it from music, as well, particularly if you’re in a system where section chairs and the like are competitive. I think it’s a good demonstration, though, that even things that too many of my colleagues would say are in direct opposition to academic success are, in fact, complementary to it. You can pick up skills and character traits through extracurricular activities that turn out to be extremely helpful in a professional context, even when the two areas seem to have nothing whatsoever in common. In many cases, this can more than justify the apparent loss of time to practices and competitions.

So, as I said, it was an illuminating discussion, and I’m glad the students put it together and I agreed to do it. It was also interesting to trip over the fact that even I have internalized the idea that sports and academics are completely separate, if not in tension. It’s also a necessary reminder of a thing I say a lot to other faculty about student life stuff: that it’s important to think carefully and honestly about what positive features students are actually getting out of the the things that they do. Especially when those activities don’t seem directly connected to our overall mission, or when they’re not necessarily things that we’d choose to do in their position.