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How sport can have a positive impact on mental and physical health

It’s not always easy to start a workout, but research shows that sport and exercise are beneficial not only for your physical health, but your mental well-being, too. Let us help!

Health experts and Olympic athletes agree: Your mental and physical health benefit when you get active and participate in sport – whatever that means for you.

From daily exercise to choosing a sport to practice or play, the body and mind are worked in new and different ways each time you move your body.

On June 23rd every year we come together to celebrate that, as part of Olympic Day.

For the 2020 edition, we connected with Olympians around the world for Olympic Day 2020 at-home workouts – and a reminder: We’re stronger together, especially when we stay active!

And those are still available online to help inspire you today.

Sport benefits: Both the physical and mental

While the physical benefits are numerous (more on that below), the UK's National Health Service (NHS) report that people who take part in regular physical activity have up to a 30 percent lower risk of depression.

Additionally, exercise can help lower anxiety, reduce the risk of illness and increase energy levels. Want better sleep? Work up a good sweat!

Exercise can help you fall asleep faster and sleep for longer, research says.

It was in June 2020 that the IOC partnered with the World Health Organization and United Nations to promote the #HEALTHYTogether campaign , which highlights the benefits of physical activity in the face of the pandemic.

Over 50 at-home workouts are searchable across Olympics.com for you, each which help further the idea that moving and challenging the body can only prove beneficial for your physical and mental well-being.

The athletes' perspective: 'I used this strength to survive'

“If I had sat doing nothing, I would have gone crazy,” says Syria's Sanda Aldass , who fled the trauma of civil war in her country, leaving behind her husband and infant child.

Instead, she had judo - and has been selected for the IOC Refugee Olympic Team Tokyo 2020 for the Games in 2021.

“Running around and doing some exercises filled up my time and also kept me in good mental health,” Sanda said of the impact of sport on her life during nine months spent in a refugee camp in the Netherlands in 2015.

The same power of sport goes for Iranian taekwondo athlete Ali Noghandoost.

"When I had to leave my family and my home in Iran, the first things I packed in my bag were my belt, my dobok, my shoes and my mitt for taekwondo," Noghandoost said . "I took some documents that said I was a champion in Iran and in a national team, so I could prove I was a fighter and continue to train in any city I went to."

"Taekwondo did not only help me physically; mentally, it stopped me from thinking about giving up and that we wouldn’t make it. I used this strength to survive," he added.

Noghandoost has worked as a coach for refugees in Croatia, where he has tried to pass the power of sport on to the next generation.

"When you’re living in a refugee camp, it’s a really hard situation, but when you play sport, you can release any negative energy and feel free. It’s a space – a paradise – for them to be themselves."

A member of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team Rio 2016, Yiech Pur Biel says that the team provided a message of hope for those watching around the world.

"We were ambassadors for a message of hope, that anything is possible," Biel said . "A good thing had come out of our situations. The world understood. I am called a refugee, but you never know when someone else might become a refugee, through war or persecution. We wanted to show that we responded positively. So that made me very happy. Through sport, we can unite and make the world better."

Sport as a tool for much - including mental health

Sport is a powerful tool no matter from what angle you look at it, including mental health. The Olympic Refugee Foundation (ORF) has recently launched two different programs that are aimed at helping young refugees dream of a brighter future - through sport.

One of those programs, Game Connect, is a three-year initiative that was launched in August 2020 and aims to "improve the mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of young refugees by improving their access to safe sport," as explained on Olympics.com last year.

We are "embarking on a three-year project to improve the psychosocial wellbeing and mental health of young refugees, working together with well-trained community-based coaches to deliver a Sport for Protection program and activities," explained Karen Mukiibi of Youth Sport Uganda, which has partnered with the ORF.

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The health benefits of sport and physical activity

Although research interest on physical activity and health dates back to the 1950s, the breakthrough in the scientific evidence on health benefits of physical activity largely took place during the 1980s and 1990s. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence on the positive effects of sport and physical activity as part of a healthy lifestyle. The positive, direct effects of engaging in regular physical activity are particularly apparent in the prevention of several chronic diseases, including: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, obesity, depression and osteoporosis.

The Report from the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Sport for Development and Peace states that young people can benefit from physical activity as it contributes to developing healthy bones, efficient heart and lung function as well as improved motor skills and cognitive function. Physical activity can help to prevent hip fractures among women and reduce the effects of osteoporosis. Remaining physically active can enhance functional capacity among older people, and can help to maintain quality of life and independence.

Physical activity and psychosocial health

The WHO has estimated that “one in four patients visiting a health service has at least one mental, neurological or behavioural disorder, but most of these disorders are neither diagnosed nor treated”. A number of studies have shown that  exercise may play a therapeutic role in addressing a number of psychological disorders . Studies also show that exercise has a positive influence on depression. Physical self-worth and physical self-perception, including body image, has been linked to improved self-esteem. The evidence relating to health benefits of physical activity predominantly focuses on intra-personal factors such as physiological, cognitive and affective benefits, however, that does not exclude the social and inter-personal benefits of sport and physical activity which can also produce positive health effects in individuals and communities.

Sport and physical activity as part of a healthy lifestyle

A number of factors influence the way in which sport and physical activity impacts on health in different populations. Sport and physical activity in itself may not directly lead to benefits but, in combination with other factors, can promote healthy lifestyles. There is evidence to suggest that changes in the environment can have a significant impact on opportunities for participation and in addition, the  conditions under which the activity is taking place can heavily impact on health outcomes . Elements that may be determinants on health include nutrition, intensity and type of physical activity, appropriate footwear and clothing, climate, injury, stress levels and sleep patterns.

Sport and physical activity can make a substantial contribution to the well-being of people in  developing countries . Exercise, physical activity and sport have long been used in the  treatment and rehabilitation of communicable and non-communicable diseases . Physical activity for individuals is a strong means for the  prevention of diseases  and for nations is a cost-effective method to improve public health across populations.

Key Reading

• Health Benefits of Physical Activity: the evidence
• Health and Development Through Physical Activity and Sport

Steering Board Members

• Systematic review update
• Open access
• Published: 21 June 2023

The impact of sports participation on mental health and social outcomes in adults: a systematic review and the ‘Mental Health through Sport’ conceptual model

• Narelle Eather   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6320-4540 1 , 2 ,
• Levi Wade   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4007-5336 1 , 3 ,
• Aurélie Pankowiak   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0178-513X 4 &
• Rochelle Eime   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8614-2813 4 , 5  

Systematic Reviews volume  12 , Article number:  102 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Sport is a subset of physical activity that can be particularly beneficial for short-and-long-term physical and mental health, and social outcomes in adults. This study presents the results of an updated systematic review of the mental health and social outcomes of community and elite-level sport participation for adults. The findings have informed the development of the ‘Mental Health through Sport’ conceptual model for adults.

Nine electronic databases were searched, with studies published between 2012 and March 2020 screened for inclusion. Eligible qualitative and quantitative studies reported on the relationship between sport participation and mental health and/or social outcomes in adult populations. Risk of bias (ROB) was determined using the Quality Assessment Tool (quantitative studies) or Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (qualitative studies).

The search strategy located 8528 articles, of which, 29 involving adults 18–84 years were included for analysis. Data was extracted for demographics, methodology, and study outcomes, and results presented according to study design. The evidence indicates that participation in sport (community and elite) is related to better mental health, including improved psychological well-being (for example, higher self-esteem and life satisfaction) and lower psychological ill-being (for example, reduced levels of depression, anxiety, and stress), and improved social outcomes (for example, improved self-control, pro-social behavior, interpersonal communication, and fostering a sense of belonging). Overall, adults participating in team sport had more favorable health outcomes than those participating in individual sport, and those participating in sports more often generally report the greatest benefits; however, some evidence suggests that adults in elite sport may experience higher levels of psychological distress. Low ROB was observed for qualitative studies, but quantitative studies demonstrated inconsistencies in methodological quality.

Conclusions

The findings of this review confirm that participation in sport of any form (team or individual) is beneficial for improving mental health and social outcomes amongst adults. Team sports, however, may provide more potent and additional benefits for mental and social outcomes across adulthood. This review also provides preliminary evidence for the Mental Health through Sport model, though further experimental and longitudinal evidence is needed to establish the mechanisms responsible for sports effect on mental health and moderators of intervention effects. Additional qualitative work is also required to gain a better understanding of the relationship between specific elements of the sporting environment and mental health and social outcomes in adult participants.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The organizational structure of sport and the performance demands characteristic of sport training and competition provide a unique opportunity for participants to engage in health-enhancing physical activity of varied intensity, duration, and mode; and the opportunity to do so with other people as part of a team and/or club. Participation in individual and team sports have shown to be beneficial to physical, social, psychological, and cognitive health outcomes [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Often, the social and mental health benefits facilitated through participation in sport exceed those achieved through participation in other leisure-time or recreational activities [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. Notably, these benefits are observed across different sports and sub-populations (including youth, adults, older adults, males, and females) [ 11 ]. However, the evidence regarding sports participation at the elite level is limited, with available research indicating that elite athletes may be more susceptible to mental health problems, potentially due to the intense mental and physical demands placed on elite athletes [ 12 ].

Participation in sport varies across the lifespan, with children representing the largest cohort to engage in organized community sport [ 13 ]. Across adolescence and into young adulthood, dropout from organized sport is common, and especially for females [ 14 , 15 , 16 ], and adults are shifting from organized sports towards leisure and fitness activities, where individual activities (including swimming, walking, and cycling) are the most popular [ 13 , 17 , 18 , 19 ]. Despite the general decline in sport participation with age [ 13 ], the most recent (pre-COVID) global data highlights that a range of organized team sports (such as, basketball, netball volleyball, and tennis) continue to rank highly amongst adult sport participants, with soccer remaining a popular choice across all regions of the world [ 13 ]. It is encouraging many adults continue to participate in sport and physical activities throughout their lives; however, high rates of dropout in youth sport and non-participation amongst adults means that many individuals may be missing the opportunity to reap the potential health benefits associated with participation in sport.

According to the World Health Organization, mental health refers to a state of well-being and effective functioning in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, is resilient to the stresses of life, and is able to make a positive contribution to his or her community [ 20 ]. Mental health covers three main components, including psychological, emotional and social health [ 21 ]. Further, psychological health has two distinct indicators, psychological well-being (e.g., self-esteem and quality of life) and psychological ill-being (e.g., pre-clinical psychological states such as psychological difficulties and high levels of stress) [ 22 ]. Emotional well-being describes how an individual feels about themselves (including life satisfaction, interest in life, loneliness, and happiness); and social well–being includes an individual’s contribution to, and integration in society [ 23 ].

Mental illnesses are common among adults and incidence rates have remained consistently high over the past 25 years (~ 10% of people affected globally) [ 24 ]. Recent statistics released by the World Health Organization indicate that depression and anxiety are the most common mental disorders, affecting an estimated 264 million people, ranking as one of the main causes of disability worldwide [ 25 , 26 ]. Specific elements of social health, including high levels of isolation and loneliness among adults, are now also considered a serious public health concern due to the strong connections with ill-health [ 27 ]. Participation in sport has shown to positively impact mental and social health status, with a previous systematic review by Eime et al. (2013) indicated that sports participation was associated with lower levels of perceived stress, and improved vitality, social functioning, mental health, and life satisfaction [ 1 ]. Based on their findings, the authors developed a conceptual model (health through sport) depicting the relationship between determinants of adult sports participation and physical, psychological, and social health benefits of participation. In support of Eime’s review findings, Malm and colleagues (2019) recently described how sport aids in preventing or alleviating mental illness, including depressive symptoms and anxiety or stress-related disease [ 7 ]. Andersen (2019) also highlighted that team sports participation is associated with decreased rates of depression and anxiety [ 11 ]. In general, these reviews report stronger effects for sports participation compared to other types of physical activity, and a dose–response relationship between sports participation and mental health outcomes (i.e., higher volume and/or intensity of participation being associated with greater health benefits) when adults participate in sports they enjoy and choose [ 1 , 7 ]. Sport is typically more social than other forms of physical activity, including enhanced social connectedness, social support, peer bonding, and club support, which may provide some explanation as to why sport appears to be especially beneficial to mental and social health [ 28 ].

Thoits (2011) proposed several potential mechanisms through which social relationships and social support improve physical and psychological well-being [ 29 ]; however, these mechanisms have yet to be explored in the context of sports participation at any level in adults. The identification of the mechanisms responsible for such effects may direct future research in this area and help inform future policy and practice in the delivery of sport to enhance mental health and social outcomes amongst adult participants. Therefore, the primary objective of this review was to examine and synthesize all research findings regarding the relationship between sports participation, mental health and social outcomes at the community and elite level in adults. Based on the review findings, the secondary objective was to develop the ‘Mental Health through Sport’ conceptual model.

This review has been registered in the PROSPERO systematic review database and assigned the identifier: CRD42020185412. The conduct and reporting of this systematic review also follows the Preferred Reporting for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines [ 30 ] (PRISMA flow diagram and PRISMA Checklist available in supplementary files ). This review is an update of a previous review of the same topic [ 31 ], published in 2012.

Identification of studies

Nine electronic databases (CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, Informit, Medline, PsychINFO, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, Scopus, and SPORTDiscus) were systematically searched for relevant records published from 2012 to March 10, 2020. The following key terms were developed by all members of the research team (and guided by previous reviews) and entered into these databases by author LW: sport* AND health AND value OR benefit* OR effect* OR outcome* OR impact* AND psych* OR depress* OR stress OR anxiety OR happiness OR mood OR ‘quality of life’ OR ‘social health’ OR ‘social relation*’ OR well* OR ‘social connect*’ OR ‘social functioning’ OR ‘life satisfac*’ OR ‘mental health’ OR social OR sociolog* OR affect* OR enjoy* OR fun. Where possible, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) were also used.

Criteria for inclusion/exclusion

The titles of studies identified using this method were screened by LW. Abstract and full text of the articles were reviewed independently by LW and NE. To be included in the current review, each study needed to meet each of the following criteria: (1) published in English from 2012 to 2020; (2) full-text available online; (3) original research or report published in a peer-reviewed journal; (4) provides data on the psychological or social effects of participation in sport (with sport defined as a subset of exercise that can be undertaken individually or as a part of a team, where participants adhere to a common set of rules or expectations, and a defined goal exists); (5) the population of interest were adults (18 years and older) and were apparently healthy. All papers retrieved in the initial search were assessed for eligibility by title and abstract. In cases where a study could not be included or excluded via their title and abstract, the full text of the article was reviewed independently by two of the authors.

Data extraction

For the included studies, the following data was extracted independently by LW and checked by NE using a customized Google Docs spreadsheet: author name, year of publication, country, study design, aim, type of sport (e.g., tennis, hockey, team, individual), study conditions/comparisons, sample size, where participants were recruited from, mean age of participants, measure of sports participation, measure of physical activity, psychological and/or social outcome/s, measure of psychological and/or social outcome/s, statistical method of analysis, changes in physical activity or sports participation, and the psychological and/or social results.

Risk of bias (ROB) assessment

A risk of bias was performed by LW and AP independently using the ‘Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies’ OR the ‘Quality Assessment of Controlled Intervention Studies’ for the included quantitative studies, and the ‘Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) Checklist for the included qualitative studies [ 32 , 33 ]. Any discrepancies in the ROB assessments were discussed between the two reviewers, and a consensus reached.

The search yielded 8528 studies, with a total of 29 studies included in the systematic review (Fig.  1 ). Tables  1 and 2 provide a summary of the included studies. The research included adults from 18 to 84 years old, with most of the evidence coming from studies targeting young adults (18–25 years). Study samples ranged from 14 to 131, 962, with the most reported psychological outcomes being self-rated mental health ( n  = 5) and depression ( n  = 5). Most studies did not investigate or report the link between a particular sport and a specific mental health or social outcome; instead, the authors’ focused on comparing the impact of sport to physical activity, and/or individual sports compared to team sports. The results of this review are summarized in the following section, with findings presented by study design (cross-sectional, experimental, and longitudinal).

Flow of studies through the review process

Effects of sports participation on psychological well-being, ill-being, and social outcomes

Cross-sectional evidence.

This review included 14 studies reporting on the cross-sectional relationship between sports participation and psychological and/or social outcomes. Sample sizes range from n  = 414 to n  = 131,962 with a total of n  = 239,394 adults included across the cross-sectional studies.

The cross-sectional evidence generally supports that participation in sport, and especially team sports, is associated with greater mental health and psychological wellbeing in adults compared to non-participants [ 36 , 59 ]; and that higher frequency of sports participation and/or sport played at a higher level of competition, are also linked to lower levels of mental distress in adults . This was not the case for one specific study involving ice hockey players aged 35 and over, with Kitchen and Chowhan (2016) Kitchen and Chowhan (2016) reporting no relationship between participation in ice hockey and either mental health, or perceived life stress [ 54 ]. There is also some evidence to support that previous participation in sports (e.g., during childhood or young adulthood) is linked to better mental health outcomes later in life, including improved mental well-being and lower mental distress [ 59 ], even after controlling for age and current physical activity.

Compared to published community data for adults, elite or high-performance adult athletes demonstrated higher levels of body satisfaction, self-esteem, and overall life satisfaction [ 39 ]; and reported reduced tendency to respond to distress with anger and depression. However, rates of psychological distress were higher in the elite sport cohort (compared to community norms), with nearly 1 in 5 athletes reporting ‘high to very high’ distress, and 1 in 3 reporting poor mental health symptoms at a level warranting treatment by a health professional in one study ( n  = 749) [ 39 ].

Four studies focused on the associations between physical activity and sports participation and mental health outcomes in older adults. Physical activity was associated with greater quality of life [ 56 ], with the relationship strongest for those participating in sport in middle age, and for those who cycled in later life (> 65) [ 56 ]. Group physical activities (e.g., walking groups) and sports (e.g., golf) were also significantly related to excellent self-rated health, low depressive symptoms, high health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and a high frequency of laughter in males and females [ 60 , 61 ]. No participation or irregular participation in sport was associated with symptoms of mild to severe depression in older adults [ 62 ].

Several cross-sectional studies examined whether the effects of physical activity varied by type (e.g., total physical activity vs. sports participation). In an analysis of 1446 young adults (mean age = 18), total physical activity, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and team sport were independently associated with mental health [ 46 ]. Relative to individual physical activity, after adjusting for covariates and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), only team sport was significantly associated with improved mental health. Similarly, in a cross-sectional analysis of Australian women, Eime, Harvey, Payne (2014) reported that women who engaged in club and team-based sports (tennis or netball) reported better mental health and life satisfaction than those who engaged in individual types of physical activity [ 47 ]. Interestingly, there was no relationship between the amount of physical activity and either of these outcomes, suggesting that other qualities of sports participation contribute to its relationship to mental health and life satisfaction. There was also some evidence to support a relationship between exercise type (ball sports, aerobic activity, weightlifting, and dancing), and mental health amongst young adults (mean age 22 years) [ 48 ], with ball sports and dancing related to fewer symptoms of depression in students with high stress; and weightlifting related to fewer depressive symptoms in weightlifters exhibiting low stress.

Longitudinal evidence

Eight studies examined the longitudinal relationship between sports participation and either mental health and/or social outcomes. Sample sizes range from n  = 113 to n  = 1679 with a total of n  = 7022 adults included across the longitudinal studies.

Five of the included longitudinal studies focused on the relationship between sports participation in childhood or adolescence and mental health in young adulthood. There is evidence that participation in sport in high-school is protective of future symptoms of anxiety (including panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, social phobia, and agoraphobia) [ 42 ]. Specifically, after controlling for covariates (including current physical activity), the number of years of sports participation in high school was shown to be protective of symptoms of panic and agoraphobia in young adulthood, but not protective of symptoms of social phobia or generalized anxiety disorder [ 42 ]. A comparison of individual or team sports participation also revealed that participation in either context was protective of panic disorder symptoms, while only team sport was protective of agoraphobia symptoms, and only individual sport was protective of social phobia symptoms. Furthermore, current and past sports team participation was shown to negatively relate to adult depressive symptoms [ 43 ]; drop out of sport was linked to higher depressive symptoms in adulthood compared to those with maintained participation [ 9 , 22 , 63 ]; and consistent participation in team sports (but not individual sport) in adolescence was linked to higher self-rated mental health, lower perceived stress and depressive symptoms, and lower depression scores in early adulthood [ 53 , 58 ].

Two longitudinal studies [ 35 , 55 ], also investigated the association between team and individual playing context and mental health. Dore and colleagues [ 35 ] reported that compared to individual activities, being active in informal groups (e.g., yoga, running groups) or team sports was associated with better mental health, fewer depressive symptoms and higher social connectedness – and that involvement in team sports was related to better mental health regardless of physical activity volume. Kim and James [ 55 ] discovered that sports participation led to both short and long-term improvements in positive affect and life satisfaction.

A study on social outcomes related to mixed martial-arts (MMA) and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) showed that both sports improved practitioners’ self-control and pro-social behavior, with greater improvements seen in the BJJ group [ 62 ]. Notably, while BJJ reduced participants’ reported aggression, there was a slight increase in MMA practitioners, though it is worth mentioning that individuals who sought out MMA had higher levels of baseline aggression.

Experimental evidence

Six of the included studies were experimental or quasi-experimental. Sample sizes ranged from n  = 28 to n  = 55 with a total of n  = 239 adults included across six longitudinal studies. Three studies involved a form of martial arts (such as judo and karate) [ 45 , 51 , 52 ], one involved a variety of team sports (such as netball, soccer, and cricket) [ 34 ], and the remaining two focused on badminton [ 57 ] and handball [ 49 ].

Brinkley and colleagues [ 34 ] reported significant effects on interpersonal communication (but not vitality, social cohesion, quality of life, stress, or interpersonal relationships) for participants ( n  = 40) engaging in a 12-week workplace team sports intervention. Also using a 12-week intervention, Hornstrup et al. [ 49 ] reported a significant improvement in mental energy (but not well-being or anxiety) in young women (mean age = 24; n  = 28) playing in a handball program. Patterns et al. [ 57 ] showed that in comparison to no exercise, participation in an 8-week badminton or running program had no significant improvement on self-esteem, despite improvements in perceived and actual fitness levels.

Three studies examined the effect of martial arts on the mental health of older adults (mean ages 79 [ 52 ], 64 [ 51 ], and 70 [ 45 ] years). Participation in Karate-Do had positive effects on overall mental health, emotional wellbeing, depression and anxiety when compared to other activities (physical, cognitive, mindfulness) and a control group [ 51 , 52 ]. Ciaccioni et al. [ 45 ] found that a Judo program did not affect either the participants’ mental health or their body satisfaction, citing a small sample size, and the limited length of the intervention as possible contributors to the findings.

Qualitative evidence

Three studies interviewed current or former sports players regarding their experiences with sport. Chinkov and Holt [ 41 ] reported that jiu-jitsu practitioners (mean age 35 years) were more self-confident in their lives outside of the gym, including improved self-confidence in their interactions with others because of their training. McGraw and colleagues [ 37 ] interviewed former and current National Football League (NFL) players and their families about its impact on the emotional and mental health of the players. Most of the players reported that their NFL career provided them with social and emotional benefits, as well as improvements to their self-esteem even after retiring. Though, despite these benefits, almost all the players experienced at least one mental health challenge during their career, including depression, anxiety, or difficulty controlling their temper. Some of the players and their families reported that they felt socially isolated from people outside of the national football league.

Through a series of semi-structured interviews and focus groups, Thorpe, Anders [ 40 ] investigated the impact of an Aboriginal male community sporting team on the health of its players. The players reported they felt a sense of belonging when playing in the team, further noting that the social and community aspects were as important as the physical health benefits. Participating in the club strengthened the cultural identity of the players, enhancing their well-being. The players further noted that participation provided them with enjoyment, stress relief, a sense of purpose, peer support, and improved self-esteem. Though they also noted challenges, including the presence of racism, community conflict, and peer-pressure.

Quality of studies

Full details of our risk of bias (ROB) results are provided in Supplementary Material A . Of the three qualitative studies assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Program (CASP), all three were deemed to have utilised and reported appropriate methodological standards on at least 8 of the 10 criteria. Twenty studies were assessed using the Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies, with all studies clearly reporting the research question/s or objective/s and study population. However, only four studies provided a justification for sample size, and less than half of the studies met quality criteria for items 6, 7, 9, or 10 (and items 12 and 13 were largely not applicable). Of concern, only four of the observational or cohort studies were deemed to have used clearly defined, valid, and reliable exposure measures (independent variables) and implemented them consistently across all study participants. Six studies were assessed using the Quality Assessment of Controlled Intervention Studies, with three studies described as a randomized trial (but none of the three reported a suitable method of randomization, concealment of treatment allocation, or blinding to treatment group assignment). Three studies showed evidence that study groups were similar at baseline for important characteristics and an overall drop-out rate from the study < 20%. Four studies reported high adherence to intervention protocols (with two not reporting) and five demonstrated that.study outcomes were assessed using valid and reliable measures and implemented consistently across all study participants. Importantly, researchers did not report or have access to validated instruments for assessing sport participation or physical activity amongst adults, though most studies provided psychometrics for their mental health outcome measure/s. Only one study reported that the sample size was sufficiently powered to detect a difference in the main outcome between groups (with ≥ 80% power) and that all participants were included in the analysis of results (intention-to-treat analysis). In general, the methodological quality of the six randomised studies was deemed low.

Initially, our discussion will focus on the review findings regarding sports participation and well-being, ill-being, and psychological health. However, the heterogeneity and methodological quality of the included research (especially controlled trials) should be considered during the interpretation of our results. Considering our findings, the Mental Health through Sport conceptual model for adults will then be presented and discussed and study limitations outlined.

Sports participation and psychological well-being

In summary, the evidence presented here indicates that for adults, sports participation is associated with better overall mental health [ 36 , 46 , 47 , 59 ], mood [ 56 ], higher life satisfaction [ 39 , 47 ], self-esteem [ 39 ], body satisfaction [ 39 ], HRQoL [ 60 ], self-rated health [ 61 ], and frequency of laughter [ 61 ]. Sports participation has also shown to be predictive of better psychological wellbeing over time [ 35 , 53 ], higher positive affect [ 55 ], and greater life satisfaction [ 55 ]. Furthermore, higher frequency of sports participation and/or sport played at a higher level of competition, have been linked to lower levels of mental distress, higher levels of body satisfaction, self-esteem, and overall life satisfaction in adults [ 39 ].

Despite considerable heterogeneity of sports type, cross-sectional and experimental research indicate that team-based sports participation, compared to individual sports and informal group physical activity, has a more positive effect on mental energy [ 49 ], physical self-perception [ 57 ], and overall psychological health and well-being in adults, regardless of physical activity volume [ 35 , 46 , 47 ]. And, karate-do benefits the subjective well-being of elderly practitioners [ 51 , 52 ]. Qualitative research in this area has queried participants’ experiences of jiu-jitsu, Australian football, and former and current American footballers. Participants in these sports reported that their participation was beneficial for psychological well-being [ 37 , 40 , 41 ], improved self-esteem [ 37 , 40 , 41 ], and enjoyment [ 37 ].

Sports participation and psychological ill-being

Of the included studies, n  = 19 examined the relationship between participating in sport and psychological ill-being. In summary, there is consistent evidence that sports participation is related to lower depression scores [ 43 , 48 , 61 , 62 ]. There were mixed findings regarding psychological stress, where participation in childhood (retrospectively assessed) was related to lower stress in young adulthood [ 41 ], but no relationship was identified between recreational hockey in adulthood and stress [ 54 ]. Concerning the potential impact of competing at an elite level, there is evidence of higher stress in elite athletes compared to community norms [ 39 ]. Further, there is qualitative evidence that many current or former national football league players experienced at least one mental health challenge, including depression, anxiety, difficulty controlling their temper, during their career [ 37 ].

Evidence from longitudinal research provided consistent evidence that participating in sport in adolescence is protective of symptoms of depression in young adulthood [ 43 , 53 , 58 , 63 ], and further evidence that participating in young adulthood is related to lower depressive symptoms over time (6 months) [ 35 ]. Participation in adolescence was also protective of manifestations of anxiety (panic disorder and agoraphobia) and stress in young adulthood [ 42 ], though participation in young adulthood was not related to a more general measure of anxiety [ 35 ] nor to changes in negative affect [ 55 ]). The findings from experimental research were mixed. Two studies examined the effect of karate-do on markers of psychological ill-being, demonstrating its capacity to reduce anxiety [ 52 ], with some evidence of its effectiveness on depression [ 51 ]. The other studies examined small-sided team-based games but showed no effect on stress or anxiety [ 34 , 49 ]. Most studies did not differentiate between team and individual sports, though one study found that adolescents who participated in team sports (not individual sports) in secondary school has lower depression scores in young adulthood [ 58 ].

Sports participation and social outcomes

Seven of the included studies examined the relationship between sports participation and social outcomes. However, very few studies examined social outcomes or tested a social outcome as a potential mediator of the relationship between sport and mental health. It should also be noted that this body of evidence comes from a wide range of sport types, including martial arts, professional football, and workplace team-sport, as well as different methodologies. Taken as a whole, the evidence shows that participating in sport is beneficial for several social outcomes, including self-control [ 50 ], pro-social behavior [ 50 ], interpersonal communication [ 34 ], and fostering a sense of belonging [ 40 ]. Further, there is evidence that group activity, for example team sport or informal group activity, is related to higher social connectedness over time, though analyses showed that social connectedness was not a mediator for mental health [ 35 ].

There were conflicting findings regarding social effects at the elite level, with current and former NFL players reporting that they felt socially isolated during their career [ 37 ], whilst another study reported no relationship between participation at the elite level and social dysfunction [ 39 ]. Conversely, interviews with a group of indigenous men revealed that they felt as though participating in an all-indigenous Australian football team provided them with a sense of purpose, and they felt as though the social aspect of the game was as important as the physical benefits it provides [ 40 ].

Mental health through sport conceptual model for adults

The ‘Health through Sport’ model provides a depiction of the determinants and benefits of sports participation [ 31 ]. The model recognises that the physical, mental, and social benefits of sports participation vary by the context of sport (e.g., individual vs. team, organized vs. informal). To identify the elements of sport which contribute to its effect on mental health outcomes, we describe the ‘Mental Health through Sport’ model (Fig.  2 ). The model proposes that the social and physical elements of sport each provide independent, and likely synergistic contributions to its overall influence on mental health.

The Mental Health through Sport conceptual model

The model describes two key pathways through which sport may influence mental health: physical activity, and social relationships and support. Several likely moderators of this effect are also provided, including sport type, intensity, frequency, context (team vs. individual), environment (e.g., indoor vs. outdoor), as well as the level of competition (e.g., elite vs. amateur).

The means by which the physical activity component of sport may influence mental health stems from the work of Lubans et al., who propose three key groups of mechanisms: neurobiological, psychosocial, and behavioral [ 64 ]. Processes whereby physical activity may enhance psychological outcomes via changes in the structural and functional composition of the brain are referred to as neurobiological mechanisms [ 65 , 66 ]. Processes whereby physical activity provides opportunities for the development of self-efficacy, opportunity for mastery, changes in self-perceptions, the development of independence, and for interaction with the environment are considered psychosocial mechanisms. Lastly, processes by which physical activity may influence behaviors which ultimately affect psychological health, including changes in sleep duration, self-regulation, and coping skills, are described as behavioral mechanisms.

Playing sport offers the opportunity to form relationships and to develop a social support network, both of which are likely to influence mental health. Thoits [ 29 ] describes 7 key mechanisms by which social relationships and support may influence mental health: social influence/social comparison; social control; role-based purpose and meaning (mattering); self-esteem; sense of control; belonging and companionship; and perceived support availability [ 29 ]. These mechanisms and their presence within a sporting context are elaborated below.

Subjective to the attitudes and behaviors of individuals in a group, social influence and comparison may facilitate protective or harmful effects on mental health. Participants in individual or team sport will be influenced and perhaps steered by the behaviors, expectations, and norms of other players and teams. When individual’s compare their capabilities, attitudes, and values to those of other participants, their own behaviors and subsequent health outcomes may be affected. When others attempt to encourage or discourage an individual to adopt or reject certain health practices, social control is displayed [ 29 ]. This may evolve as strategies between players (or between players and coach) are discussion and implemented. Likewise, teammates may try to motivate each another during a match to work harder, or to engage in specific events or routines off-field (fitness programs, after game celebrations, attending club events) which may impact current and future physical and mental health.

Sport may also provide behavioral guidance, purpose, and meaning to its participants. Role identities (positions within a social structure that come with reciprocal obligations), often formed as a consequence of social ties formed through sport. Particularly in team sports, participants come to understand they form an integral part of the larger whole, and consequently, they hold certain responsibility in ensuring the team’s success. They have a commitment to the team to, train and play, communicate with the team and a potential responsibility to maintain a high level of health, perform to their capacity, and support other players. As a source of behavioral guidance and of purpose and meaning in life, these identities are likely to influence mental health outcomes amongst sport participants.

An individual’s level of self-esteem may be affected by the social relationships and social support provided through sport; with improved perceptions of capability (or value within a team) in the sporting domain likely to have positive impact on global self-esteem and sense of worth [ 64 ]. The unique opportunities provided through participation in sport, also allow individuals to develop new skills, overcome challenges, and develop their sense of self-control or mastery . Working towards and finding creative solutions to challenges in sport facilitates a sense of mastery in participants. This sense of mastery may translate to other areas of life, with individual’s developing the confidence to cope with varied life challenges. For example, developing a sense of mastery regarding capacity to formulate new / creative solutions when taking on an opponent in sport may result in greater confidence to be creative at work. Social relationships and social support provided through sport may also provide participants with a source of belonging and companionship. The development of connections (on and off the field) to others who share common interests, can build a sense of belonging that may mediate improvements in mental health outcomes. Social support is often provided emotionally during expressions of trust and care; instrumentally via tangible assistance; through information such as advice and suggestions; or as appraisal such feedback. All forms of social support provided on and off the field contribute to a more generalised sense of perceived support that may mediate the effect of social interaction on mental health outcomes.

Participation in sport may influence mental health via some combination of the social mechanisms identified by Thoits, and the neurobiological, psychosocial, and behavioral mechanisms stemming from physical activity identified by Lubans [ 29 , 64 ]. The exact mechanisms through which sport may confer psychological benefit is likely to vary between sports, as each sport varies in its physical and social requirements. One must also consider the social effects of sports participation both on and off the field. For instance, membership of a sporting team and/or club may provide a sense of identity and belonging—an effect that persists beyond the immediacy of playing the sport and may have a persistent effect on their psychological health. Furthermore, the potential for team-based activity to provide additional benefit to psychological outcomes may not just be attributable to the differences in social interactions, there are also physiological differences in the requirements for sport both within (team vs. team) and between (team vs. individual) categories that may elicit additional improvements in psychological outcomes. For example, evidence supports that exercise intensity moderates the relationship between physical activity and several psychological outcomes—supporting that sports performed at higher intensity will be more beneficial for psychological health.

Limitations and recommendations

There are several limitations of this review worthy of consideration. Firstly, amongst the included studies there was considerable heterogeneity in study outcomes and study methodology, and self-selection bias (especially in non-experimental studies) is likely to influence study findings and reduce the likelihood that study participants and results are representative of the overall population. Secondly, the predominately observational evidence included in this and Eime’s prior review enabled us to identify the positive relationship between sports participation and social and psychological health (and examine directionality)—but more experimental and longitudinal research is required to determine causality and explore potential mechanisms responsible for the effect of sports participation on participant outcomes. Additional qualitative work would also help researchers gain a better understanding of the relationship between specific elements of the sporting environment and mental health and social outcomes in adult participants. Thirdly, there were no studies identified in the literature where sports participation involved animals (such as equestrian sports) or guns (such as shooting sports). Such studies may present novel and important variables in the assessment of mental health benefits for participants when compared to non-participants or participants in sports not involving animals/guns—further research is needed in this area. Our proposed conceptual model also identifies several pathways through which sport may lead to improvements in mental health—but excludes some potentially negative influences (such as poor coaching behaviors and injury). And our model is not designed to capture all possible mechanisms, creating the likelihood that other mechanisms exist but are not included in this review. Additionally, an interrelationship exits between physical activity, mental health, and social relationships, whereby changes in one area may facilitate changes in the other/s; but for the purpose of this study, we have focused on how the physical and social elements of sport may mediate improvements in psychological outcomes. Consequently, our conceptual model is not all-encompassing, but designed to inform and guide future research investigating the impact of sport participation on mental health.

The findings of this review endorse that participation in sport is beneficial for psychological well-being, indicators of psychological ill-being, and social outcomes in adults. Furthermore, participation in team sports is associated with better psychological and social outcomes compared to individual sports or other physical activities. Our findings support and add to previous review findings [ 1 ]; and have informed the development of our ‘Mental Health through Sport’ conceptual model for adults which presents the potential mechanisms by which participation in sport may affect mental health.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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We would like to acknowledge the work of the original systematic review conducted by Eime, R. M., Young, J. A., Harvey, J. T., Charity, M. J., and Payne, W. R. (2013).

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All authors contributed to the conducting of this study and reporting the findings. The titles of studies identified were screened by LW, and abstracts and full text articles reviewed independently by LW and NE. For the included studies, data was extracted independently by LW and checked by NE, and the risk of bias assessment was performed by LW and AP independently. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree with the order of presentation of the authors.

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Eather, N., Wade, L., Pankowiak, A. et al. The impact of sports participation on mental health and social outcomes in adults: a systematic review and the ‘Mental Health through Sport’ conceptual model. Syst Rev 12 , 102 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-023-02264-8

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20 Sport, Health, and Well-Being

Parissa Safai is an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science in the Faculty of Health at York University. Her research interests focus on the critical study of sport at the intersection of risk, health, and healthcare, including the social determinants of athletes’ health. Her interests also center on sport and social inequality, with attention to the impact of gender, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural inequities on accessible physical activity for all.

• Published: 21 September 2022
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Sport is often touted by many as good for one’s health and well-being; in fact, Hippocrates is thought to have once said that “sport is the preserver of health.” And yet there is a substantial amount of scholarly research, across a range of disciplines, that problematizes this commonplace assumption. This chapter explores the central question: Is sport participation healthful for well-being? Organized in three parts, the chapter first examines key conceptual challenges associated with unpacking this question. For example, what do we mean when we refer to the concepts of sport, health, and well-being? The second section explores the challenges faced by critical social scientists in disrupting the commonplace notion of sport as good for one’s health, and the third section highlights the questions: Can contemporary sport be good for one’s health, and if so, how?

At the risk of stating a cliché, the world is currently in the midst of the most unprecedented public health, social, political, economic, and human rights crisis in human history. According to data from Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 Dashboard, and at the time of reviewing this chapter proof (mid-April 2022), over 504 million cases and nearly 6.2 million deaths have occurred around the world as a consequence of COVID-19. These figures are widely recognized as underestimates of the actual number of cases and deaths as effective, reliable, and sustained testing in countries around the world has been virtually absent, at best variable, and highly dependent on trust and cooperation (or lack thereof) between governments, the medico-scientific community, and the public at large (e.g., see Balmford, Annan, Hargreaves, Altoè, & Bateman, 2020 ).

There have been other global pandemics over the course of human history (e.g., the 1918 influenza [H1N1] pandemic). Yet the complexities and complications of the COVID-19 pandemic have proven to be much more pronounced due to a range of factors. For example, the ease and speed of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) within and across regions as well as within and among particular groups of individuals (e.g., the elderly, Black and Indigenous people of color, those in poverty) has rendered COVID-19 particularly virulent. Another confounding issue is the host of still relatively unknown factors that shape the epidemiological patterns and clinical presentations of those infected and suffering with COVID-19. Simply put, despite huge advances in our scientific understanding of the virus and the disease in a relatively short span of time, we still do not know why some infected individuals are asymptomatic, why some are viral super-spreaders, and why some are long-haulers and suffer extraordinarily long aftereffects of the disease. And unlike other pandemics, the impact of COVID-19 has been unmatched given the near complete disruption of heightened and more intensive interdependencies that exist between populations, cultures, and economies in our contemporary globalized world.

There is no avoiding the metaphoric “elephant in the room” with this chapter—exploring the relationships between sport, health, and well-being during this time of a global pandemic is, simply put, weird. On one hand, at a time when so many people are sick or dying, and even more are trying to simply survive lockdowns and isolation, staggering job losses and economic instability, social unrest and political protest, increased food insecurity, interrupted education, and exponential increases in anxiety, depression, and stress, unpacking the common belief that sport is good for you feels like an exercise (no pun intended) in futility. And yet, on the other hand, there may be no more opportune time to do so, as the profound disruption of our daily lives as a consequence of COVID-19 demands of us to take fuller and more critical stock of the real or imagined sport-health dyad. In so doing, we may open and shift thought and praxis to re-create our beliefs, associations, and practices about sport and health. We may, in fact, take up Arundhati Roy’s (2020) call to conceptualize the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” and as providing the impetus to “break with the past and imagine [our] world anew.”

This chapter explores the central questions: Is sport healthy, and can it contribute to well-being? Organized in three parts, the chapter will first examine key conceptual challenges associated with answering this question. For example, what do we mean when we refer to the concepts of sport, health, and well-being? The second section will explore the challenges faced by critical social scientists in disrupting the commonplace notion of sport as good for one’s health, and the third section will highlight the wicked questions: Can contemporary sport be good for one’s health, and if so, how?

Famous quotes about the healthfulness of sport are plentiful. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates is credited with saying that “sport is the preserver of health,” while American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883 , p. 204) once wrote, “Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.” It should be no surprise that famous athletes and sport leaders have oft made a causal link between sport and health. For example, Indian cricketer Kapil Dev enthused, “Apart from education, you need good health, and for that, you need to play sports,” and English decathlete Daley Thompson declared, “Sport and health are so important to our nation that they deserve to be right at the front of people’s minds” (quoted in Bryant, 2008 ). And one could be forgiven for thinking that sport is the magical cure for all of humanity’s problems when the president of the International Olympic Committee Juan Antonio Samaranch, in his address during the Opening Ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games, espoused, “Sport is friendship, sport is health, sport is education, sport is life, sport brings the world together.”

Such quotes can be easily dismissed as just fodder for motivational posters or inspirational greeting cards. What is of much greater concern, however, is the way such rhetoric is routinely woven into the policies and resource-distributing decisions of national and international governments and public-, private- and third-sector organizations (see the 2016 special issue of the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics on “sport, physical activity and public health” ( Mansfield & Piggin, 2016 ) for a range of national and international examples). Certainly, the website for sportanddev.org (2020) , an online platform dedicated to resources and communications on sport and development, is rife with sport-health associations, including such definitive statements as the following:

There is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence on the positive effects of sport and physical activity as part of a healthy lifestyle. The positive, direct effects of engaging in regular physical activity are particularly apparent in the prevention of several chronic diseases, including: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, obesity, depression and osteoporosis. (para. 1)

Sport and physical activity can make a substantial contribution to the well-being of people in developing countries. Exercise, physical activity and sport have long been used in the treatment and rehabilitation of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Physical activity for individuals is a strong means for the prevention of diseases and for nations is a cost-effective method to improve public health across populations. (para. 5)

In 2003, the United Nations adopted Resolution 58/5, Sport as a Means to Promote Education, Health, Development and Peace, “[noting] that sport and physical education are a major tool not only for health and physical development but also for acquiring values necessary for social cohesion and intercultural dialogue” (para. 8). More recently, and right in the midst of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (2020 , para. 1) formalized its partnership with the IOC, signing “an agreement to work to promote health through sport and physical activity.” The press release for the partnership hails the WHO-IOC collaboration as especially relevant for the following reason:

The current COVID-19 pandemic is particularly affecting people with noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The agreement has a special focus on preventing NCDs through sport. Physical activity helps lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and various types of cancer (including breast cancer and colon cancer). (para. 3)

Where Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, states that “physical activity is one of the keys to good health and well-being” ( World Health Organization, 2020 , para. 2), IOC President Thomas Bach notes, “Over the last few months in the current crisis, we have all seen how important sport and physical activity are for physical and mental health. Sport can save lives” (para. 6). He goes further to state, “The IOC calls on the governments of the world to include sport in their post-crisis support programmes because of the important role of sport in the prevention of NCDs, but also of communicable diseases” (para. 6).

Although it is premature to know if or how governments will “include sport in their post-crisis support programmes,” current national legislation and sport policies give us insight into existing understandings of the sport-health relationship and suggest the possible (perhaps even likely) directions in which sport systems in pandemic/postpandemic times may head (cf. Misener & Misener, 2016 ). For example, in Canada, the very first statement in the preamble to the Physical Activity and Sport Act states, “[T]he Government of Canada recognizes that physical activity and sport are integral parts of Canadian culture and society and produce benefits in terms of health, social cohesion, linguistic duality, economic activity, cultural diversity and quality of life” (Government of Canada, 2003, para. 5). The 2012 Canadian Sport Policy ( CSP), which operationalizes the Act and was endorsed by federal and provincial-territorial ministers of sport until 2022, frames “improved health and wellness” as a societal outcome of participation in sport: “Canadians participate in sport activities in a manner that strengthens their personal development, provides enjoyment and relaxation, reduces stress, improves physical and mental health, physical fitness and general well-being, and enables them to live more productive and rewarding lives” ( Sport Information Resource Center, 2012 , p. 4). In addition, and of particular note for this chapter, as will be discussed below, the CSP also draws linkages between sport, personal health, and the economy. “Increased economic development and prosperity” is identified as another societal outcome of sport participation among Canadians, “where sport delivers benefits, for increasing numbers, to individual health and well-being, and contributes to socio-economic outcomes” (p. 5). In sum, the CSP aims to advance a vision of sport whereby “Canadians improve their standard of living and economic well-being through sport; communities benefit from healthier citizens and the reduction of health care costs; and the sport and tourism sectors benefit from legacies of hosting of local, regional, national and international sport events” (p. 4).

For critical sport scholars, red flags with these statements, legislative acts, and policies abound—not just with the loftiness and presumptuousness of these suggested connections between sport and health, but also with the discursive slipperiness embedded in these texts and the implications of such fuzzy definitions for the ways in which material resources are distributed (cf. Piggin, 2020 ). It has been well recognized by sport scholars that sport is routinely yoked together and used interchangeably with such terms as physical activity, physical literacy, physical education, exercise, fitness, tourism, and play (for example, and not an exhaustive list, Bloyce & Smith, 2009 ; Coalter, 2007 ; Green, 2004 ; Grix & Carmichael, 2012 ; Malcolm, 2016 ; Mansfield & Malcolm, 2014 ; Oliver, Hanson, Lindsey, & Dodd-Reynolds, 2016 ; Waddington, 2000 ; Weed, 2016 ). The challenge in collapsing these terms together is captured well by Safai and Malcolm (2016 , p. 159):

Sport is a physical activity; sport is often used in physical education curricula; it incorporates exercise; and may even involve an element of play. However, this does not mean that sport is the same as physical education, exercise or play. The conflation of sport with physical education, exercise and play obscures its differences in intensity, frequency and duration of participation from other forms of physical activity. We must be cognisant of these differences since the institutionalised, competitive, rigorous and complex nature of sport has markedly different consequences for health than physical education, exercise or play.

To be clear, critical sport scholars do not suggest that organized and competitive sport is completely incapable of being healthful for individuals, groups, or communities. Rather, concerns have been and are being raised about the seemingly wholescale promotion of such definitive sport = health statements (i.e., sport is healthful for all, as is implicit in many national “sport for all” programs) that poorly distinguish between and yet still blend together sport, physical activity, physical literacy, physical education, exercise, fitness, tourism, and play in the service of health.

Similar conceptual concerns arise with the terms “health” and “well-being” or “wellness,” which are routinely used synonymously and interchangeably in public consciousness and in public or social policy- and program-making circles (alongside “healthcare” and “medicine,” which are also often used as though identical to one another) (see Dodge, Daly, Huyton, & Sanders, 2012 ). There are numerous examples of the tautological quality in definitions of “health” and “well-being.” For example, in efforts to move away from the more narrow biomedical understanding of health (as the absence of disease), the World Health Organization’s (1948) canonized definition of health situates it as a state of well-being (specifically, “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”). In the Oxford English Dictionary , health is defined in part as “[w]ell-being, welfare, safety; deliverance” ( “Health,” 2020 ), and well-being is defined as “the state of being healthy, happy, or prosperous; physical, psychological, or moral welfare” ( “Well-being,” 2020 ). It is important to note that even the term “welfare” poses similar challenges as it too is often employed synonymously with health and well-being. In the following, we can see Melanie Lang, editor of the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Athlete Welfare fall back on using these concepts to define each other even though she is attempting to disentangle them from one another (personal communication, March 2018):

Well-being is a quality or emotional state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy and is linked to being satisfied with a particular thing/aspect of life. Welfare is a broader term that comprises health, safety, happiness, prosperity etc. and that relates to the overall quality of life and concerns about this. As such, well-being is a component of the broader concept of welfare, with well-being being a contributing factor in an individual’s overall welfare.

There are not enough pages in this chapter to be able to properly, or perhaps even adequately discuss the attempts to define health and well-being. Scholars from a multitude of disciplinary areas across the range of humanities and natural, medical, and social sciences have dedicated tomes to different interpretations of what is and is not health and well-being (e.g., see Godlee, 2011 ; Huber et al., 2011 ; La Placa, McNaught, & Knight, 2013 ; Larson, 1999 ; Wiseman & Brasher, 2008 ). With tongue in cheek, Smith (2008) captures his dissatisfaction with the WHO’s unrealistic definition of health as a state of “complete” well-being when he writes, “It’s a ludicrous definition that would leave most of us unhealthy most of the time.” The key takeaway from this discussion on this confusing state of affairs is that such discursive slipperiness “may set the limits to what it is possible to think, and thus the understandings of the choices that can be made’ ( Newman, 2005 , p. 128) and leaves wide open the opportunity for governing bodies (whether governments, health agencies, sport organizations, or corporations) to manipulate such fuzzy language to suit specific agendas at specific times ( Grix & Carmichael, 2012 ).

The good news for critical sport and health scholars is that more nuanced characterizations of health and well-being are multidimensional (i.e., from the health of our cells to the health of our planet) in conceptualization and much more sensitive to the wider and intersectional determinants of health and the material conditions of social life that constrain or facilitate health and well-being for individuals and groups (cf. Marmot & Wilkinson, 1999 ; Naci & Ioannidis, 2015 ; Raphael, Bryant, & Rioux, 2010 ). For example, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (2020) defines well-being thus:

The presence of the highest possible quality of life in its full breadth of expression focused on but not necessarily exclusive to: good living standards, robust health, a sustainable environment, vital communities, an educated populace, balanced time use, high levels of democratic participation, and access to and participation in leisure and culture.

In this example, we can see—via the association to standards of living, the environment, education, and engaged citizenship—well-being (and health) situated as a collective and political issue. These attempts to understand health and well-being as one’s capacity to cope, adapt, and manage life (cf. Huber et al., 2011 ), as helped or hindered by broader social structures and processes, challenge the more individualistic and inward-looking focus of extant definitions as well as the over-/medicalization of social life, which some suggest is stimulated by the pathologization of “incomplete” states of well-being (see Godlee, 2011 ). In this vein, health and well-being are not limited to lifestyle choices, or the consequences of biological advantage conferred upon someone by their good genes, or even access to good healthcare services. Rather health and well-being are political because they are resources of power that possess dimensions of quality and quantity, they can be shaped by political institutions and interventions (or their lack), they are linked to social relations such that some enjoy more health and well-being than others, and they are elements of our human rights (cf. Bambra, Fox, & Scott-Samuel, 2005 ). The bad news, however, is that these more diverse, interconnected, multidimensional, and power-sensitive understandings of health and well-being do not necessarily translate into the ways health and well-being—and even sport—are being promoted and lived in the day-to-day. The following section expands on these points.

Despite the availability of fresher and more refined notions of health and well-being—ones that connect the personal to the communal and to the political—mainstream approaches to the operationalization or enacting of health and well-being (and even sport, as will be discussed below) in our daily lives remain quite entrenched in individualistic ideologies of good health as personal responsibility and as evidence of good moral conduct. This approach is commonly referred to as “healthism” ( Crawford, 1980 ), whereby health is wholly conceived as a product of individual choice and practice, and where such “concepts as willpower, self-discipline and lifestyle operate to define health as a personal trouble rather than public issue” ( Safai, Johnson, & Bryans, 2016 , p. 271). Poor health is not understood as a result of or even a symptom of systemic or structural disadvantage and inequity between individuals and/or groups, but rather as a product of an individual’s inability to be disciplined, hard-working, in control, or to “do the right thing” ( Crawford, 1977 ; Greenhalgh & Wessely, 2004 ; Howell & Ingham, 2001 ).

Healthism flourishes within neoliberalism, which is defined in this chapter in the broadest terms possible—from a concretized political economic approach to governance in many nation-states to a governing rationality and “an everyday experience” ( Hamann, 2009 , p. 39) that cuts across social and cultural dimensions of life. Both healthism and neoliberalism encourage individuals to think and act solely about and through themselves (particularly through their wallets and bank accounts) and encourage the hollowing out of public government and the public sector in the name of fiscal responsibility and/or the need to stimulate and protect business and industry above all ( Ingham, 1985 ). In so doing, healthism (as situated within and buttressing neoliberalism) minimizes a government’s capacity to equitably foster and be responsible for the health and well-being of its citizens and, perhaps more profoundly, undermines the belief that the determinants of health and well-being are connected to and derive from social relations and the ways in which power and material resources are distributed (or not) among individuals and/or groups in our communities ( Armstrong, Armstrong & Coburn, 2001 ; Skrabanek, 1994 ). In a healthist approach to health, it doesn’t matter if you vote for or against racist and fascist political regimes in national elections; it matters only that you purchase and use a membership to the fitness club without question ( Wiest, Andrews, & Giardina, 2015 ). And it doesn’t matter whether the fitness club and its instructors encourage patrons to ask critical questions about access, privilege, and health inequalities; it matters only that muscles are kept toned and that fat is controlled (see Markula & Chikinda, 2016 ).

Within the logics of these neoliberal times, well-being is similarly influenced by healthism and its ideology of personal responsibility. Conservative estimates of the global wellness movement suggest it is a multitrillion-dollar industry annually, with devotees paying for such things as detoxifications, juice cleanses, coffee enemas, specialized fitness classes, biometric technologies, silent meditative spa retreats, controlled diets, life coaching, beauty regimes, chakra healing, customized tonics and skin oils, healing crystals, and the list goes on ( Global Wellness Institute, 2018 ). Critics of the modern wellness movement offer scathing assessments of the ways in which false and at times outright dangerous misinformation is peddled to people, especially women, in the pursuit of “health, happiness, and prosperity.” Gunter (2018) routinely attacks the wellness-industrial complex for “grifting off desperate women” looking for health information, care, or even just validation of their health concerns, by reproducing long-ingrained patriarchal beliefs that women’s bodies are impure, flawed, and in need of help from outside experts ( Wiseman, 2019 , para. 15). In an editorial that is as much about the rise of anti-intellectualism as it is about the dangers of the cult of wellness, McCartney (2019) similarly notes:

Of course, the ultimate irony of the wellness industry is that it is aimed at the people least likely to benefit from it. It is not the well-off people with gym memberships, fitness trackers and a regular Whole Foods habit who are most likely to die young. It is the people whose social disadvantage make it more likely that they will smoke, to suffer more of the adverse consequences of alcohol, who have less access to green spaces to exercise, have jobs with less control and often more stress. It is citizens who are most wealthy, and healthy, who are invited to spend their money on accumulating interventions that don’t work. Yet they can paradoxically be harmed and easily become anxious patients as they accumulate the side effects of too much medicine. Marketing and advertising can make people into patients unnecessarily, while people who really could benefit from becoming a patient are left with less resource to do so. This paradox makes everyone sicker.

The cult of wellness implies that people can make their own “health, happiness, and prosperity” if only they believe enough and buy enough—an approach that seamlessly dovetails with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. Healthism deflects attention away from the health-compromising determinants of social life that are often beyond the control of the average individual to focus only on seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses or a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality ( Tirado, 2015 ). In her exploration of the dangers of relentlessly pushing people to think, feel, and act optimism and happiness, Ehrenreich (2009 , p. 8) writes:

[P]ositive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

For example, the rise of precarious labor markets and the gig economy results in many workers not being able to enjoy health and dental benefits that accompany stable, permanent, and full-time jobs—let alone enough disposable income or free time to pursue sport or any form of physical activity. This holds dangerous consequences in the event of illness or injury for many individuals and communities, and yet there is seemingly little critical or sustained attention paid to this issue in the public sector as governments shift toward new public management and the embrace of an entrepreneurial ethos ( Connell, Fawcett & Meagher, 2009 ; Diefenbach, 2009 ; McSweeney & Safai, 2020 ; Vosko, 2006 ). In other words, the answer to addressing the precarity of the contemporary job market is not in enacting and enforcing labor policies and workplace legislation that ensures material and health stability for workers but, rather, encouraging workers to work harder and to persevere. As Bambra, Smith, Garthwaite, Joyce, and Hunter (2011 , p. 403) note, however, such approaches and such policies “attempt to tackle health inequalities by trying to ‘empower’ people or encouraging them to feel happier, more confident or more responsible, without necessarily addressing the key, underlying issue.”

Sport is implicated in the promotion of this ideology of personal responsibility as it is most typically posed as a lifestyle choice that morally good people should adopt. In large part, the weaving of sport in healthist doctrine is facilitated by the easy conflation of physical activity, physical literacy, physical education, exercise, fitness, tourism, and such with sport. As noted earlier, the blurring of sport with any and all forms of physical culture renders sport, as one specific form of physical culture and as one area of social or public policy, amenable to manipulation by those who want to fit it into their agendas—including those who are trying to advance or reinforce neoliberal, healthist agendas. Mansfield (2016 , p. 714) makes this point clear when she states, “Sport can also be thought of as a relatively cheap and malleable policy tool which helps to explain its continued appeal as a simple solution to complex, deeper-seated social problems like health inequalities.” Yet, just as it is problematic to equate sport to physical activity, play, exercise, and so on, it is bizarre to suggest that sports participation will adequately address or redress serious personal and/or social health issues. If we set aside COVID-19 for a moment, the top causes of death globally are chronic conditions (e.g., diabetes, cancers, malnutrition, heart disease) that are multifactorial in causation and treatment ( Roser & Ritchie, 2016 ). Proponents of the social determinants of health (SDOH) paradigm know that there is no way that playing rugby can solve such conditions. Rather, critical sport and health scholars urge attention to the cleanliness of the air in which the rugby pitch is located, to the aesthetic appeal to and safety of green spaces for local citizens, to the accessibility of public transit to get a player to and from practice, and to the stability and sensitivity of the job market so that people can eat regularly, live in a safe home, and have time to play football.

Furthermore, as many critical sport sociologists note, conflating physical activity, physical education, exercise, fitness, and so on with sport results in everything getting operationalized as sport, with its heightened focus on performance and competition (e.g., Green, 2007 ; Kirk, 2010 ; Murphy & Bauman, 2007 ; Ressler, Richards, & Wright, 2016 ). Critical sport scholars have long known that the performance principle and the culture of risk (i.e., a culture that produces and reproduces the tolerance of health-compromising beliefs, behaviors, and practices) that underpin organized, competitive sport often endanger good health (see the chapter in this volume by Dominic Malcolm and Emma Pullen for a fuller discussion). The potential public health benefits that may be seen from getting individuals and communities engaged at some level of active living or physical activity more broadly (i.e., not in just organized, competitive sport) get taken up in extraordinarily functionalist ways. There is no shortage of dose-response studies that attempt to ascertain how many minutes of physical activity at what level of intensity and frequency are needed for some beneficial physiological effect on the body. Indeed, in the Canadian context, guidelines from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology (n.d.) on movement, sleep, and screen time dominate public health messaging. Parents are repeatedly told that their children should be getting at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day and that they themselves should be logging at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each week!

My intent is not to suggest that these guidelines are inappropriate or lacking in scientific rigor or credibility, or even that sport cannot be healthful for individuals and communities. Rather, I want to draw attention to how unquestioningly sport, organized in the narrow terms of performance and competition, gets taken up as healthful for all, as well as how broader physical activity guidelines are reductive and disconnected from well-established and long-standing insights on the impact of the material conditions of life on health ( Kay, 2016 ). In the guidelines from the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, which seem to have a remarkably sticky and enduring quality given how long and how well they have been taken up by all levels of Canadian government and in the public sector more broadly (cf. Bercovitz, 2000 ), it is the number of minutes one sleeps, watches a screen, and moves that seem to matter the most. Absent in these guidelines is the fact that the minutes in our days are contained and structured by broader social, cultural, political, and economic institutions, forces, and processes that operate to the advantage of some more than others. More critical relational analyses that foreground power between individuals and groups need to be layered into these prescriptive guidelines, and to this end, there must be more engagement with and input from critical sport and health scholars who advance an SDOH approach to the study and operationalization of sport, health, and well-being in the service of public/population health. Kay (2016 , p. 555) states:

Social scientists within the academic sport science community can help bridge this chasm, by contributing social scientific theories, methodologies and knowledge to this area. Such offers must be constructive: to dismiss health behaviourists as not addressing “context” is not adequate, when their theoretical frameworks do; to argue that they do not address it “properly” is not sufficient without elucidation and to elucidate by only offering grand theory is not only unhelpful but actively counterproductive, reinforcing the notion that “social influences” exist only as some abstraction that is beyond translation into practice. Tangible specifics are required to demonstrate how social science knowledge can enhance understanding of health behaviour and efforts to enhance it.

Kay’s words are prescient, but calling on just the “academic sport science community” to mobilize is limiting. Advancing the critical sociocultural study of sport, health, and well-being so as to make a difference in public-sector guidelines, policies, and programs is about advancing a “relevant and engaged” public sociology of sport that

can contribute to “the terms of the debate,” not just by adding to the body of knowledge, but also by having researchers who specifically draw the connections between their work and the larger debates and problems, and by seeking ways to engage various publics when disseminating that research. ( Donnelly, 2015 , p. 422; see also Bairner, 2009 ; Cooky, 2017 ; Ingham & Donnelly, 1990 )

This represents a prime, albeit challenging opportunity for critical sport and health scholars. It is one, however, that is certainly not supported by the functionalist, positivist, and managerial paradigms of the moving body and classic and healthist health promotion prescriptions that dominate the research and teaching agendas of many (if not most) kinesiology departments in higher education—departments where more critical social, cultural, and historical interrogations of sport, health, and well-being are increasingly being pushed to the wayside ( Safai, 2016 ; see Andrews, Silk, Francombe, & Bush, 2013 ).

This section will explore the questions: Can sport be good for one’s health, and if so, how? Such questions “exhibit the characteristics of ‘wicked problems,’ in that they are difficult to define/interpret, are based in competing/uncertain causes, and generate further issues when solutions are applied” ( Sam, 2009 , p. 499). It is important to note that any attempts I offer here to answer these questions must begin with my own admission that I like sport, as do most (if not all) sport sociologists, even those who engage a critical standpoint. I think it is safe for me to suggest, on behalf of the wider sociology of the sport community, that we are not “anti-sport” as much as we are uncomfortable with and resistant to the current ways in which the sport system—from grassroots to the highest levels of national and international competition—is predominantly structured, organized, and delivered. We are extraordinarily concerned by how the mainstream sport agenda is set in ways that do not adequately attend to remediating the conditions that make sport inaccessible or unhealthy for some individuals and groups, or that do not legitimately develop or sustain humane and healthy sport for all.

In some cases, it is blatantly clear why the “sport is healthful for all people all the time” message is misleadingly and inappropriately trotted out by individuals and groups. When former FIFA president Sepp Blatter is the first author of a peer-reviewed paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports titled “Football for Health—Science Proves That Playing Football on a Regular Basis Contributes to the Improvement of Public Health” ( Blatter & Dvorak, 2014 ), we know that the unspoken yet obvious agenda of the piece is to promote FIFA and its version of football, not public health. For critical sport and health scholars, it is not that football holds no potential to contribute to the improvement of public health but that corrupt sport leaders such as Blatter, and the sport governing bodies and governments that have been shown to be in cahoots with these criminals, fail to safeguard the health and lives of people around the world ( Jennings, 2011 ; Masters, 2015 ). The deaths of numerous migrant construction workers involved in the building of venues for the Qatar FIFA World Cup scheduled for 2022—the exact number of which still remains shrouded in mystery to this day, but ranging anywhere from 34 to over 1,200 depending on the source ( Gibson & Pattison, 2014 ; Ingraham, 2015 ; Pattison, 2020 )—negate any “proof” of football’s ability to contribute to public health as public health is far more dependent upon sound and enforced labor laws, occupational health regulations, workplace safety standards, and labor reform when needed than on playing a game of football or hosting a sporting mega-event.

The Blatter example is admittedly sensational, but questioning how sport-health agendas get set is vital for our better understanding of if and how sport can be good for one’s health. As noted earlier, functionalist, positivist, and managerial approaches dominate much of government and public-sector discourse on sport and health. Such approaches endure not because of nefarious backroom wheeling and dealing between, for example, exercise physiologists and policymakers, but because of such factors as the capacity for individuals and groups to define key issues and put forth persuasive “evidence” that supports their definitions in ways that capture and hold the attention and support of key government actors; the presence and strength of advocacy coalitions and their successful (or not) lobbying of government decision-makers; the opening of “policy windows” amid welcoming political environments; or even just the heightened capacity of some individuals and groups to take advantage of circumstantial geopolitical or economic opportunities to advance their vision of the “ways things should be” ( Bundon & Hurd-Clarke, 2015 ; Green, 2004 , 2007 ; Green & Houlihan, 2004 ; Milton & Grix, 2015 ; Mansfield, 2017 ; Misener & Misener, 2016 ; Weiss, 1989 ).

A prime example of the way such factors play out in the setting of sport-health agendas is close to home for me, as colleagues from my own academic department were recruited by a coalition of the Canadian Off-Highway Vehicle Distributors Council, the All Terrain Quad Council of Canada, the Motorcyclists Confederation of Canada, and the Government of Nova Scotia to determine if riding all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and off-road machines (ORMs) offered fitness and health benefits to participants. The research team found that “off-road riding was found to impose a true physiological demand that would be expected to have beneficial effects on health and fitness according to current [physical activity] recommendations” and that the “metabolic demand of off-road riding is at an intensity level associated with health and fitness benefits in accord with the guidelines of both Health Canada and the [American College of Sports Medicine]” ( Burr, Jamnik, Shaw, & Gledhill, 2010 , pp. 1350, 1353). The authors conclude:

[O]ff-road vehicle riding is similar in aerobic demand to many other recreational, self-paced, sporting activities such as golf, rock climbing, and alpine skiing. This examination of off-road vehicle riding is valuable for understanding the physical demands of this alternative mode of recreational [physical activity] in the context of potential health-related fitness outcomes. (p. 1353)

And in yet another publication, the authors suggest that ATV and off-road riding may even positively influence one’s sense of well-being:

[I]t is possible that the higher levels of vitality, general happiness and [quality of life] of recreational off-road vehicle riders is a consequence of participation in the sport and thus further research is warranted to determine if this type of alternative activity should be recognized as a means to increase the health and [quality of life] of Canadians. ( Burr, Jamnik, & Gledhill, 2010 , p. 10)

Not surprisingly, these findings have also been challenged (see Bissix, MacCormick, & Milburn, 2013 ), but, also not surprisingly, these types of findings have been welcomed and robustly taken up by proponents of ATV and ORM riding as the evidence that such activities boost health and as the evidence that such activities should be supported more by government through, at minimum, the establishment of more trails for ATV and ORM use. However, more critical sociocultural readings of the setting of the pro-ATV/ORM agenda highlight a range of issues that rub against the supposed fitness and health benefits, including the exclusionary nature of off-road riding (in general, riders tend to be middle- to upper-class men), injury concerns arising from off-road riding accidents and traumas (especially among youth riders), and risks to the environment (e.g., see Muller, 2016 ).

This example highlights the point that we must acknowledge, a priori : that the question “Can sport be good for one’s health and, if so, how?” can be answered only when we have a clear understanding of who is posing the question and what agenda they hope to advance. In his exploration of the Kieran Pathways Society, a human-powered active transportation (i.e., walking, cycling, skiing, canoeing, using a wheelchair, etc.) group in Nova Scotia struggling to advance the development of trails/corridors that exclude motorized vehicles and to push back against their provincial government’s collaborations with off-highway vehicle groups, Pitter (2009 , p. 347, emphasis added) states:

The dynamics surrounding the production and consumption of space in this case study illustrate how the state, civil society, and commercial institutions play various roles in the creation of recreational sport spaces. The commercial manufacturers and distributors of [off-highway vehicles] have played a significant role through corporate funding/sponsorship. Their influence appears to have been greatest through their collective actions via the Canadian Off-Highway Vehicle Distributors Council that works to legitimize the sport through various public relation initiatives and research .

The movement (if we can call it that) promoting ATV riding for health highlights the breadth and depth of the lobbying and persuasive efforts of specific stakeholders—who tap into and call upon particular forms of sport science and scientific evidence that favor their interests—on governments that, in the context of public roadways and community trails, “have an implicit duty of care to manage risks prudently to reduce harm, and to mitigate financial and reputational impairment to its corporate body” ( Bissix, 2015 , p. 346). The wicked problem permeating the question “Can sport be good for one’s health, and if so, how?” arises, in part, from how such concepts as sport, health, well-being, risk, and harm get defined and whose definition gets understood as most legitimate; these are problems of power and social relations. As such, and continuing in the context of leisure and recreation, Tink, Peers, Nykiforuk, and Mayan’s (2019 , pp. 454–455) observations are particularly poignant:

Paying attention to the ways expert discourses of science, medicine, and public health have supported, and continue to support, various forms of institutionalized governance, conversations between philosophers and practitioners of leisure and recreation could begin by interrogating the relationship between the governors and the governed. That is, philosophers and practitioners of leisure and recreation could interrogate how particular knowledge(s) and power relations have resulted in recreation spaces being oriented toward certain bodies or subjects.

For many critical sociologists, sport, health, and well-being are issues of equity, related more to access and opportunity than to measures of performance, biological processes, or lifestyle choice. In this line of argument, sport can be healthy for individuals and communities only if the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions necessary for personal and community health have been met. As such, any sport program that is disconnected from the social and material conditions of life and one’s political right to health has limited potential to positively influence health and well-being (cf. Safai, Johnson, & Bryans, 2016 ). Take for example, one of Sport Canada’s recent initiatives to increase sport participation among girls and women, LGBTQ2+ identifying individuals and groups, persons with disabilities, and newcomers to Canada: the Sport Support Program—Innovation Initiative (SSP-II). Fully embracing an entrepreneurial ethos, the SSP-II provides financial support to individuals or organizations for the development and testing of “innovative quality sport approaches in order to develop evidence-based solutions to improve sport participation” (Government of Canada, 2019, para. 5). This attempt to improve sport participation for these commonly underrepresented groups is commendable, but as McSweeney and Safai (2020 , p. 12) note, the federal government’s turn to public entrepreneurship (PE) and new public management (NPM) to advance accessibility in sport is problematic for Canadians:

NPM and PE, as embedded in and reproductive of neoliberalism, assume that all individuals are equally motivated and have equal opportunity and means with which to navigate through and be successful in society while, at the same time, hollowing out the very public supports and services that ensure some degree of safety for those who struggle to survive or thrive in neoliberal regimes.

The SSP-II’s focus on girls and women is particularly worrisome given that it attempts to employ tactics that are informed by neoliberal and market-centric modes of thinking in efforts to address the consequences of problems very much created by a neoliberal and market-centric political economy:

The SSP-II may encourage initiatives to boost girls’ and women’s participation in sport, but it does [so] in a political economic system that continues to depend upon the unpaid labour of girls and women outside of the formal economy, and the inequitable social relations that arise from this arrangement. ( McSweeney & Safai, 2020 , p. 14)

Just knowing and stating that these paradoxes exist is insufficient for critical sport and health scholars. In this vein, let us heed Kay’s (2016) call to better translate and communicate our perspectives and our evidence to the relevant decision-making bodies and to the public at large. In so doing, we move forward our research and advocacy for accessible, equitable, humane, and healthy sport for all outside of “a Phantom Zone of irrelevance,” “divorced from everyday public policy activity, media discourse and public awareness” ( Raphael, 2009 , p. 193).

In this chapter, I have endeavored to unsettle the commonplace notion that sport is good for one’s health and well-being all the time by examining key conceptual challenges embedded in the associations made between sport and health, by exploring the challenges faced by critical social scientists in disrupting this widely held belief, and by questioning whether contemporary sport can be good for one’s health and, if so, how? I prefaced this work, however, by acknowledging the surreal feel of writing about sport and health amid the unprecedented and most consequential global health crisis of our times. This concluding section returns to the issue of COVID-19 as there can be no doubt that the pandemic will impact and set the sport and health research agenda for years to come. In fact, it takes but a fraction of a second on any good search engine to see that it already has. Special issues in top-tier journals are in the process of being crafted, edited book collections are being proposed, virtual colloquia are being dedicated to the topic, and calls on what should be the focus for critical sport sociologists are already being offered (e.g., Evans et al., 2020 ).

In the critical sociocultural study of sport scholarship, researchers from all over the world are already actively interrogating the ways in which people, communities, organizations, and government have been impacted by and are responding to COVID-19 in sport, specifically, and in social life more broadly. Researchers are making plain both (1) the ways in which the pandemic and the response to the pandemic contribute to the continued (if not amplified or accelerated) marginalization and disempowerment of already vulnerable groups and communities that, de facto, disproportionately suffer higher levels of illness and death (e.g., Malcolm & Velija, 2020 ) and (2) the ways in which people—especially athletes—are mobilizing together against irresponsible governing bodies that value their own vested interests over human lives. In describing the ways in which Canadian Olympic athletes banded together in the early months of the pandemic to push back against the IOC’s indecision about postponing the Tokyo Olympic Games, Donnelly (2020 , p. 39) states, “We all hope that the pandemic is creating the possibility of new alternatives for societies, for a new social contract. And we hope that athletes’ voices have now been released from the culture of control to continue their demands for fairness, equity, and human and labour rights” (see also Mann, Clift, Boykoff, & Bekker, 2020 ).

COVID-19 has forced many people to step out of their taken-for-granted routines and to critically examine—from a “social distance”—those sport norms, behaviors, and practices that were commonly accepted without question. Rowe (2020 , p. 7) explains:

[I]t is in the general interest for sport to resume service. But that does not mean repeating its mistakes—as in other areas of social life, the pandemic provided an opportunity for reflection. If sport is, as so many have loudly proclaimed, a vital part of social life, then it must bend to the will of the social, not override it.

Sport and health scholars play a vital role here. “Creating the possibility of new alternatives for societies” requires information, advocacy, and action from vocal and engaged critical sport and health scholars committed to offering and insisting upon conceptual clarity; advancing health paradigms sensitive to the wider social, political, and economic determinants of health; recognizing health as a political right of all people; and working with and through government and public sector policy circles. Rowe (2020 , p. 7) writes, “It is unlikely that sport after the pandemic will be transformed, but it will certainly be changed.” At the risk of stating the obvious, we must do all that we can to ensure that it will change for the better of all.

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How to Write a Non-Cliche College Essay About Sports + Examples

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• How To Make Your Sports Essay Unique

Great Examples of College Essays About Sports

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You’ve been brainstorming essay topics for your college applications, and you think you’ve finally found the right one: an extended metaphor likening your experience on the field with overcoming personal struggles. The problem: many other students have this same thought. 

The purpose of a college essay is to make yourself stand out as a unique individual, but when students write about sports, they often blend in. Because of that, students are usually advised to pick a different topic.

That being said, it is possible to write a non-cliche college essay about sports if you put in a little extra effort. Read along to learn how to make your sports essay different from all the other sports essays.

Sports essays are cliche when they follow a standard trajectory. Some of these trajectories include writing a story about:

• An agonizing defeat
• Forging bonds with teammates
• Overcoming adversity
• Overcoming an injury
• Refusing to quit
• Victory during a big game

Because sports essays have very similar themes and “lessons learned,” it can be difficult to make your story stand out. These trajectories also often focus too much on the sport or storyline, and not enough on the writer’s reflections and personality.

As you write your essay, try to think about what your experience says about you rather than what you learned from your experience. You are more than just one lesson you learned!

(Keep in mind that the sports essay is not the only college essay cliche. Learn about other essay cliches and how to fix them in our complete guide).

How to Make Your Sports Essay Unique

1. focus on a specific moment or reflection..

The college essay is a way for students to humanize themselves to admissions officers. You do not feel human if you are describing yourself as just another player on the field!

One important way to make your essay about you (not just about sports) is by focusing on a specific moment in time and inviting the reader to join you in that moment. Explain to the reader what it would be like to be sitting in that locker room as you questioned the values of the other players on your team. Ask your reader to sit with you on the cot in the trainer’s room as your identity was stripped away from you when they said “your body can’t take this anymore.” Bring your reader to the dinner table and involve them in your family’s conversation about how sports were affecting your mental health and your treatment of those around you.

Intense descriptions of a specific experience will evoke emotions in your reader and allow them to connect with you and feel for you.

When in doubt, avoid anything that can be covered by ESPN. On ESPN, we see the games, we see the benches, we even see the locker rooms and training rooms. Take your reader somewhere different and show them something unique.

2. Use sports to point out broader themes in your life.

The main risk when writing about sports is neglecting to write about yourself. Before you get started, think about the main values that you want to express in your sports essay. Sports are simply your avenue for telling the reader what makes you unique. 

As a test, imagine if you were a pianist. Would you be able to talk about these same values? What if you were a writer? Or a chemist? Articulating your values is the end, and sports should simply be your means.

Some values that you might want to focus on:

• Autonomy (you want to be able to set your mind to anything and achieve it on your own)
• Growth (you seek improvement constantly)
• Curiosity (you are willing to try anything once)
• Vulnerability (you aren’t afraid to fail, as long as you give it your all)
• Community (you value the feedback of others and need camaraderie to succeed)
• Craft (you think that with deliberate care, anything can be perfected)
• Responsibility (you believe that you owe something to those around you and perhaps they also owe something to you)

You can use the ESPN check again to make sure that you are using sports as an avenue to show your depth.

Things ESPN covers: how a player reacts to defeat, how injuries affect a player’s gameplay/attitude, how players who don’t normally work well together are working together on their new team.

Things ESPN doesn’t cover: the conversation that a player had with their mother about fear of death before going into a big surgery (value: family and connection), the ways that the intense pressure to succeed consumed a player to the point they couldn’t be there for the people in their life (value: supporting others and community), the body image issues that weigh on a player’s mind when playing their sport and how they overcame those (value: health and growth).

3. Turn a cliche storyline on its head.

There’s no getting around the fact that sports essays are often cliche. But there is a way to confront the cliche head-on. For example, lots of people write essays about the lessons they learned from an injury, victory, and so on, but fewer students explain how they are embracing those lessons. 

Perhaps you learned that competition is overwhelming for you and you prefer teamwork, so you switched from playing basketball to playing Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe, when your softball career ended abruptly, you had to find a new identity and that’s when you became obsessed with your flower garden and decided to pursue botany. Or maybe, you have stuck with football through it all, but your junior-year mental health struggle showed you that football should be fun and you have since started a nonprofit for local children to healthily engage with sports.

If your story itself is more cliche, try bringing readers to the present moment with you and show why the cliche matters and what it did for you. This requires a fair amount of creativity. Ensure you’re not parroting a frequently used topic by really thinking deeply to find your own unique spin.

Night had robbed the academy of its daytime colors, yet there was comfort in the dim lights that cast shadows of our advances against the bare studio walls. Silhouettes of roundhouse kicks, spin crescent kicks, uppercuts and the occasional butterfly kick danced while we sparred. She approached me, eyes narrowed with the trace of a smirk challenging me. “Ready spar!” Her arm began an upward trajectory targeting my shoulder, a common first move. I sidestepped — only to almost collide with another flying fist. Pivoting my right foot, I snapped my left leg, aiming my heel at her midsection. The center judge raised one finger. 

There was no time to celebrate, not in the traditional sense at least. Master Pollard gave a brief command greeted with a unanimous “Yes, sir” and the thud of 20 hands dropping-down-and-giving-him-30, while the “winners” celebrated their victory with laps as usual. 

Three years ago, seven-thirty in the evening meant I was a warrior. It meant standing up straighter, pushing a little harder, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am”, celebrating birthdays by breaking boards, never pointing your toes, and familiarity. Three years later, seven-thirty in the morning meant I was nervous. 

The room is uncomfortably large. The sprung floor soaks up the checkerboard of sunlight piercing through the colonial windows. The mirrored walls further illuminate the studio and I feel the light scrutinizing my sorry attempts at a pas de bourrée, while capturing the organic fluidity of the dancers around me. “Chassé en croix, grand battement, pique, pirouette.” I follow the graceful limbs of the woman in front of me, her legs floating ribbons, as she executes what seems to be a perfect ronds de jambes. Each movement remains a negotiation. With admirable patience, Ms. Tan casts me a sympathetic glance.   

There is no time to wallow in the misery that is my right foot. Taekwondo calls for dorsiflexion; pointed toes are synonymous with broken toes. My thoughts drag me into a flashback of the usual response to this painful mistake: “You might as well grab a tutu and head to the ballet studio next door.” Well, here I am Master Pollard, unfortunately still following your orders to never point my toes, but no longer feeling the satisfaction that comes with being a third degree black belt with 5 years of experience quite literally under her belt. It’s like being a white belt again — just in a leotard and ballet slippers. 

But the appetite for new beginnings that brought me here doesn’t falter. It is only reinforced by the classical rendition of “Dancing Queen” that floods the room and the ghost of familiarity that reassures me that this new beginning does not and will not erase the past. After years spent at the top, it’s hard to start over. But surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become. In Taekwondo, we started each class reciting the tenets: honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet. 

The thing about change is that it eventually stops making things so different. After nine different schools, four different countries, three different continents, fluency in Tamil, Norwegian, and English, there are more blurred lines than there are clear fragments. My life has not been a tactfully executed, gold medal-worthy Taekwondo form with each movement defined, nor has it been a series of frappés performed by a prima ballerina with each extension identical and precise, but thankfully it has been like the dynamics of a spinning back kick, fluid, and like my chances of landing a pirouette, unpredictable. 

Why it works:

What’s especially powerful about this essay is that the author uses detailed imagery to convey a picture of what they’re experiencing, so much so that the reader is along for the ride. This works as a sports essay not only because of the language and sensory details, but also because the writer focuses on a specific moment in time, while at the same time exploring why Taekwondo is such an important part of their life.

After the emotional image is created, the student finishes their essay with valuable reflection. With the reflection, they show admissions officers that they are mature and self-aware. Self-awareness comes through with statements like “surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become” and maturity can be seen through the student’s discussion of values “honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet.” These are the kinds of comments that should find their way into a sports essay!

“Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one. 

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we compete with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

In the beginning, you might think this is another cliche sports essay about overcoming adversity. But instead, it becomes a unique statement and coming-of-age tale that reads as a suspenseful narrative. 

The author connects their experience with martial arts to larger themes in their life but manages to do so without riffing off of tried-and-true themes. Through statements like “I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was” we learn about the students values and their desire to be there for those who depend on them. 

The student also brings it full circle, demonstrating their true transformation. By using the “Same, but Different” ending technique , the student places themself in the same environment that we saw in the intro, but experiences it differently due to their actions throughout the narrative. This is very compelling!

“1…2…3…4 pirouettes! New record!” My friends cheered as I landed my turns. Pleased with my progress, I gazed down at my worn-out pointe shoes. The sweltering blisters, numbing ice-baths, and draining late-night practices did not seem so bad after all. Next goal: five turns.

For as long as I can remember, ballet, in all its finesse and glamor, had kept me driven day to day. As a child, the lithe ballerinas, donning ethereal costumes as they floated across the stage, were my motivation. While others admired Messi and Adele, I idolized Carlos Acosta, principal dancer of the Royal Ballet. 

As I devoted more time and energy towards my craft, I became obsessed with improving my technique. I would stretch for hours after class, forcing my leg one inch higher in an effort to mirror the Dance Magazine cover girls. I injured my feet and ruined pair after pair of pointe shoes, turning on wood, cement, and even grass to improve my balance as I spun. At competitions, the dancers with the 180-degree leg extensions, endless turns, and soaring leaps—the ones who received “Bravos!” from the roaring audience—further pushed me to refine my skills and perfect my form. I believed that, with enough determination, I would one day attain their level of perfection. Reaching the quadruple-pirouette milestone only intensified my desire to accomplish even more. 

My efforts seemed to have come to fruition two summers ago when I was accepted to dance with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet at their renowned New York City summer intensive. I walked into my first session eager to learn from distinguished ballet masters and worldly dancers, already anticipating my improvement. Yet, as I danced alongside the accomplished ballerinas, I felt out of place. Despite their clean technique and professional training, they did not aim for glorious leg extensions or prodigious leaps. When they performed their turn combinations, most of them only executed two turns as I attempted four. 

“Dancers, double-pirouettes only.” 

Taken aback and confused, I wondered why our teacher expected so little from us. The other ballerinas seemed content, gracing the studio with their simple movements. 

As I grew closer with my Moscow roommates, I gradually learned that their training emphasized the history of the art form instead of stylistic tricks. Rather than show off their physical ability, their performances aimed to convey a story, one that embodied the rich culture of ballet and captured both the legacy of the dancers before them and their own artistry. As I observed my friends more intently in repertoire class, I felt the pain of the grief-stricken white swan from Swan Lake, the sass of the flirtatious Kitri from Don Quijote, and I gradually saw what I had overlooked before. My definition of talent had been molded by crowd-pleasing elements—whirring pirouettes, gravity-defying leaps, and mind-blowing leg extensions. This mindset slowly stripped me from the roots of my passion and my personal connection with ballet. 

With the Bolshoi, I learned to step back and explore the meaning behind each step and the people behind the scenes. Ballet carries history in its movements, from the societal values of the era to each choreographer’s unique flair. As I uncovered the messages behind each pirouette, kick, and jump, my appreciation for ballet grew beyond my obsession with raw athleticism and developed into a love for the art form’s emotive abilities in bridging the dancers with the audience. My journey as an artist has allowed me to see how technical execution is only the means to a greater understanding between dancer and spectator, between storyteller and listener. The elegance and complexity of ballet does not revolve around astonishing stunts but rather the evocative strength and artistry manifested in the dancer, in me. It is the combination of sentiments, history, tradition, and passion that has allowed ballet and its lessons of human connection to become my lifestyle both on and off stage.

This essay is about lessons. While the author is a dancer, this narrative isn’t really about ballet, per se — it’s about the author’s personal growth. It is purposefully reflective as the student shows a nice character arc that begins with an eager young ballerina and ends with a reflection on their past. The primary strength of this essay is the honesty and authenticity that the student approaches it with.

In the end, the student turns a cliche on its head as they embrace the idea of overcoming adversity and demonstrate how the adversity, in this case, was their own stereotypes about their art. It’s beautiful!

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay uses the idea of sports to explore a more profound topic—growing through relationships. They really embrace using sports as an avenue to tell the reader about a specific experience that changed the way they approach the world. 

The emphasis on relationships is why this essay works well and doesn’t fall into a cliche. The narrator grows not because of their experience with track but because of their relationship with their coach, who inspired them to evolve and become a leader.

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• Essay On Importance Of Sports

Essay on Sports

500+ word essay on the importance of sports.

Sports keep us healthy and active. We can have a healthy mind only when we have a healthy body. We can achieve anything in our lives if we have a healthy body and a peaceful mind. Physical and mental well-being comes naturally when we involve ourselves in sports activities. Sports help in improving our overall personality and make us more active and attentive. Here, students can find a 500+ Words Essay on the Importance of Sports where we will be discussing how important a role sports plays in our life.

Essay on the Importance of Sports

The topic of sports is very broad. It can serve as a form of therapy and a tool in different aspects of life, which can help change the world. Through sports, children develop physical skills, exercise, be team players, and improve their self-esteem. Sports play a significant role in advancing education and in enhancing knowledge.

Playing sports means regular exercising, jogging, going to the fitness centres or playing any game. There are different types of games involved in sports activities. Each game has its own specific rules. These sports activities are done either by individuals or teams for leisure, and entertainment as well as to compete against one another. Playing sports improves the physiological functions of the body organs and improves the functionality of the entire body system. Through sports, we learn different skills like leadership, patience, coordination, motivation, and team effort.

Sport has great importance in building personality, too. For some people, it is not only the body movement or playing strategy, but it’s a life philosophy. In the modern world, a positive attitude to sports is becoming a trend and style. Young people try to look sporty, fit and full of energy. A sports career in India was considered less lucrative in the past. However, now it has become one of the gainful professional options for students. Sometimes students take an interest in sports merely for adventure and a tension-free life. Now, sports games are gaining popularity. Various sports competitions are played at the international level, such as the Olympics. Apart from it, multiple matches and inter-city competitions are organised to promote the field of sports.

Benefits of Sports and Games

Nowadays, we can see problems related to unhealthy lifestyles. We sit more and more on the couch, surrounded by modern technologies. We don’t realise the importance and benefits of sports and physical activities. The lack of physical activity in our body leads to obesity and many other health problems such as heart disease and so. It has become a necessity of today’s world that all of us do daily physical activities or play any sports for a minimum of 30 minutes.

Regular physical activity benefits health in many ways. It helps build and maintain healthy bones, muscles and joints, controls weight, reduces fat, and prevents high blood pressure. Children who participate in physical activities such as sports, experience positive health benefits. These health benefits include a decreased risk of high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Also, these children are less likely to smoke or use drugs and alcohol than children who don’t participate in sports.

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Frequently asked Questions on the Importance of Sports Essay

Why is playing sports important for us.

Playing sports not only helps in the active functioning of our body but also helps in flexibility and reduces the chances of falling sick.

Which was the first sport to be played in the world?

Wrestling is said to have been the first sport played in the world, depictions of the same can be found in the caves of France.

Which is the most famous sport in the world?

Football is ranked as the top sport with 3.5 billion followers, seconded by Cricket.

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Essay on Sports and Health

Today increasingly more people think of the necessity to engage in sport activity to be able to lead a healthy way of life.

Sport prevents many health problems and renders enormous influence on our health. Sport and health are closely interrelated. It has emerged that health is the base for a human being in his ability to decide serious vital tasks and surmount various obstacles. It is a necessary condition for a man to live long and happy life.

What does happen in our body when we are engaged in the regular sport activity? During exercising we make work our muscles, bones, joints, ligaments in a stress mode, which results in their adaptation to such an intensive work. It makes our muscles grow stronger, adjusts our nerve system to more effective functioning and help us perform more difficult tasks, then we done before.

There are also positive changes in our joints, but those who are thinking the more, the better, are deeply mistaken.

The regular, moderate physical activity positively influences our cardiovascular system. The correct, sparing exercise stress help preventing phlebeurysm and thrombosis in lower limbs. Due to properly proportioned physical activity, the amount of red corpuscles increases in blood, which results in the improvement of oxygen assimilation. Our respiratory system is also one of the main beneficiary from engagement in sport. Better ventilation of lungs to a great extent lead to reduction of such diseases as bronchitis and inflammation of the lungs. There is also an improvement of metabolism, due to the acceleration of metabolism of fats…

As it was already mentioned above, sparing physical activity on the regular basis prevents diseases of blood vessels, such as atherosclerosis. It is also important to say that acceleration of metabolism of carbohydrates leads to better energy consumption.

Naturally, the healthy and active way of life implies total abandonment of fat products and tobacco smoking. Facts talk for itself: moderate physical activity, daily sport exercises, healthy diet effectively prevent such diseases, as diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, obesity and hypercholesterolemia. The decrease of blood cholesterol level beneficially affects not only on the health of the people, suffering cardiac diseases, but also those who suffers diabetes of the second group, increasing the sensitiveness to insulin.

From above-described it is possible to do the following conclusion: it is necessary to be regularly engaged in physical exercises, at least during 30 minutes a day, controlling your heart-rate (simpler speaking – you have to watch after your pulse), to avoid arrhythmia and remember that excessive physical exertion only harms your heart. Doctors meet in opinion that the most healthy sports for the heart are walking, swimming, wheeling and running in an unhurried rate.

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17 Replies to “Essay on Sports and Health”

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Essay on Sports for Students and Children

500+ words essay on sports.

Sport plays an important role in students. As it develops the physical and mental health of the child. Moreover, adults should include in their daily life routine. Sports are not only played for physical health but also to create discipline in a person. Since all the sports require obedient towards a goal, it enlists hard work in a person. Furthermore, some people play sports to make their career in it.

In our country where cricket is more than a sport for us, many cricketers have got fame because of it. Moreover, cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar , M.S. Dhoni are renowned in the entire world. As they have much fame in the country. People recognize them just by their name.

But apart from cricket different organization organize different sports. Tournaments like Commonwealth Games , FIFA World Cup , Asian games have great importance in the world. The tournaments carry out on a huge scale.

There are many sports that have equal importance. Division of these sports is in two categories.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Outdoor sports

Outdoor sports as the name states takes place outside the house. For instance, some of these sports are: Football: This sport takes place on the ground. Moreover, there are two goalposts at the end. As two teams play this sport. So the players of the team have to kick in the ball in the opposite goals. However, the other teams have to defend their goalposts.

Cricket: As we all know about cricket It is also an outdoor sport. Players play cricket on a pitch. In this one team does batting while the other bowls and fields. Moreover, we can only play cricket on a dry pitch. So this game can only take place in pleasant weather.

Tennis: Player plays this sport with a racquet. Moreover, in this sport, only two or four players can play. Furthermore, this sport takes place in a tennis court. Hockey: Hockey is also a renowned sport. Our country excels in this game. Moreover, our hockey players are the best be it in the male or the female category. Players play hockey with a hockey stick and a synthetic ball. But the gameplay of this sport is the same as of football However, there are many outdoor sports but these are the major ones.

Indoor sports

Indoor sports usually take place in a confined place or a room. Some examples of these types of sports are:

Chess: Chess is a mind game. Only intellectual players play this sport. Because it requires a lot of knowledge and presence of mind. Participants play this sport on a chessboard. Moreover, each player has 16 pieces with which they have to play the game

Table Tennis: Players play table tennis on a table inside a room or a hall. Moreover, like tennis it also has racquets. But the size of the racquets is small and of a different material. Moreover, it has a set of rules so the players have to play accordingly.

Boxing: Boxing is a lethal sport. Players like Mary Kom from our country excel in this game. Moreover, Mary Kom makes a huge name worldwide because of her skills in this game. Boxing is a sport that takes place in a boxing ring. Two players land punches on each other until either one knocks out.

Badminton: Similar to tennis only two or four players can play this. Moreover, players play it wit a badminton racquet.

Moreover, there are other sports too but these have great significance in our country.

The FAQ on Essay on sports

Q1.What is the importance of sports in our life?

A1. Sports keep our physical and mental health stable. Moreover, it keeps our body free from any disease by keeping our heart fit.

Q2. Name any two renowned sports players in our country.

A2. The two renowned sports players in our country are Sachin Tendulkar and M.S. Dhoni.

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• School Education /

Essay on Importance of Sports

• Updated on  
• Oct 7, 2023

Sports are an integral part of life. Sports are exciting activities which are not only fun to play but also promote physical fitness. But do you know the benefits of playing sports both mentally and physically? Well, we have come to your rescue. In this blog, you will read about the importance of sports and how it can help one learn several new qualities. These qualities will help one to be ahead in their life. We will also be discussing more on this topic through essays. 

Table of Contents

• 1.1 Physical Benefits
• 1.2 Mental Benefits
• 2 Essay on Importance of Sports in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Importance of Sports in 300 Words
• 4 Essay on Importance of Sports in 400 Words

Importance of Sports 

Sports are essential to every student’s life. Almost every parent believes their child should be involved in sports during their growing years. Moreover, playing sports keeps us fit, healthy and active. Sports teach essential life skills such as discipline, perseverance, teamwork, and time management. Here are all the benefits one gets by playing sports. 

Physical Benefits

• By playing sports, one gets to be physically active and at the same time maintain discipline. 
• By involving oneself in sports, it reduces the risk of obesity and other chronic health issues. 
• Playing sports leads to muscle development, promotes strong bones and lastly reduces the risk of osteoporosis.

Mental Benefits

The benefits of sports are not limited to physical enhancement, they also help in brain functioning and mental activities.

• Playing in team sports, helps one to learn to work together leading to achieving a common goal – leadership skills, teamwork and several other qualities. 
• Sports also improve one’s decision-making skills and boost self-confidence.
• Lastly, sports help one to reduce stress, depression and other mental issues.

Also Read: Essay on My Aim in Life

Essay on Importance of Sports in 200 Words

Sports are essential because they promote social, mental, and physical well-being. They are not only a source of amusement but also play a huge role in many facets of life.

To begin with, sports encourage physical fitness. Sports participation helps people maintain a healthy lifestyle by enhancing their stamina, strength, and cardiovascular fitness. The risk of obesity, diabetes, and other lifestyle-related disorders is reduced by regular exercise in sports.

Secondly, sports improve mental health. It encourages self-control, tenacity, and goal-setting. At the same time, athletes gain the ability to manage stress, develop resilience, and cultivate a solid work ethic. While team sports can foster interpersonal, communication, and teamwork skills.

Sports also help to maintain societal harmony. They give people from various backgrounds a place to interact, fostering friendship and harmony. Sporting events frequently foster a sense of belonging and pride among viewers.

Sports in the classroom impart important life lessons including cooperation, initiative, and sportsmanship. For gifted athletes, they can also result in scholarships and educational possibilities.

Also Read: Essay on Waste Management

Essay on Importance of Sports in 300 Words

The development of the body, mind and social structure are all considerably aided by sports in human society. They have a special and complex significance that goes much beyond simple competition or entertainment.

Sports are crucial for physical health in the first place. People who participate in sports and physical activity can keep up a healthy lifestyle. Sporting activity regularly enhances physical endurance, muscular strength, and cardiovascular health. It works well to combat the rising obesity pandemic, lower the likelihood of developing chronic illnesses like diabetes, and improve general health.

Sports are essential for mental health in addition to physical health. Athletes learn to be disciplined, determined, and have a strong work ethic. They get knowledge on how to set and accomplish goals, manage stress, and develop resilience. These life skills learned via sports are transferable to many facets of success on both a personal and professional level.

Sports also encourage social growth. They give people from various backgrounds a place to interact, fostering social cohesiveness and harmony. Sporting activities foster a sense of community by inspiring people to interact, find common ground, and form enduring friendships.

Sports in education provide a distinctive learning opportunity. They impart characteristics like leadership, sportsmanship, and teamwork, which are crucial in both academic and professional environments. Many students find that participating in athletics paves the way for scholarships and other educational opportunities that might not otherwise be possible.

Sports are economically significant as well. They open up positions in the sports sector for everyone from athletes and coaches to event planners and sports medical specialists. Major athletic events can promote local economies, increase income, and create jobs by boosting tourism.

In conclusion, sports are more than just amusement; they are essential to leading a balanced existence. Sports have an enormous value that goes well beyond the pitch or court, making them an essential component of human society.

Essay on Importance of Sports in 400 Words

Sports plays a crucial role in our lives, promoting our physical and mental health as well as our social and economic development. Sports provide entertainment and recreation for both participants and spectators. They offer an escape from daily routines, a source of excitement, and a sense of shared experience.

First off, sports are essential for fostering physical wellness. People can keep up an active lifestyle by participating in sports. It improves muscle strength, total physical endurance, and cardiovascular health. Regular exercise dramatically lowers the risk of lifestyle disorders like diabetes, obesity, and heart problems. These health advantages help people live longer and with higher quality.

Second, engaging in athletics is crucial for mental health. Athletes learn valuable life lessons including self-control, tenacity, and goal-setting. They gain skills for dealing with stress, developing resilience, and upholding a solid work ethic. These mental skills developed via sports are transferable to many facets of life and can promote success and overall well-being.

Additionally, sports encourage social growth and unity. They bridge gaps in class, age, gender, and ethnicity by bringing people together. Sporting occasions foster a sense of belonging and camaraderie, inspiring people to interact, discover similar interests, and form enduring connections. This social component of sport fosters harmony and understanding between various groups.

Sports offer a special educational opportunity. They provide characteristics like leadership, sportsmanship, and teamwork, which are crucial in both academic and professional situations. Sports are given a high priority in the curriculum of many educational institutions, which recognise the benefits they provide for students’ all-around growth.

Sports are economically significant as well. They open up positions in the sports sector for everyone from athletes and coaches to event planners and sports medical specialists. Major athletic events have the potential to increase tourism, fire up local economies, bring in money, and provide jobs.

Sports also support a sense of national identity and pride. International sporting success may bring a nation together by fostering a sense of achievement and patriotism. Athletes serve as ambassadors for their nations, representing the commitment and labour of the populace.

To conclude, sports are more than just amusement; they provide the basis of a full existence. They encourage mental toughness, social harmony, physical fitness, and practical life skills. Sports participation should be promoted as a top priority by everyone—individuals, educational institutions, and governments. Sports are important for reasons that go beyond the physical, contributing to human society as a whole.

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Sports teaches one several values. These include discipline, elegance, sacrifice, instills leadership qualities which help people to lead a successful life.

When people participate together in a sport, they know that they competing against each other. This helps them to come together as a team.

As they keep kids physically fit and engaged, sports have a direct link to a healthy physique.

For more information related to such interesting topics, visit our essay-writing page and make sure to follow Leverage Edu . 

Malvika Chawla

Malvika is a content writer cum news freak who comes with a strong background in Journalism and has worked with renowned news websites such as News 9 and The Financial Express to name a few. When not writing, she can be found bringing life to the canvasses by painting on them.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Recreation and Sports — The Importance of Playing Sports

Social, Mental, and Physical Benefits of Sports for Young Adolescents

• Categories: Physical Education Physical Exercise Recreation and Sports

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Words: 1334 |

Published: Dec 5, 2018

Words: 1334 | Page: 1 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, social benefits, effects on mental health, effects on physical health.

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• Sciences: Biology
• Sciences: Sports, Exercise, and Health Sciences
• Interdisciplinary Papers: World Studies
• Assessment Criteria
• Research Questions
• Investigation

Extended Essays in Sports, Exercise, and Health Sciences

Choosing a Topic

All EEs in the sciences should begin with at least one hypothesis based on their research question. An extended essay in sports, exercise, and health sciences  covers a wide range of topics from human physiology to biomechanics. It is an applied science course so an EE in this subject must investigate a sporting or health-related issue using the principles of science .

Extended essays in sports, exercise, and health sciences must have a clear SEHS emphasis. This incorporates knowledge from a variety of fields, in particular biology, chemistry, physics and psychology, but the essay must focus on human health and performance in relation to sport and exercise.

The topic must allow for an approach that relates specifically to:

• human performance in sport or exercise, or
• an understanding of the role of exercise or nutrition in improving or maintaining health and managing disease.

Approaches to Research

Research in SEHS

Then, a student will conduct either primary or secondary research to test their hypothesis by collecting some kind of data. By analyzing their findings a student should be able to find a scientific answer to their research question.

Sports Exercise and Health Sciences Sources

Sports, Exercise, and Health Sciences Sources

Even students doing primary research will still need to reference secondary sources. And students relying entirely on secondary sources will need to find sources not only of written information but also experimental data which they can analyze.

Writing the Essay

An essay in the sciences requires is more than just generating and presenting data. Analysis of the data is also essential. The main body of the essay should consist of an argument or evaluation based on the data or information presented . You can gather your own data through a variety of methods, or rely on secondary data. You should use graphs, tables, or diagrams to point out the significance of your findings.

You should ensure that the main body of the essay is well structured and has an obvious logical progression. You can use numbered and headed paragraphs to impose a clear structure. Your evaluation should show that you understand the the data they have collected and its significance to the world.

In your analysis, you should also describe and explain the limitations imposed on the research by factors such as

• the suitability and reliability of the sources accessed
• accuracy and precision of measuring equipment
• sample size
• validity and reliability of statistics

Students  should also consider biological limitations such as:

• those arising from the problem of repeatability and control when using living material
• the difficulties of generalizing from research based on a single type of organism or environment.

Exceptions for Safety and Academic Honesty

Safety and Ethics in Choosing a Topic

In all cases where human subjects are used as the basis for an investigation, clear evidence of informed consent must be provided in accordance with the IB guidelines.

Some topics may be inadmissible because their means of investigation are unethical. For example, investigations that:

• are based on experiments likely to inflict pain on, or cause stress to, living organisms
• are likely to have a harmful effect on health, eg culturing micro-organisms at or near body temperature (37°C)
• involve access to, or publication of, confidential medical information.

Some topics may be unsuitable because of safety issues. Adequate safety apparatus and qualified supervision is required for experiments involving dangerous substances such as:

• toxic or dangerous chemicals
• carcinogenic substances
• radioactive materials.

Other topics may be unsuitable because the outcome is already well known and documented in standard textbooks.

Assessed Student Work

• A study of the effects of Mindfulness Meditation Therapy (MMT) on accuracy in competitive 10 metre Air Pistol Shooting
• What can influence a better reaction time in martial artists?
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My Mother Needed Mental Health Treatment. She Got a Jail Cell

I had just arrived back in the States when I got the call. It was January 2004, and after a semester abroad studying literature in Italy, I was as far mentally and geographically as I’d ever had from my mother and 15-year-old brother. I was still thinking in Italian when I got the call from a family friend. My mother had set her house on fire, the friend told me, and was being held in county jail on charges of Felony arson.

A stream of questions ran through my mind, but in the shock, all I said was: “You can’t light your own house on fire?”

My mom’s friend chuckled, deflecting the question’s absurdity. “No honey,” she cooed. “Apparently, that’s a Felony.” I was days away from starting my final semester at college, but I emailed my professors, flew home, and picked my brother up just in time for visiting hours.

In the visiting room, the three of us sat slumped in shell chairs on either side of a plexiglass wall, phone receivers tucked against our ears, oscillating between confusion and heartbreak as my mother recounted what had happened. In a fugue state, she’d set fire to the house, but as it went up in flames, she became lucid. Realizing what she’d done, she called the fire department and ran out of the house. She was waiting on the lawn when they arrived. But instead of being offered care, she was escorted to a squad car and driven 20 minutes up California’s Interstate-5 to the county jail, where she was promptly booked.

What she needed was mental health treatment; what she got was a cell.

Her story isn’t rare. A March 2024 Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) report on women and incarceration concluded that 80% of women in state prisons are mothers, most, primary caretakers; and that 76% of women have past or current mental health problems, a significantly higher rate than men in the same demographic. In the last few decades, women’s incarceration has grown at twice the rate of men. There is hypocrisy in how we treat mothers: As Mother’s Day approaches and we get ready to shower maternal figures with flowers and Hallmark sentiments, we honor, even revere the mother culturally. But single mothers are still stigmatized—both in policy and ideology. Many mothers, particularly single mothers living in poverty or with little safety net or community to bolster them, don’t report warning signs, or even crises when they have them, for fear of losing their children. Asking for help comes at a cost—and is oftentimes simply too dangerous.

Later, I would come to understand that what my mother experienced that day was a psychotic break. It didn’t happen overnight. There had been signs. For years, decades even. In fact, at 20 years old, she’d had a similar break that left her hospitalized for months. By the time my brother and I came along, she was functional enough and privileged enough—white, traditionally attractive, educated, and with a healthy dose of natural charm—to move through the world at will. She wanted to be a mother more than anything and often prized autonomy and her right to parent over stability, choosing to work less so she could be home with us, and moving frequently. Raising us on her own, she scraped by on part-time work, child support, and occasional government assistance. She knew how to slip around the lurking eyes of society looking down on her—on all poor single mothers.

Any single parent bears great weight, but in the U.S., single mothers, femme-presenting, or nonbinary people, shoulder different expectations than fathers or masculine-presenting parents. They experience higher rates of psychological distress, often due to finances. And they are perceived differently. A 2021 Pew Research study tracked American attitudes toward single mothers. In 2018, when asked if women raising children on their own was bad for society, 40% said yes. In 2021, it was 47%. Incremental, but not insignificant as abortion rights are stripped at dizzying rates.

A government that forces people into parenthood and penalizes them when asking for help as the struggle is a no-win cul-de-sac, and for some, it’s not just a U-turn but potential jail time that looms—a risk greatly exacerbated by class and race.

Read More: Mental Illness Made My First Year as a Mom Excruciating. I’m Just Lucky It Wasn’t Worse

According to the PPI report, 2.6 million children have had a parent in jail or prison. The image of my mother in a state-issued orange jumpsuit was dissonant, but for many families it’s the unfortunate outcome of living in a system that criminalizes poverty. A 2022 joint report by the Human Rights Watch and the ACLU on the impacts of family separation, found that families living in poverty, “often have limited, or no access to resources, services, and social supports for the kinds of issues many parents struggle with, such as mental health, relationships, services for children with disabilities, or responding to behavioral issue s .”

My mother told me that when I was young, she had once partaken in free counseling services from a government agency, and soon after, received a home visit from Child Protective Services. She never talked to anyone after that. A parent with the insight to notice warning signs in themselves should be supported not penalized. But the system isn’t well-prepared to assess these situations with nuance. In fact, the HRW/ACLU study found that many caseworkers in the child welfare system, the agency responsible for reporting perceived neglect, don’t have mental health training at all.

Children must be protected. But by stripping a mother’s ability to get help and keep her children at the same time, we put under resourced communities at greater risk of losing their kids for good. In a way, my mother, like many others, endangered us and herself in order to protect our family unit.

After three months, she was released on what’s called a deferred judgment, a ruling that stated if she attended mandated counseling and got into no further legal trouble for three years, her record would be cleared. She’d never been charged before, so it was unlikely to happen again. But if for some reason it had, my mother would have been saddled with a felony record for having a mental breakdown. And with a felony record, would have been less able to find work, increasing the likelihood of continued poverty, and threat of recidivism, thus carrying on the punitive cycle ad infinitum. Still, she was one of the “lucky ones.” What she experienced is increased multifold by mothers of color.

Unfortunately, she died of technically unrelated causes before the three years was up.

Today, my mother has been dead almost 20 years. But every year, around this time, I wonder what it would look like if she had been given the necessary care absent of threat to her parental rights. I wonder how we might center interventions of care and support instead of punitive measures. What if we assumed the best of mothers, first? Mostly, I wonder how we might help parents living with mental illness keep their families intact.

I know there are many opinions and no simple solutions, here. That to move away from punishment and toward compassion and complexity would require not only major policy shifts, but a cultural sea-change in how we understand family and what it means to protect its sanctity and sanity. But when we talk about who deserves help, we must consider what it costs to ask. The price is not the same for everyone.

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Trends to watch: innovations in sports and health technology.

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Entrepreneur & investor with a passion for early-stage startups. CEO of leAD— a leading sports & health tech investment ecosystem.

As the CEO of a sports and health technology investment company, I track how trends across these industries can create new opportunities for organizations and those looking to enter the market. In the health technology space, I anticipate that artificial intelligence will continue to increase in adoption, and investment in these solutions will likely have a massive impact across the board from staffing to preventative medicine.

Across both the health and sports tech worlds, extended reality (known as "XR") solutions could transform operational and engagement strategies for businesses across industries. As I see it, companies that prioritize creating people-first experiences will continue to make a resurgence in the post-pandemic landscape.

1. Exploring AI In Healthcare

Still coping with the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry is scarce for talent. More than half (57%) of health systems executives anticipate workforce challenges and talent shortages to impact their strategies this year, according to Deloitte . This concern, however, has seen a decline from 68% a year ago. AI is emerging as a dual-force catalyst for potentially addressing challenges in workforce shortages and even detecting diseases .

Companies such as Ada Health , Hyro and ORtelligence (paywall) are deploying solutions focused on workforce optimization and streamlining workflows with automation. Systems like these can enhance efficiency and liberate clinicians to engage in more impactful and meaningful work, which, in turn, can help reduce staff burden and burnout. AI is also being explored to improve patient outcomes and transform early disease detection. For example, companies like Ainnova Tech are working to reshape diagnostic possibilities.

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It's important to note that there are still hurdles to overcome in regard to using AI in healthcare, including accuracy assurance, data biases and privacy concerns. But, overall, these technologies are showcasing their ability to outperform human capabilities in certain aspects. Increased investments in AI solutions will likely drive efficiency, cost-savings and innovation in 2024 and beyond.

2. Evolution Of The XR Landscape

From my perspective, extended reality—a term that covers virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies—is here to stay and poised for growth, particularly with the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Quest 3.

In healthcare, XR extends beyond entertainment and can be used for training and simulation. It has also been employed as a non-pharmacological approach to pain management . In the realm of sports technology, XR is shaping the fan experience by creating immersive and interactive experiences beyond traditional in-person or televised sports events. A notable example is FC Barcelona’s virtual reality experience, where fans can virtually tour the soccer stadium as avatars and explore the history of the club, trophies, player exhibits and more, according to the football club's website.

But as curiosity about XR grows, there is a need for more practical use cases to drive mainstream adoption. For today’s consumers, high price points pose a challenge, emphasizing the demand for more affordable, lightweight and user-friendly options. The global XR market is expected to reach more than $111 billion by 2028, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets. The deployment of XR in the education sector and industrial training, as well as developments in 5G technology, are some of the factors driving market growth, the report said. In 2024 and beyond, I expect to see increased interest and applications for XR to continue.

3. Resurgence Of Human-Centered Innovation

Challenging the digital-first approaches of modern companies, a new, "people-first" trend is emerging that emphasizes a human approach to addressing real-world challenges through community integration. While digital transformation skyrocketed during the Covid-19 era due to restrictions, many consumers still want in-person experiences post-pandemic.

From my perspective, companies like Boram Care, which provides in-person aftercare for mothers post-childbirth, and Spartan Race, known for organizing obstacle races, illustrate a trend of prioritizing people over a purely digital focus. (Full disclosure: My company is an investor in Boram Care.) According to Spartan Race's website, there have been more than 6 million race participants to date.

A people-first approach can be used to shape intentional solutions across sports and healthcare to ensure solutions resonate with communities and address real challenges. At its core, this trend prioritizes people over a purely digital focus, countering the drift toward eliminating personal connections seen in many digital tech trends.

Overall, I believe the continued evolution and adoption of AI and XR will reshape solutions across health and sports technology. As AI builds a more resilient, patient-first healthcare industry and XR reshapes healthcare operations and fan engagement, the intersection of these trends underscores an increasing commitment to people-first experiences and human-centric solutions. I anticipate that across industries, technology that embraces a people-first principle will take center stage in 2024 and beyond.

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Ex-nbaer glen ‘big baby’ davis gets 40 months in prison for health care scam.

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 Glen “Big Baby” Davis is going away for a while. 

The former NBA player was sentenced in New York on Thursday to 40 months in prison for his involvement in an alleged $5 million scheme defrauding the league’s health and welfare benefit plan.

Davis was accused by prosecutors of making $27,000 in claims for a dental procedure in Beverly Hills even though he was traveling between Las Vegas and Paris on the day of the operation. 

He is one of more than a dozen players who have been charged in the criminal conspiracy. 

The players, who earned a combined $360 million during their NBA careers, are said to have submitted “false and fraudulent claims for reimbursement of expenses for medical and dental services that were not actually rendered,” according to a report from Manhattan federal prosecutors in October of 2021. 

In August, former New Jersey Nets player Terrance Williams was  sentenced to 10 years in prison  after he admitted to orchestrating the scheme over a period from 2017-21. 

Former Coney Island high school star and ex-Los Angeles Clipper Sebastian Telfair  avoided prison for his role in the scam  but was given three years probation and was ordered to forfeit more than $350,000 in January. 

Ex-NBA player Will Bynum received an 18-month prison sentence and was forced to return $183,000 in April.

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“While many of the more than 20 defendants convicted in this case were well-known NBA stars, their conduct was otherwise a typical fraudulent scheme designed to defraud the NBA’s health care plan and net the defendants over $5 million in illicit profits,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams wrote in a statement after the convictions of Davis and Bynum came down in November . 

“Today’s conviction exemplifies that despite notoriety or success in sports or any other field, no one is exempt from criminal charges if they engage in fraud.”

Davis played eight seasons in the NBA from 2007-15, which included stints with the Celtics, Magic and Clippers. 

He came off the bench for Boston during its 2008 NBA title-winning run. 

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Will student medical forms to play sports and be in band be used against them?

It’s springtime in Oklahoma, which means students wanting to participate in athletics or marching band next school year must complete and submit a physical evaluation form. It includes questions regarding heart health, bone and joint health, family health, general medical questions, and a section for female students only, which asks multiple questions about menstruation, including the age of the first menstrual period, how many menstrual periods have occurred during the past 12 months and the date of the most recent menstrual period.

The form explains that the questions are “designed to identify risk factors prior to participation by way of a thorough medical history and physical exam.” There was a time, not long ago, that the stated purpose behind these questions was readily believed and understood. Indeed, the answers to these questions are vital in helping medical professionals, coaches and other trusted adults watch for and identify conditions that can have long-term impacts on a student’s health and well-being. The information provided helps to provide preventative care and can even save lives.

But these days, parents and guardians are suspicious. It’s springtime in Oklahoma, which is the season when elected officials in this state seem to work their hardest at creating a climate of fear by attempting to control bodies, legislate gender and criminalize reproductive health care. Their obsession with genitalia and gender conformance means that parents are having a hard time trusting that information they provide will be used only for its stated purpose or in the best interest of their child.

More: Two Oklahoma elected officials challenge federal government over proposed gender rules

Instead of confidently filling out a basic health form that is meant to be a helpful tool in ensuring the wellbeing of students, parents are worried about the nefarious ways information could be used against their children and families. While details about a girl’s period can aid in identifying multiple concerns (like amenorrhea and disordered eating) before they spiral out of control, it is no longer safe to share those particulars. Given the rhetoric and legislation around reproductive health care, if details about missed menstrual periods are put in the wrong hands, it could be used to detain, punish or put students through inappropriate and unnecessary examinations and questions. Indeed, there is a risk of students (along with the rest of us) having to prove gender in public places because of legislation like Sen. Jessica Garvin’s so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights.”

We want our kids to play sports and march with the band, but the current climate has us scared to fill out the paperwork. We can’t be sure how the bathroom-and-bodily-function police will weaponize it, and this puts our children’s health and well-being on the line.

It’s springtime in Oklahoma, which means there are still a few weeks left in the legislative session for our elected officials to shift their focus from regulating a person’s private parts to investing in our children’s educational experience. God, hear our prayer. May our legislators hear it, too.

The Rev. Lori Allen Walke is senior minister at Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ.