You Learn to Have Fun…and More

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: Somewhere along the way while playing sports, you learn to have fun—but you also learn how to be tough and intensely competitive. It’s not an easy balancing act to try to get along with everyone as you try to find a way to win. And, you learn about being a part of something and finishing it up. You learn about discipline, handling disappointments, being more team-oriented, and realizing that not everything is about you. You could score, but could you pass? Employers understand that athletes possess soft-skills which are difficult to acquire anywhere other than though sports participation.

Here's some more great benefits playing sports: On the turf field, on the court, in the pool, or on the track, every athlete gets a lesson in community organization and education. It is where you can make your closest friends, whether they were from a different neighborhood, on a different team, or of a different color. It is an environment where your GPA, your religion, or your sex couldn’t be a disadvantage. The respect you received playing sports was usually a direct result of the respect you gave.

Athletics Largely Shape Who We Are

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: The licensed establishment known as organized athletics serves us well in two important areas:

• It is a great training ground to find out who you are, what you are made of, and what you’re capable of.
• It provides you with exposure to an environment from which to learn the human interaction skills necessary to be confident and successful in your life.

Organized sports, particularly in high school and at the major college level, are also an exercise in submission to social control. Within this environment, rules, conformity, plays, media, expectation, measurement, referees and pressure all conspire to make you an integral part of the team, like it or not.

By contrast, unorganized sports like pick-up ball, four-square, hopscotch, or the other playground sports we all grew up on, provided our most important life lessons. First and foremost, unorganized sports taught us a great deal about collective governance and constant conflict resolution. Pick-up ball harks back to a traditional time when kids weren’t scheduled into play dates or stashed with adult supervision, but instead made their way to the park on their own, picked teams, had fun, and sorted it all out… conflicts, disagreements, start and stop times, rules, team selections, and who was out and who was safe. It was on the playground where most athletes molded their athlete DNA and grew up along the way.

One of a Kind… for Better or Worse

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: When people become highly skilled at anything they were not forced to learn, they are probably expressing a natural gift. One person might learn multiple languages with incredible ease, while another person has very little ability to learn languages but possesses a gift for downhill skiing. Someone born with a collection of innate abilities has an easier time learning certain things, and they turn each progressive skill corner much more easily.

Each of us has already been dealt a very specific hand of cards by our genetic inheritance of talent and ability. That gives us a knack for playing a great game of lacrosse, tennis, or water polo… and, going forward in life, a fairly narrow range of roles in the working world that we can enjoy with natural ease and mastery.

But just as our DNA makes each of us a one-of-a-kind individual with abilities to do certain kinds of things easily and happily, that same DNA and can make other tasks seem like pure torture. Aptitudes you were born with are completely different from acquired knowledge, skills, and interest. Over your lifetime, your interests can change. You can gain new skills and knowledge. But your natural, inherent talents remain with you for your entire life; and for the most part, Mother Nature, doesn’t let you change them except to improve upon them.