Kids + Sport – Leadership In Adults + other Benefits – Fitness & MMA Blog

Ask most parents why they sign their kids up for football, netball, or swimming and you’ll hear the usual answers: fitness, friendship, fun. All true. But a growing stack of research, spanning hundreds of thousands of people across multiple countries and generations, shows the real returns arrive years after the kit bag gets put away.

From boardroom seats to salary negotiations, from lower rates of depression to higher odds of attending university, the tracked benefits of youth sport are far broader than most people realise. And while the data applies to all children, the effects are particularly stark for girls.

The Leadership Pipeline

In September 2024, the Women’s Sports Foundation published Play to Lead, the first study to survey seven generations of women, from their twenties to their eighties, on the connection between youth sport and adult leadership.

The headline finding: of women who played youth sport and went on to hold a formal leadership role, 71% held titles like Manager, Director, President, or C-suite Executive. The longer a girl stayed in sport, the more likely she was to hold one of those roles.

That built on a landmark 2014 survey by EY and espnW of over 400 senior female executives across five countries. Among women in C-suite positions, 94% had played sport. More than half had competed at university level. Only 3% had never played at all.

The most recent data comes from 2026. A study by e.l.f. Beauty and women’s sports consultancy Parity surveyed over 9,500 women across the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK. Women classified as “Everyday Athletes” (those who had played sport for at least three years before finishing school) were nearly 50% more likely to hold leadership roles at work than women who played less or no sport. They were 37% more likely to aspire to senior positions, and 25% more likely to have negotiated their salary.

Critically, these benefits are linked to participation itself, not to becoming an elite athlete. As Parity CEO Leela Srinivasan put it: the gains come from playing, not from winning.

The Earnings Premium

Here’s a finding that often surprises people: former high school athletes earn 5 to 15 percent higher wages than peers who didn’t play sport. That’s not a correlation with income or education background. Researchers controlled for those variables. The premium is unique to sport. It doesn’t show up for other extracurricular activities like band or yearbook.

The Deloitte 2023 study added granularity: 85% of women who played sport said the skills they developed were important to their career success. Among women already in leadership roles, that figure rises to 91%. Among women earning over $100,000, it’s 93%.

The skills women most credited to sport: teamwork (73%), learning from mistakes (53%), handling pressure (51%), and pushing physical boundaries (46%). Three-quarters of C-suite women surveyed by EY said a candidate’s involvement in sport influences their hiring decisions, meaning the advantage compounds. Former athletes hire other former athletes.

Mental Health: Children Who Play

The youth mental health crisis is well documented. What’s less widely known is how consistently sport shows up as a protective factor.

The Women’s Sports Foundation’s 2024 report Thriving Through Sport compared girls who play sport with girls who have never played:

Source: Women’s Sports Foundation, Thriving Through Sport, April 2024

Team Sport vs Individual Sport: A Surprising Split

This is one of the more counterintuitive findings in the research. A study of over 11,000 US children aged 9 to 13 found that team sport and individual sport have very different mental health profiles:

Source: PLOS ONE study of 11,235 US children aged 9 to 13, 2022

Read that right column again. Children who exclusively played individual sports had greater mental health difficulties than children who didn’t play sport at all. The researchers at Cal State Fullerton suggest the isolation, self-comparison, and pressure of solo competition may explain the difference. Team sport, by contrast, provides built-in social connection and shared accountability.

A 2019 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that children with no exercise were twice as likely to have mental health problems compared to those meeting the recommended hour a day.

Mental Health: Adults Who Played (and Stopped)

The protection doesn’t evaporate after school. A June 2024 study from Baylor University and Ohio State, published in the Sociology of Sport Journal, tracked nearly 4,000 adults and their youth sport histories. The results split adults into three groups:

That third finding is the one that stops you. Adults who dropped out of youth sport had worse mental health than adults who never played at all. Not slightly worse. Measurably, consistently worse across both depression and anxiety measures.

Why? The reasons for dropping out tell the story. Of those who quit:

• 45% said it stopped being fun
• 31% felt they weren’t good enough
• 16% couldn’t afford it
• 15% had team conflicts
• 8% experienced coach abuse

The interpersonal reasons (not having fun, team conflicts, coach abuse) were specifically linked to worse adult depression and anxiety. Financial barriers also predicted poorer mental health. Interestingly, those who quit to focus on academics showed lower depressive symptoms, suggesting the reason for leaving matters as much as the leaving itself.

Mental Health: Adults Who Stay Active

The data on adults who currently exercise or play sport is just as compelling.

A major study published in The Lancet Psychiatry analysing 1.2 million US adults found that those who exercised experienced 43.2% fewer poor mental health days per month than those who didn’t. That’s not a small effect. It’s nearly half as many bad days.

A 2024 APA survey found that 84% of Americans who participate in sport say it benefits their mental health. And in clinical settings, exercise interventions showed a 22% higher likelihood of depression remission than traditional treatment methods alone.

Perhaps most striking: a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that following exercise, only 20.8% of panic-disorder patients experienced panic attacks, compared to 62.5% after rest. The physical act of sport is doing something pharmacological.

Sport and Suicide Risk in Young People

A 2025 Washington University study analysed data from over 800,000 students across 41 US states using Youth Risk Behavior Survey data from 2007 to 2023. Among middle schoolers, 20.5% had seriously considered suicide, 13.5% had made a plan, and 8.6% had attempted it. For high schoolers: 16.6%, 13.5%, and 9.2% respectively.

Students engaged in organised sport showed significantly reduced suicide risk across all those measures. The researchers attributed the protective effect to structure, social connection, and a sense of belonging.

This arrives alongside a worrying trend: high school sport participation dropped from 57.4% in 2019 to 49.1% in 2021, and hasn’t recovered. The protective factor is shrinking at the exact moment it’s most needed.

Body Image and Confidence

The confidence gap between boys and girls widens sharply in middle school, particularly between fifth and ninth grade. Sport doesn’t close that gap entirely, but the data shows it narrows it meaningfully.

A national US survey of more than 10,000 girls found:

• Girls who play sport are 11% more likely to say they are “happy the way they are”
• They are 16% less likely to want to change their appearance
• During the years when confidence drops most steeply, sporting girls remain at least 8 percentage points more confident than non-sporting peers

Academic Performance

The old worry that sport takes time away from study runs directly against the evidence.

The 2024 University of Sydney study tracked over 4,200 children from age 4 to 21. Children who stuck with sport had higher test scores, better school attendance, stronger working memory, and higher odds of university admission. Critically, the study controlled for socioeconomic status, disability, and school type.

Wider US data shows that high school student-athletes are far less likely to drop out and 15% more likely to attend college. The academic effect was strongest in maths and science, and strongest when sport was conducted during school hours at a moderate dose of one to two hours per week.

The Sydney researchers also found that continued sport participation was especially beneficial for socioeconomically disadvantaged children, though, in a painful irony, those children were the least likely to keep playing.

The Generational Shift: The Barriers That Remain

70% of Gen Z women who started sport played through to the end of secondary school, up from 62% of Baby Boomers. The pipeline is widening. But seven out of ten women in the WSF study reported barriers to full participation: family finances (27%), low parental engagement (20%), limited opportunities (20%), and injury (17%). Girls of colour, LGBTQ+ youth, and those from lower-income backgrounds face the steepest barriers of all.

A Note on Causation

The research isn’t perfect. Correlation runs through much of it. Families who encourage sport may also encourage ambition, and self-selection makes clean causal claims difficult. Researchers writing in the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics in 2024 cautioned against overstating the empowering potential of girls’ sport without acknowledging these complexities.

But the consistency of the signal, across the EY survey of 400 executives, the WSF’s seven-generation study, Deloitte’s career analysis, the e.l.f./Parity survey of 9,500 women, Australia’s longitudinal tracking of 4,200 children, Ohio State’s 4,000-adult mental health study, and Washington University’s analysis of 800,000 students, makes the direction of the evidence very hard to dismiss.

The kit bag pays for itself many times over.

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