True-Sport-Report

VII. Conclusions: What We Can Do to Achieve True Sport
Playing sport, and learning how to compete, provides a crucial venue
for educating our nation’s youth and shaping our national culture.
It is a vehicle for building positive relationships, fostering personal growth
and perseverance, and learning ethical behavior. Myriad benefits to our
health and general well-being can be attributed to sport, not only by
diminishing obesity and disease, but also by fostering positive psychological
and social outcomes. The physical, mental, and social health benefits of
sport are enormous and can last a lifetime. Sport can build character, provide
a moral compass, and bring people together. Beyond the love of family
and friends—and good parenting—there are few human activities that can
make that claim.
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden wrote in his memoirs, The
Wisdom of Wooden, that his father was formative in instilling the values of
sport and life:
Basketball or any other sport can be great fun to play and entertaining
to watch. However, it offers something more important. The lessons
it provides—taught properly—apply directly to life. Many of those
lessons are usually taught first by a good mother and father, but sports
can help make them stick and add a few more. 202
We might play sport for different reasons—because it is fun, because
the glory of pitting our skills against those of a well-matched opponent is
exhilarating, because we value our relationships with teammates or coaches,
or because we feel the personal accomplishment of pushing our physical
and emotional limits. Whatever the reason, true sport—that is, sport
played hard, fair, and clean—fosters personal growth and social goods.
Beyond the intrinsic rewards of sport are the extrinsic rewards—winning,
fame, and notoriety. Certainly, everyone who plays sport at any level wants
to win—that is the nature of competition. But we know from research
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