Do high school sports build character? A quasi-experiment on a national sample

Abstract

Popular sport culture, conventional social wisdom and promotional ideology by athletic associations suggest that participation in high school varsity sports programs has positive effects on prosocial personality traits (i.e., sport “builds character”). While it is an open ended process to specify which facets of personality are affected during the high school years by playing sports, we use a broad array of personality measures in a secondary analysis of a five-wave panel of U.S. males. Drawing from the nationally representative Youth in Transition panel (n = 1,628), we employ a quasi-experimental design incorporating pre- and post-sports participation measures of personality to evaluate the “sport builds character” argument. Few statistically significant effects of varsity sports participation on social character are observed in these data on males during the late-60s and early-70s. Since little positive evidence was found, we challenge the “sports builds character” myth of conventional high school sport programs.