From athletes to entrepreneurs: Participation in youth sports as a precursor to future business endeavors

ABSTRACT

Building upon athletes’ positive attributes recognized by the theory of deliberate practice and research in sports psychology, this study examines the relationship between a person’s participation in competitive sports during formative years and the propensity for creating a new venture later in life. The analysis of the biographies of 2,084 American executives reveals that individuals who participated in competitive sports in their youth are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Our research indicates that participation in individual sports (such as tennis, running, and swimming), but not in team sports, drives the results. Moreover, being a star youth athlete further enhances the likelihood of entrepreneurial action. Thus, we contribute to research on personal characteristics in entrepreneurship by shedding light on the relevance and importance of an athletic background and qualities developed through sports to entrepreneurs. We discuss the practical policy implications of our findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Sports psychology
• youth athletes
• deliberate practice
• new venture creation

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Professor Martie-Louise Verreynne for her editorial guidance along with the anonymous reviewers. Additionally, we are very grateful to Dr. Paul Kossman for his assistance with editing the manuscript. Kirill Pervun thanks his coaches and athlete-friends without whom this research article would not be possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ https://app.boardroominsiders.com/sample-profiles.

² Note that Boardroom Insiders Inc. is an independent organization which, unlike social media or other information- sharing platforms, independently collects all information. Profiled executives are not involved in the process of their profile creation. In fact, most of them are not aware of the existence of such profiles. These facts exclude the possibility of using BRI profiles for image management by CEOs and their firms.

³ For the founder-CEOs of large corporations (S&P 1500), we verify their founders’ status also through public sources, such as annual (10-K) reports (Fahlenbrach, 2009). Our method for identifying entrepreneurs appears to be reliable regardless of the size of the company that executives in the sample currently manage.

⁴ We derive these calculations from not tabulated analysis using the following inputs: out of 242 former youth athletes in the sample 81 are entrepreneurs and 141 are not; within the subsample of those who did not engage in competitive sports in their youth, 446 are entrepreneurs and 1,396 are not.

⁵ In some cases, we observe a person’s involvement in several sports which may include both individual and team sports.

⁶ We acknowledge our results may not establish causality in the statistical sense. However, typically there is a significant time lag, measured in years and sometime in decades, between a person's involvement in competitive sports in adolescence and starting a business. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that an individual’s participation in youth athletics precedes entrepreneurial action.

⁷ To address potential concerns of multicollinearity among the independent variables, we use applicable tests and conclude that multicollinearity does not pose a problem in our analyses. Appendix A contains a correlation matrix for main variables used in our study. Overall, correlations between pairs of independent variables are low except for a few naturally occurring interactions between several education variables, such as MBA, Advanced degree, and Elite graduate school. The highest correlation coefficient is 0.364. The variance inflation factors (VIFs) are all less than 3.18, which is far below the acceptable cutoff point of 10.

⁸ A series of articles in the Entrepreneur magazine (see links below) highlight similarities between athletes and entrepreneurs, such as determination and perseverance, strong work ethics, goal-orientation, courage, focus, stress management and recovery skills among others.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/329404

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/320751

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/330438.