THE INFLUENCE OF SPORTS PARTICIPATION ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE, DISCIPLINE, AND LEADERSHIP SKILLS AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
Keywords:
sports participation, academic performance, discipline, leadership skills, university students, secondary data analysis, higher educationAbstract
This study examined the influence of sports participation on academic performance, discipline, and leadership skills among university students using a quantitative explanatory research design based on secondary data analysis. A harmonized dataset comprising 54,230 undergraduate students from multiple institutional and international sources, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL), UNESCO, OECD, and peer-reviewed studies, was analyzed. Sports participation was operationalized through participation frequency, duration of participation, sport type, and competitive level, while academic performance, discipline, and leadership skills served as the outcome variables. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and multiple linear regression were employed to examine the relationships among the variables. The findings revealed that long-term participation in sports positively predicted academic performance, whereas excessive participation frequency, varsity status, and team sport involvement negatively affected academic achievement, indicating a crowding-out effect. Sports participation demonstrated a strong positive influence on student discipline, with varsity participation, team sports, and higher training frequency significantly enhancing behavioral compliance and self-regulation. In contrast, sports participation showed minimal influence on leadership development, explaining only a negligible proportion of the variance in leadership skills and revealing no significant differences between athletes and non-athletes. The study concludes that sports participation contributes differently across developmental domains, strongly promoting discipline while producing conditional academic benefits and limited leadership outcomes. These findings underscore the need for higher education institutions to balance athletic commitments with academic support and to intentionally integrate structured leadership development programs into university sports.
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