Team sport involves a group of people who participate in a common activity that requires their collective performance. A variety of sports can be considered team sports, including basketball, soccer, baseball and football (known in the US as ice hockey).
Athletes are able to practice together to learn new skills and strategies for competition. This provides them with a sense of belonging and connection to others.
They have an opportunity to learn to support each other during a game, on and off the field. This helps them to become more resilient and develop the ability to deal with setbacks.
Children also learn the value of hard work, dedication, and delayed gratifications that they can apply to their life outside of sports. This is one of the greatest benefits of team sports.
Athletes are required to compete with their teammates and coaches for starting roles and playing time, but they must also cooperate with each other for performance success. This makes it more likely that athletes will develop cooperative behavior than for individual sports, where cooperation is viewed as incompatible with competition.
In a study, researchers found that while both team and individual sports require competitive behavior (for starting positions and for training), cooperation is more prevalent in team sports. They also found that competition does not undermine information sharing (i.e., a cooperative behavioral tendency) with uninvolved others after an experience of competition, as was previously predicted.
