Why Sports and Sportsmanship Matters

I've been an athlete myself as long as I can remember, and I played competitive sports all the way through my junior year of undergraduate school. I learned quite a few lessons that have served me well throughout my life on things like teamwork, playing by the rules, integrity, and so on. Kim DuToit lays it out very well in this post, which I've excerpted below. I am hopeful that if my future children do get into sports that they take away as many good things from it as I did, and hopefully even more.

"Why was sport so important?

The answer is quite simple: to engender the concept of sportsmanship, and manners. While all competitions were fierce, they were always played in a spirit of the utmost cordiality—and if another school’s team did not display good sportsmanship and manners, they were not included in the following year’s fixtures.

We were taught, at all levels, that to win by cheating was not winning at all—and if someone was discovered to have won by cheating, at anything, the consequences were dire: banning from the sport, or (in extreme cases), expulsion from the school altogether. ...

Here was the essence of what we were taught: every game has its rules, and one plays within them. But if there’s an ambiguity, one should always err on the side of the honorable decision. Had I not been given out, and stayed in, I might have scored enough runs to have given our team victory. But at what price? Was it worth compromising one’s integrity for the sake of a meaningless game?

The lesson stuck with me, and has always been one of my steadfast, guiding principles. Outside sport, of course, this is called conscience, and I am appalled by the number of people who either ignore that small voice, or who never had one to begin with. The former are immoral, the latter amoral, and I try to have as little to do with either group as I possibly can. ...

When one plays by those rules of fairness and sportsmanship, of course, the expressions “technically legal”, “not provable” and the like are completely irrelevant. Where some people make the mistake, I think, is that they believe that somehow the principles of fair play and sportsmanship only apply to sport. They don’t. ...

I’ve tried to play the Game of Life with the utmost degree of sportsmanship, and where I’ve failed, not only have I known it, but my conscience is going to trouble me for the rest of my days because of it."