What Youth Sports Teach Us About Work
And life.
At Heja, our mission is to connect the youth sports world.
Already, more than a million coaches, parents and players use our app, and we try to educate them how to better communicate with their teams.
But just as often, it’s us who find ourselves learning from the world of youth sports.
Virtually everyone in our company spent our childhoods playing on a team.
As a competitive athlete myself, as well as Heja’s growth marketer and content editor, most of what I seem to know about navigating the world of work (and adult life) I learned playing sport.
This is part of its magic. And here are just a few ways youth sports help prepare us for life in work:
- Being a team player
- Building vital communication skills
- Maintaining confidence under pressure
Some Transferable Skills From Sport To Work Life
As a teenager, I played for the Manchester City academy, dreaming of becoming a professional football player, training and playing with full discipline, determination and dedication in pursuit of these ambitions.
My football journey led me to America, to become a ‘student-athlete’, which meant combining a university degree with a place on the soccer team.
At university I was shown a cheesy presentation, listing the ‘transferable skills’ we were building in our sporting lives that would help us later in the world of work.
I didn’t take it seriously at the time, but at Heja, I use these skills every hour of the day.
1. Be a good teammate
As my colleague puts it, teamwork makes the dream work. It’s true.
And while the Heja offices have a more modern feel than most football changing rooms I’ve spent time in — with more MacBook Airs and less smelly sports kit — it’s a place filled with teammates just the same.
In tech, we sometimes give teamwork a bunch of different names. Helping someone from another department is called ‘cross-functional collaboration’. But it’s no different from a striker helping out a defender on a football pitch in pursuit of the team’s common goal.
Being a good teammate is something you learn from an early age playing youth sports. It helps you make friends, it helps you succeed as a team, it helps keep your coach happy.
And as far as I can tell, being a good teammate remains the most valuable trait you can demonstrate throughout your work life too.
2. Build vital communication skills
We asked a group of coaches who use Heja what their ambitions are for the upcoming season.
“To continue to make being a part of my team an enjoyable experience that the kids look forward to,” was one nice response.
“To communicate better with my team and improve communication between everyone on the team,” was another that demonstrates how, especially when good coaches are involved, youth sports set you up for success in adult life.
I wasn’t the loudest kid, at least not in big groups. But sport is where I learned to speak up.
I learned to communicate with adult coaches. And those same coaches taught me that on a football pitch, a big part of your role is to pass on information to teammates that could help them in their positions and help you in yours.
Simple stuff: “Time.” “Turn.” “Left.” “Right.”
But by not communicating these things, none of us would be able to perform at our best.
At work, communication is usually more nuanced, but the principles are the same. Whether it’s:
- sending a Slack message relaying information a colleague may have missed
- sharing a work discovery in a conversation over lunch
- having a tough conversation with your manager
- or video calling an organisation your company hopes to partner with
Good communication skills are vital for virtually all successful work. Youth sports players, especially when playing under good coaches, are fortunate to learn these skills at a young age.
3. Maintain confidence under pressure
I recently had the chance to take a penalty kick to try and save a football game for my team.
I’ve missed penalties before, and remember feeling like I’d let my teammates down.
So when this pressure situation presented itself again — with the added distraction of the loud whistles from opposition fans in the stadium — I tried to maintain my confidence by reminding myself how hard my team had worked to get to this point and of all the training I’d done to prepare.
I took a deep a deep breath, hit the ball where I practiced and our team went home with a point.
Young athletes are tested by situations like these every weekend on the playing fields and courts of the youth sports world.
Pressure situations are less obvious at Heja. But as a company with a grand vision we have big goals that we strive to hit both individually and together.
Whether it’s a project deadline we set ourselves, or targets set by investors, at the end of the day, we all need to deliver results of some variety.
We’ve experienced some awesome growth at Heja since I first joined, mainly thanks to an extremely good product that coaches and parents are happy to recommend to other teams.
Still, as a growth marketer I find myself regularly feeling some kind of pressure — often self-imposed — to try to keep up with the high pace of growth we expect from ourselves.
When unforeseen events occur, like a global pandemic grinding the sports world to a halt, this pressure can rise a notch or two.
Maintaining your confidence in these challenging moments is hard but necessary, and youth sports provide a perfect arena to learn that lesson for the rest of your sporting career, work life and beyond.
For these reasons and more, at Heja we believe to our core that youth sports have a massive positive impact on society.
They help children prepare for their futures, leading to better results in school, helping make lifelong friends and building foundations for healthy lifestyles.
That’s why our founders started a youth sports company, and it’s why I joined the team.
- Interested in a position on our team? Check out Heja’s openings here.
