Character is built whether a person plays a sport or not. Yet playing sports develops a certain type of character. The characteristics that get noticed more often are selfishness, overly competitive, and aggressive. The more helpful characteristics such as cooperative, disci

plined, and self-driven, go unnoticed more often. Other virtues that sports promote are team working skills, leadership abilities, fast-clear thinking, and being able to make decisions under pressure. Bad sports experiences may lead to the opposite of the fore-mentioned virtues. Say for instance that a child is pressured into participating in a sport that they do not want to. This will change the child's attitude toward that particular sport or even all sports in general. It will lead them to develop a negative view of sports. It is all right for a person to think that facing athletic challenges develops good habits of character. To take that seriously we have to assume that character is not fully developed much earlier than the age of sports participation. An example of not having good character development would be when the child's sports experience is one which winning is over emphasized and the character that is shown to them is screaming parents and coaches who lack self control (Freezell 205).

If there were one thing that I would change would be the emphasis on winning. There is too much emphasis on winning at a young age for beginning athletes. When children first

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Approximate Word count = 804
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)