When people think about sports, they often will immediately have their minds jump to a player on the field of play. If that is the case, I cannot blame you, but professional athletes have begun to shift more off the field and help the community. Today, we are going to discuss some of the ways that some of the major professional athletes and student-athletes have excelled off the field of play and continue to help people.
Helping people can give you a bit of a high, similar to hitting a blackjack inside of an online casino. Let's dive into the article to talk about helping others.
Helping Yourself
According to a study by the University of Rochester, “studies have shown that exercise increases blood flow to the brain and helps the body build more connections between nerves, leading to increased concentration, enhanced memory, stimulated creativity, and better-developed problem skills. In short, playing sports helps your brain grow and makes it work better.”
This is something that makes sense as being a healthy person will help you in the long run as your body is benefitting from the social and physical activities that are happening around sports and continuing to help people grow and become a more well-rounded person as a result.
You also are getting some benefits from social skills as well as if you play a team sport, that teaches people to not be selfish and to cooperate with one another to achieve a goal. There are also self-esteem benefits that come from sports, as getting support from your teammates and coaching staff can go a long way to feeling better about yourself.
Sports also help you figure out exactly who you are. Sports, just like life, make you experience incredible highs and lows, and playing a sport teaches you how to cope with your losses along the way. Controlling your emotions is one of the most unsung heroes of playing sports that continues to help whether you are playing with your friends or playing in front of millions of fans.
Helping Others
Helping others is something that happens a lot in the sports world as, unfortunately, there are a lot of chances for this to happen. This can be from a professional athlete standpoint or as simple as community service with your teammates to make the community that you live and play in a little bit of a better place.
From the professional athlete's standpoint, there are natural and unnatural disasters that can derail a community, and a lot of professional athletes make a lot of money and create foundations to help people in need.
One example is the Anthony Rizzo Family Foundation of New York Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo, who battled cancer and focuses his foundation on helping families dealing with pediatric cancer in supporting them. There are hundreds of thousands of causes that professional athletes extend their foundations to help and become role models in the community.
In a non-professional athlete aspect, you can go do some community service hours as a team and make sure you are doing your part in the community. Go find a local soup kitchen or clean the highway; there is no wrong answer to helping out in one way or another to continue helping people.
Conclusion
Helping people should not just fall on people with an athletic background, but the ability to help should be a team effort, and that is something you learn in the world of team sports. You never want to let your teammate down, and helping your local town can be one of the biggest teammates that you will ever have.
It feels incredible to help out someone in need, but the world of sports helps us develop at any age, as we discussed throughout this article, so go out and play sports and make sure to help someone in need.
