The main advantage of team sport is that it teaches athletes to collaborate with others in pursuit of a shared goal. This is a valuable lesson for life, where people need to work with colleagues and partners in many professions. Athletes also learn to make decisions under pressure and deal with failure, both of which can be challenging situations for many people to cope with. Sports are a great way to build resilience and problem-solving skills, while fostering social connections with other young athletes, coaches and parents.
Team athletes must also learn to manage the physical demands of numerous training periods within a session. These include warm up, position-specific drills, special teams practice and conditioning, preparatory play, and team periods. These different types of activities require an athlete to train with different characteristics and may even be performed at different intensity levels [101].
The complexity of team sport makes it difficult to capture and analyse the full range of metrics provided by tracking systems. Athletes need to make decisions about which metrics are relevant to their context and to distil the information provided by these systems into meaningful, useful feedback. The varying evidence base around the selection of metrics and their utilisation in applied sport settings suggests that greater awareness is required to ensure that tracking system data can be used effectively in practice [102].
Team sport requires athletes to make rapid decision-making on the fly. Whether it’s a basketball player deciding to shoot or a soccer player realizing that their best move is to pass to a teammate, these snap decisions are critical for the success of a game. This learning translates into the ability to function under pressure and makes athletes better prepared for future career challenges.