In 2022, Barack Obama spoke to Harvard University’s basketball team. He described how playing basketball shaped him and prepared him for leadership. “There is something extraordinary about hitching your wagon to something bigger than yourself,” he stated. He added, “The odds of any of you being LeBron or Steph, as good as you are, are not as high as the odds of you being extraordinary leaders in health care or business or civil rights.”[1]

Obama attested to the formative value of sports for character. Additionally, while it is statistically unlikely that many collegiate athletes will play at the professional level, Obama shared that their sporting experiences would prepare them for leadership in other domains.

Can Sports Form Character?

The sentiments Obama shared are common, and they may be apt. In many cases, sports can play a formative role in our character. This is for a few reasons. Sports involve practice, or intentional repetition of certain virtue-tracking actions. For example, a footballer may learn fitting fear concerning risks. A runner may learn to persevere over extended runs. A curler may learn patience, in discerning the right moment to release a stone. Accordingly, sports provide repeated opportunities to act well, in ways that are conducive to virtue development.[2]

Sports also provide opportunities to reckon with infelicities of various sorts, such as injuries, losses, and hardships. They offer practice managing heightened emotions. Sports also facilitate encounters with excellent others, such as a teammate who far exceeds another. In such cases, athletes may respond with envy. Alternatively, they can learn to respond productively to the successes of others, such as through emulation or gratitude. Sports can also provide community, affording participants the chance to connect over “something bigger than yourself,” in Obama’s phrasing. Sports do have the potential, albeit sometimes unmet, to form participants for good.

How This Process Goes Awry

Even so, there are a few reasons why sports participation will not necessarily yield improved character. First, most coaches are not prepared to coach to this end.[3] Sports performance tactics and safety training are widely mandated for school-based coaches, but only 8 percent of states in the United States mandate training in character development and sportsmanship.[4] Also, it is possible to play sports and practice vices, instead of virtues. An example is teammates who consistently envy each other, or a player who is imprudent regarding training.

Another possibility is that the character formed in sports will remain in sports, without impacting life outside of it. For example, a runner may grow in perseverance as she accumulates mileage across a season. Should we be confident that the perseverant runner will then be able to persevere as a citizen or a student? Perhaps not. This worry is called the problem of virtue translation.[5] For the remainder of this article, I will focus on this concern.

The Problem of Virtue Translation

Virtues are often situation-restricted traits. They are stable properties but are highly context-dependent.[6] For example, I may be reliably patient while gardening—reacting to slower-than-desired progress toward a goal with a reasonable level of calmness[7]—yet not exhibit virtuous patience in line at the grocery store or while interacting with my children. We often act in predictable yet fragmented ways toward the good.[8]

On these grounds, we might wonder whether the virtues acquired in sports will impact character outside of sports at all. Maybe the patience acquired while playing tennis will only affect my comportment on the tennis court. Perhaps the courage I develop on the football field will not appreciably impact my dispositions toward risk off of it. When virtues fail to translate situations, character development initiatives in sport offer minimal benefit to our lives. So, what factors impact whether virtues translate across contexts? Here are three.

1. Similarity of Situation

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes the value of gymnastics alongside poetry for forming guardians in his City in Speech. He does not raise a concern about virtue translation. Why? Plato wrote in a milieu marked by political conflict, where preparation for citizenship largely meant preparation for war. These are similar contexts. Forming a person’s character through sports may translate readily between physical training and the military, more so than between sports and a career in finance, for example.

Something to keep in mind is that situation-types can be cast in numerous ways, and not all of them are physical. For example, if I learn to be patient with teammates in basketball and I view my work colleagues as teammates, my patience may translate readily across contexts.

2. The Virtue in Question

Situational constraints impact certain virtues more than others. For example, resilience is a virtue that enables its possessor to cope with or overcome adversity.[9] There is considerable empirical evidence that resilience translates across contexts, which is what we might expect for a virtue defined, in part, by one’s ability to reckon productively with change and unanticipated setbacks (i.e., undesirable situational changes). Otherwise, this virtue would only reckon well with expected outcomes, which is quite unresilient. Other virtues, such as fortitude and perseverance, appear to translate less readily across contexts.

3. The Process of Development

The virtue developmental process in sport will also impact translation. For example, if practice of a virtue (e.g., perseverance) is accompanied by reflection on one’s greater life purpose and values, participants may view character growth as connected to other areas of life, like relationships, religious identity, or vocation. Absent reflection, a sports participant may habituate virtue-tracking actions but lack motivational continuity across contexts.

[1] Golen, J. 2022. Obama tells Harvard team, basketball was about more than me. KARK.

[2] Little, S. 2024. The Examined Run. Oxford University Press.

[3] Coakley, J. 2015.

[4] Atkinson et al 2022: 3; Bates & Anderson-Butcher 2023

[5] Little, S. 2026. The problem of virtue translation from sports. Theory and Research in Education 24(2): 188–208.

[6] See Hursthouse 1999; Snow 2010; Upton 2009.

[7] Miller & Furr 2025

[8] Miller 2023, 2024; Upton 2009; Kamtekar 2004

[9] Snow 2019: 126