I wrestled in school. The advantage of being from a small town before cable television (there, anyway – cable television existed but you had to pay for the lines to get it to a small town) and with no TV reception at all was you find other stuff to do. And being in a small school means you’re going to make the team, whether you are any good or not.
Sports teaches about life because sports is a meritocracy – well, a meritocracy everywhere except those extracurricular clubs where you pay for your kid to be on the team. Learning to succeed on merit is a good thing for when you have to work. But even if you never are good enough to play much, you learn things about teamwork and ‘seeing’ the field.
Writing on Forbes, Steve Cooper discusses research on why athletes do better in the workforce, and data correlating wrestling to better success. Wrestling is not a team sport at all, you are out there alone for the 6 longest minutes of your life against a guy who weighs as much as you and wants the exact same thing; but other than that, you know nothing about him. He quotes Socrates in placing wrestling above another solo sport, running: “I swear it upon Zeus an outstanding runner cannot be the equal of an average wrestler.”
I never was much for running but I did three other sports during the school year and wrestling is different; it is a life. After a baseball game, you eat ice cream or drink a beer. In wrestling, it never ends. You are certain to be wrestling against someone who should weigh 10 lbs. more than they do. You can’t eat ice cream and pizza. And if you miss one day of training, your coach would tell you, it takes three days to get back to where you were.
There is no one to pass the ball to and no one to back you up if you make a mistake. Wrestling is lonely and that makes you a little tougher. So why would it make you a better teammate, which is what is needed in business? Emotional intelligence. Good luck getting emotional intellgence from musicians, for example – you never see scientists tearing up hotel rooms when they are on tour.
And you learn humility, he notes. That part is true. One of my brothers won a PA state championship in wrestling and I was rather terrible at it but neither of us felt invincible on the mat. It takes a certain humility to suppress your own instincts and knowledge and truly consider another view; it’s unnatural, we got to where we are by being awesome, not by being told we were wrong. But it’s important to gain some self-awareness of flaws. Obviously lots of people, not just athletes, have self-awareness, it is just a slight statistical difference. All other things being equal, if you have a choice between the athlete and the non-athlete, take the athlete. And all other things being equal, take the wrestler over the basketball player, even though the latter played on a team.