Adolescent Athletes and Leadership: Are We Developing Positive Role Models?

Purpose

Methods

Analysis/Results

Conclusions

The Sports Leadership Institute (SLI) at Adelphi University was founded on the principle that sports, physical education and athletics are part of a comprehensive educational experience, providing innumerable opportunities to teach valuable life lessons. One objective of SLI's programming is to teach leadership skills to high school student-athletes as preparation to act as role models and mentors to elementary school students. Over the course of several workshops, the SLI program teaches and reinforces characteristics that are acknowledged by the leadership and sport literatures (e.g., Gould, Chung, Smith, & White, 2006; Jago, 1982; Mufford et al., 2000; Northouse, 2004) as important to the development of leadership attributes and mentoring skills to adolescent student-athletes. The program also utilizes a formal debriefing process in which student-athletes meet with their program coordinator after visiting with elementary school students to review the mentor experience. However, SLI's leadership program has not been evaluated to show evidence that leadership is being taught and, more importantly, is learned by its student-athletes. Therefore, the purposes of this portion of a larger program evaluation were to examine, from the high school student-athletes' perspective, the effectiveness of SLI's leadership program in developing the desired attributes and skills in its student-athletes and the usefulness of its debriefing process. High school student-athletes (N = 175) from 15 schools in the NY metropolitan area, attending SLI workshops for at least one year participated in this study. Participants completed a questionnaire designed to evaluate participants' perception of (1) the sport leadership program's influence on their development of leadership skills, citizenship, critical thinking skills, self-regulation, and personal empowerment, and (2) the purposes and usefulness of the debriefing meetings held with their program coordinator. Results show that the student-athletes tended to agree to strongly agree that the SLI program has taught them leadership skills. Analysis of variance results did not show any significant differences between participants' gender, year in school or other demographic characteristics on the aforementioned dependent variables. Also, participants indicated that the debriefing meetings served several purposes such as to generate creative ideas and to prepare for future visits with elementary school students. These findings are consistent with other results of the larger program evaluation and indicate that the SLI leadership program has a significant influence on developing high school student-athletes' leadership attributes and mentoring skills. Implications for organizations with similar life skills programs will be discussed.