For decades, a comforting assumption has run through how American parents, coaches and policymakers talk about youth sports: get kids onto a field or a court, and good behavior follows almost automatically. A new study out of Ohio State University complicates that story considerably. Simply playing organized youth sports does not reduce a person’s likelihood of committing violence over their lifetime, the researchers found, and in some circumstances — particularly heavy-contact sports and early dropout — it may actually be associated with a higher likelihood of it. The study was published recently in the Sociology of Sport Journal.

“Our findings challenge the common notion that sports are inherently good — that you just put kids in sports after school and it’s going to be okay,” said lead author Emily Nothnagle, a PhD student in Ohio State’s College of Social Work and a former captain of the university’s national championship varsity pistol team. “There is more to the story.”

Nothnagle and her co-author, Ohio State sociology professor Chris Knoester, set out to test a long-running cultural assumption that sports sociologists have come to call the “Great Sport Myth” — the idea, popularized by sociologist Jay Coakley in 2015, that sport is inherently pure and good, that this goodness transfers automatically to anyone who plays, and that sport therefore leads inevitably to positive individual and community development. “Not only is sport thought to lead to a host of positive things, but the Great Sport Myth suggests that it’s automatic,” Knoester said. “You just roll the ball out, throw a few kids on the field, and good things happen. They learn self-control, perseverance, discipline, how to get along with one another, and how to become healthier — without any intervention or direction.”

To test that assumption against actual outcomes, Nothnagle and Knoester turned to survey data from 3,849 adults who participated in the National Sports and Society Survey, sponsored by Ohio State’s Sports and Society Initiative. Respondents, drawn from all 50 states through Ohio State’s American Population Panel, answered questions online between the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019 about their sports histories — both growing up and in adulthood — and about their lifetime experiences with violent behavior.

About two-thirds of participants had played organized sports as children, and most of those eventually dropped out. Nearly 30% reported regularly playing a heavy-contact sport while growing up. Most respondents, including most who had played youth sports, reported never engaging in violent behavior over their lives. But 17% said they had, with 3% reporting an act of violence within the past year; the most common incidents cited were physical fights and hurting someone badly enough to require medical care.

When the researchers broke those numbers down by sports history, the patterns ran counter to the conventional wisdom. People who had played organized youth sports at any point were 7 percentage points more likely to have committed a violent act than those who never played at all. That gap was driven largely by people who played and later dropped out, who were 5 percentage points more likely to report violence than lifelong non-players. Respondents who had regularly played a heavy-contact sport growing up were 8 percentage points more likely to report a violent act than those who hadn’t. Notably, the researchers found no meaningful difference in violence between people who played sports continuously throughout childhood and those who never played sports at all — the elevated risk showed up specifically among those who quit, and among those in the roughest sports, not across sports participation broadly.

“There’s evidence that sport participation is not associated with reductions in the risk of committing violence,” Knoester said. “In fact, we find consistent evidence that sport is more likely to increase the risk of ever committing violence, and this is especially the case when people are playing more violent sports. This suggests that it’s important to rethink how we are conducting sports in society and the types of programs and messaging that we’re introducing children into, if we want more positive outcomes.”

The study doesn’t argue that sports are inherently harmful, nor does it suggest parents should pull kids out of athletics. Instead, the researchers say the type of sport, the intensity and duration of a child’s engagement, and the quality of peer relationships built around it all shape whether the experience ends up associated with better or worse outcomes later in life — variables that a blanket faith in sport’s automatic benefits tends to paper over.

Nothnagle pointed to Ohio State’s own LiFEsports program, which she has been involved with as both a leader and a researcher, as a model for what a more intentional approach can look like. The program explicitly teaches young athletes social and leadership skills and provides coach education through its Coach Beyond initiative, an approach backed by research showing measurable results. “Life skills are taught, not caught,” Nothnagle said. “So, it’s about trying to create those environments that shape the behaviors and outcomes you want to see.”

That distinction — between assuming sport will build character on its own and deliberately structuring it to do so — sits at the center of what Nothnagle and Knoester hope their findings will shift. As Knoester put it, the goal isn’t to abandon youth sports but to stop treating their benefits as something that simply happens by default. The data, the researchers say, suggest those benefits depend heavily on how, and how long, a child actually stays in the game.

Endnotes
1. Emily Nothnagle and Chris Knoester, “Does Sport Participation Deter or Encourage Violence? Patterns of Sport Participation and Acts of Violence Over the Life Course,” Sociology of Sport Journal, May 20, 2026, DOI: 10.1123/ssj.2025-0140.
2. Ohio State University, “Participating in heavy-contact youth sports, dropping out of sports linked to acts of violence,” news release via EurekAlert!, June 25, 2026.
3. Jay Coakley, “Assessing the sociology of sport: On cultural sensibilities and the great sport myth,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 50, nos. 4–5 (2015): 402–406 — origin of the “Great Sport Myth” framework the study sets out to test.
4. National Sports and Society Survey (NSASS), Ohio State University Sports and Society Initiative and Center for Human Resource Research — survey infrastructure underlying the study’s data.

IMAGE CREDIT: NASA.