Gender and race patterns in the pathways from sports participation to self-esteem

ABSTRACT: Athletics is the most prominent extracurricular activity in U.S. secondary schools in terms of student participation and school bud-gets. The latter is often justied on the grounds that healthy bodies produce healthy minds, that school sports boost school spirit, and that participation in school-based sports increases students ’ self-esteem. In this article we examine the interrelationships among participation in a school-based sport and the benets assumed to be associated with it. Specically, we test a model that postulates that school spirit, operationalized as attachment to school, and healthy bodies, operationalized as a sense of physical well-being, mediate the relationship between school sports and self-esteem. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health on Caucasian and African American girls and boys were employed to test the model. School attachment and physical well-being absorbed the statistical effect of participating in a sport for all four gender-by-race groups. Among Cauca-sian girls a negative residual effect of sports participation was observed