To say that the FIFA World Cup has been eventful would be an understatement. Over the last month, there have been upsets, controversies, and personality clashes on and off the pitch. But there’s a common theme that occurs in matches with a tight scoreline, or where one side managed to grind out a win despite not being the statistically better team: They had players who were creative in generating opportunities—and then exploiting them.
Watching this play out seems like a constant exercise in problem-solving. So can playing sports—especially team sports—be a way to cultivate creativity in other aspects of life? After all, athletics involve physical activity, collaboration, motor control, and coming up with solutions with a clear set of constraints. These are all aspects that, individually, tend to have a positive impact on creativity.
The relationship between sports creativity and other forms of creativity
I posed this question to Matt Bowers, a faculty member in the Sport Management program at the University of Texas at Austin. He began by stating that this is an area that is constantly evolving and something that the scientific literature has yet to explore. There are, however, patterns and inferences we can draw if we isolate specific elements.
Take the example of someone who decided to play a new sport. “When we’re moving our body in new contexts, in new planes of movement, when we’re being forced to coordinate the brain and body in ways that we haven’t before,” it can feel almost like unlocking a little bit more of the brain, he says.
This is something that Kiana Glanton experienced. Glanton became a competitive athlete at 39, when she picked up blind baseball (a form of baseball for blind and visually impaired athletes) after losing her vision due to an autoimmune disease. She was recently selected to Team USA’s blind baseball roster and juggles this role alongside working full-time at Lighthouse Guild—a not-for-profit organization that provides medical assistance and social support to people who are blind or visually impaired.
Glanton says that seeing herself progress in her sport helped her immensely with creativity. Once she saw it was possible to go from “not being an athlete to being an international competitor” and eventually representing the United States, she says she knew that there was “hope and possibility.” And “after that, everything became possible.”
The role of constraints in cultivating creativity
Glanton’s experience is an exercise in finding solutions to constraints and limitations—whether real or perceived. This is something that she faces in her day-to-day life outside of sports.
“In the blind community,” she explains, “every day is an exercise in creativity or an opportunity for creativity.” She gives the example of dressing herself and putting on makeup without a mirror. Sports is another avenue where she can continue to develop that mental muscle.
“Once I got into adaptive athletics, I had to think about the way that I could run without dealing with a fear of crashing into something,” she says. “This sport was not made for us,” she continues. Because of that, it allowed her to think in a “problem-solving lens” where everything becomes, “How am I going to navigate this?”
For Glanton, that meant communicating with her teammates with a series of claps, chants, and verbal cues so they could run and get to each other without crashing or bumping into something. Once they’ve nailed that part, the blindness stops being a constraint.
“Ultimately, you want to make the play, you want to make the win. After a while, you stop thinking about the blindness and start thinking about the athletic side of it, the competition,” she says.
The importance of variety and exploration
On the other end of the spectrum, creativity can also come from variety and exploration. This can come from experimenting with different styles and tactics, incorporating other forms of movements, or playing sports in an unrestricted and unstructured setting.
In 2014, UT Austin’s Bowers published an article for The Conversation that looked at whether youth sports can foster creativity. The answer was “it depends.”
In the United States, youth sports are highly structured and competitive, and often leave little room for unstructured play. His research found that the children who scored “above average” in creativity were those who spent a balanced amount of time playing sports in both organized and unstructured settings. That’s an insight that adults can take away if they’re thinking of picking up a new sport as a way to unleash creativity.
“There’s some evidence [that] the more you vary your sport experience as an adult [and] the more different types of things you do, the more it creates cognitively this ability to navigate ambiguity,” Bowers says. And when you expose yourself to different situations regularly, you’ll be in a much better place to come up with different solutions to those situations, he continues.
Sports and movement as an exposure to other possibilities
This is something that Glanton herself has experienced. After progressing as a blind baseball athlete, she realized it was possible to participate and thrive in other activities that aren’t usually accessible to the visually impaired.
Since picking up blind baseball as an adult, Glanton was inspired to try modeling and competed in three pageants (one of which she won). In the last two weeks, she’s tried kayaking.
Glanton is adamant that sports and movement are powerful ways to cultivate creativity, especially for those who might have traditionally been excluded from participating. Glanton’s employer, Lighthouse Guild, provides the opportunity for the visually impaired to pick up tandem cycling, goalball, rock climbing, blind tennis, and blind golf, in addition to blind baseball. Picking up a sport, Glanton believes, encourages people to remove the limitations of what’s possible.
Bowers agrees. He suggests that those who are interested in using sports as a way to improve their creativity should vary the activities that they try. “Don’t feel like you have to become a marathon runner,” he urges.
Says Glanton: “There are people out there just itching to try something different. And there’s so much beauty in the vastness of what is possible.”
