Kids who play sports grow up to make more money and now we know why. But we also know your kid doesn’t have be the star player – or even on a varsity team – to reap the adult financial rewards that childhood sports can offer.

Lori Wolk, a mother of three in Parkland Florida, has always supported her kids athletic endeavors. She was rewarded last year when Vassar College selected her daughter Lindsay — now a freshman — to play lacrosse for the selective liberal arts school.

“Sports opened up doors for my daughter but it’s all driven by my kids. If they wanted to stop playing tomorrow I’d tell them to stop playing tomorrow,” says Wolk. “I wouldn’t tell my kids they need to play a varsity sport in order to be successful in life.”

No worries — economists will tell them for you. They’ve known for decades that former varsity athletes earn more money and now research shows why: prospective employers perceive them to have more leadership skills and greater self confidence than graduates who participated in extracurricular activities such as band or yearbook.

But this is not (let’s repeat: not) a license to berate our kids after plays go bad. (Meanwhile, parents who yell at referees may need more help than we can offer here.) Because experts also explain that our kids don’t need to be the top athletes on the varsity teams – or even on the varsity teams, for that matter — to get the money-making skills from sports that are so coveted by corporations.

“It’s a question of persistence,” says Kevin Kniffin, an assistant professor at Cornell University. “We get the idea there are prosocial values – thinking about other people – that are obtained when playing on a team and they spill over to outside the team.”

Kniffin and his team of researchers first set up a proxy for a hiring situations by surveying 61 adults with an average age of 39 years old — and asked them to rate their expectations of prospective employees. Without meeting the “candidates,” those “bosses” expected people who played sports in high school to be more confident leaders. (They did not, to Kniffins surprise, expect them to be better at time management.)

Next, they looked at 951 adults who had graduated high school some 50 years earlier – their average age was 78 years old. And asked those people to rate their own sense of leadership, confidence and self-respect. The respondents who had played high school sports gave themselves scores superior to those who did not.

“In addition to the correlation between participation in high school sports and late in life leadership, self confidence and self respect,” says Kniffin, “we found people who played high school sports donated their time and money significantly more than people who didn’t play.”

Those experiments very much reflect a real-world corporate mentality, says Mary M. Young, the director of the Ziff Career Services Center for University of Miami’s School of Business. At IBM, where Young was formerly an executive, mangers would actively seek out candidates with sports backgrounds because that was a predicator of leadership skills and a person’s ability to collaborate and work well on teams.

“Goal setting and achievement, high pressure and stress situations,” says Young, “all of these are skills that student athletes posses and can bring to the professional work space.”

What’s more, University of Miami has — through a partnership with the NFL — created an MBA program specifically for artists and athletes. Their competitive spirits, says Young, easily translate into entrepreneurial strength.

But leave the competition on the field, says Mark Hyman, author of The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today’s Families. Parental over-involvement in athletics — both emotionally and financially — not only costs money but can melt away the confidence and leadership skills the researchers find valuable. These attitudes are not only common, but worsening.

“It’s the global warming of youth sports,” says Hyman. “Because every year, the temperature creeps a little higher.”

Parents and coaches do best for kids by giving compliments, says Johanna Guma-Aguiar, sports director for a girl’s volleyball league and a traveling softball league in Miami. She agrees that sports develop critical skills, but says those can be — and often are — attained by players of all proficiencies, even those participating in recreational — not varsity — leagues. The best athletes learn to depend on teammates (a kid who hogs the ball eventually loses the game for everyone) and the least able players learn that positive words and high-fives go far, says Guma-Aguiar. Confidence develops when a kid can’t serve the ball until — after weeks of practicing — she eventually can. Respect from teammates and opponents comes from arriving in uniform, standing tall, and shaking hands. Commitment? It’s developed when a kid shows up at every practice, meeting and game, she says.

“The minute you’re part of a team, no matter what level,” says Guma-Aguiar, “you’re learning these basic fundamentals.”

SIDEBAR

QUESTION: Great, so I played varsity or recreational sports in school. How do tell prospective employers?

ANSWER: Put it right on your resume, says Mary M. Young, head of the University of Miami’s career training for the career services center at the University of Miami’s School of Business. At the bottom, be sure to have a section with awards, interests and activities —the perfect place to list your athletic participation.