Personal development and athletic success: exploring the link and predictors of performance among basketball players

Introduction: Personal development goes beyond physical training and technical skills.How-ever, the impactoflife skills on athletic performance remains underexplored, indicating a need to examine how personal development contribute to athlete’s success.Objective: This study examined the relationship between personal development, specifically life skills,and performance and the keypredictors of performance among varsity basketball players at Mindanao State University (MSU), Philippines.Methodology: A quantitative correlational design was employed, involving 48 varsity players. Performance datawere collected through notational analysis, while personal development was assessed using a standardized life skills questionnaire covering teamwork, goal-setting, social skills, problem-solving, emotional skills, leadership, time management, and communication. Pearson's correlation and multiple regression analyses were applied.Results: The findings revealed that the players exhibited moderate personal development over-all and majority have fair performance. A statistically significant positive correlation (r = 0.967, p < 0.05) was identified between personal development and performance, with teamwork, emotional skills, leadership, and time management emerging as significant predictors of per-formance.Discussion: Thishighlightsthe importance of integrating structured life skills training into sports programs to foster well-rounded players. Such training not only enhances performance but also equips players with transferable skills for life beyond sports.Conclusions: Current sports environments lack full optimization oflife skills, physical and tech-nical skills, thereby calls a need for intervention. Future research should explore similar rela-tionships across diverse sports and cultural contexts to generalize and expand these findings.