Being an athlete as a child usually means that the child will have to put in extra hours throughout the week to train, and playing as a team usually adds sporting events to one's schedule. where the child would have to miss school to attend. In addition to these extracurricular activities, homework is generally due by the same date as for non-athletic students. These factors can be seen as additional stress that children face today, and athletes can be expected to perform lower academically than non-athletic students. However, this is far from the truth. Recent studies have shown that athletes perform very well in school, even with this added stress. According to Medina (2008), what may seem unusual in athletes' academic achievements could be linked to the lifestyle of early human ancestors. Fifty thousand years ago, human ancestors were constantly on the move, with men traveling up to twenty kilometers daily, and women about half that. They were always moving for many reasons: in search of food, to escape predators, and to explore and discover their land. For this reason, they did all their learning while being physically active. This, combined with the fact that our brains evolve extremely slowly, contributes to the hypothesis that the human race learns best through exercise. According to an article by Rosenkrantz (1997), aside from the effects of exercise on a person's mental abilities, exercise in the form of team sports is also believed to be beneficial to an individual. Playing as a team teaches valuable skills that may not be learned in school or elsewhere in a child's life. These skills include......middle of article......according to Singh, these studies should focus on using objective measures to record physical activity as well as studies that explore the effects of the dose-response relationship that exists between physical activity and academic performance. Even without a good number of high-quality studies, Singh believes a significantly positive link has been found between physical activity and academic performance. The next step to confirm this hypothesis is to understand how the two are related. /search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/232899567/14174687A9774AA81B6/14?accountid=9358 http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/218184887/1417459703F558EB26E/1?accountid=9358 http://onlinelibrary.wiley .com/doi/10.1111/j.1746-1561.2009.00454.x/abstract http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=doctoral