Your winning mindset is what makes you stand out. Whether you’re a student-athlete applying to one of your first jobs, a coach with a knack for game planning, or a sports manager ready to lead athletic programs, you know you need a well-formed resume to stand out in competitive industries.
How do you format your resume and create a cover letter to hit your goals?
Take a look at our sports resume examples that are winning jobs in 2024. You can use them as a template for success as you take the next steps in your career.
Why this resume works
- Even if you never professionally started out as an athlete, you can still include experience bullet points that display your physical endurance.
- Leverage unrelated past work experience in your sports resume by highlighting any metric including physical activity. Adding a point like “handling packages up to 74 lbs without assistance” is a great option to prove your agility and strength.
Why this resume works
- Having a strong career objective is essential for your athlete’s resume. Here’s where you should ideally make your impact.
- Write down your past project experience in any position such as a volunteer and mentor. Now, use them both to state your intent for future goals. Is it becoming more proficient in a particular sport? Or keep on motivating young individuals? Align your objective to display what you specifically want to do moving forward.
Why this resume works
- Your projects hold a lot of value when creating your student athlete resume as demonstrated in the example here.
- Showcase any past roles of high responsibility such as being the high school team’s captain. You can even add a more fun project such as a documentary and cleverly display your skill for being detailed by writing how you analyze every player’s strength and weakness.
Why this resume works
- Walk into the shoes of Thaddeus and see how their sports management resume does a great job of mentioning a degree in sports management.
- Adding your past education qualification never goes wrong, especially in managerial roles. Use this opportunity to also show how you’ve climbed the ranks of first becoming an assistant and then a manager.
Why this resume works
- Software skills such as Coach Pain and AthleteMonitoring are the essentials of a great sports coach resume. You’re ensuring that recruiters pay attention to your application from the start.
- Leave a lasting impact on your employer by showing how you’ve used each tool to analyze your players and helped the team remain at the top of their game by creating match-winning strategies!
Related resume examples
Align Your Sports Resume with the Job Description
While writing your resume, think of it like creating a custom weekly game plan based on your team’s circumstances. In this case, it’ll involve reviewing the job description to identify each organization’s specific needs to list in your top skills.
Are you applying to be a soccer coach for a team struggling with offensive efficiency? Then, you may want to emphasize your abilities in square passing and four-cone shooting drills. Take a similar tailored approach for each sports resume you submit.
Need some ideas?
15 best sports skills
- Training Programs
- Injury Prevention
- Team Leadership
- Diet & Nutrition
- MyFitnessPal
- Hudl
- ShotTracker
- Fitness Assessments
- Recruiting
- Game Planning
- Ticketmaster
- Hootsuite
- Salesforce
- Play Design
- CPR/AED
Your sports work experience bullet points
Given your athletic background, you know that results matter whether it’s on the field or in the office.
With the number of data points that come with athletic achievements, you can set yourself up for success on your resume by using the right metrics that align with each organization’s needs. For example, while applying to be a sports manager, you could write about how you boosted attendance and increased sponsorship deals.
Here are some great sports metrics for your resume to give you some ideas.
- Program adherence: Want to present your abilities to design effective training programs? Then, program adherence rates will show that you deploy engaging training methodologies that athletes stick with.
- Injury rates: Whether you’ve been a trainer or a player, showing how you can reduce injuries with your techniques is a great way to illustrate how you keep athletic organizations in the game.
- Revenue: Both sports managers and coaches must be concerned with revenue generated for successful seasons that keep programs moving forward.
- Scoring averages: One of the best ways to show how you design effective game plans and training is with increased scoring across the season.
See what we mean?
- Monitored heart rate and aerobic activity using Fitbit, leading to a 27% improvement in cardiovascular endurance, maintaining utmost energy levels in games.
- Collaborated with clinic staff and coaches to synchronize their Google Calendars to reduce scheduling conflicts, decreasing errors of double-booked sessions by 21%.
- Integrated AthleteMonitoring to educate the team on the impact of lifestyle choices on performance, improving 42% of their recorded sleep schedules.
- Implemented real-time defensive adjustments based on StatMuse analytics, reducing opponent scoring by 8 points per game.
9 active verbs to start your sports work experience bullet points
- Developed
- Managed
- Collaborated
- Promoted
- Improved
- Incorporated
- Designed
- Planned
- Trained
3 Ways to Optimize Your Sports Resume When You Lack Experience
- List hobbies/interests
- Sports-related hobbies & interests can make entry-level candidates stand out no matter what role or industry they’re applying to. For example, your time spent following detailed training programs and providing team leadership as an elected captain could show how you’ll lead effective programs as a group fitness instructor.
- Add projects
- Entry-level sports applicants can also benefit from listing projects when they lack work experience. For instance, you could include achievements from leading a youth baseball clinic where you boosted player performance by 34% while raising $3,300 for charity.
- Include relevant educational achievements
- Many sports-related careers, like trainers or managers, require the right education. For example, while applying to be an athletic trainer, you could explain how you applied corrective exercises during kinesiology courses to reduce injury risk by 45%.
3 Ways to Make Your Sports Resume Shine When You’re Experienced
- Always measure your impact
- Stats and metrics are essential to understand performance. One of the best ways for experienced applicants to stand out is to include a measurable impact for each example you list, such as how you implemented drills to reduce weekly fatigue rates or created a promotional campaign that boosted attendance.
- Keep it to three or four jobs
- When you’re experienced, you don’t need to include every job you’ve worked at. For example, sports management internships will likely be irrelevant for you now. So, keep it to three or four that are the most recent and use a relevant skill set, such as using Ticketmaster and QuickBooks during pricing analysis as a sports manager.
- Limit it to one page
- While writing your resume, think of it like preparing a game plan for your team. It should be focused and relevant to specific organizational needs. So, keep it to a brief one-page overview of specific skills like play design and offensive strategy when applying to be an offensive coordinator for a football team.
Sports resumes will work best in reverse chronological formatting. Just like athletic performance improves with extra training, so do your top skills in training programs and team leadership. Therefore, listing your experiences in order of recency will help present your most relevant abilities as you’ve grown your career.
Action verbs like “planned” or “strategized” will help you speak in an active voice that adds impact to the examples you list. For instance, you could write about how you strategized over 30 weekly defensive play calls before games to boost forced turnovers by 64%.
Every team you’ve been on has had a unique culture and needs. Applying for sports-related jobs is the same way, so your resume should be customized to align with varying organizational needs. For example, one sports management role may be focused on budgeting, whereas another has a big emphasis on promotional planning.
