Student Athlete Resume: Free Templates, Samples & Skills Advice

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As a Student-Athlete, are you eager to use your physical talents in a working environment, but your resume is still out of shape? If that’s the case, give it a real workout with one of our personalized resume templates and be the candidate that finishes in first place.

Student Athlete Resume Example MSWord®
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You’ve got your game face on for getting a job. 

You’ve trained, you’ve competed and you’ve most likely won in your college sporting career.

Now it’s time to turn that success on the field into a successful career.

“But I’ve only been playing college football up to this point”, you might be thinking. Maybe it was basketball or lacrosse, it doesn’t really matter.

What counts is that you’ve gained tons of transferable skills in your athletic career that you might have never even thought about.

You’re sitting on a goldmine of untapped potential that’s all to your advantage when putting together a college athlete resume example.

We’re going to tell you how you can go from a hero on the court to a hero at getting hired! 

This guide explains:

You’re used to winning on the field. Now let’s learn how to get a winning career underway with an optimized student athlete resume. 

When you sit down to write your resume think of it as a bit like your game plan. 

You have to strategize, create points of attack, and get the right components into the right places.

That last point is especially important when you’re deciding which kind of athletic resume template you’re going to use. 

In almost all cases your best choice is a reverse-chronological resume format.

Why is that?

This is because it focuses mostly on the elements a recruiter will want to see you get down on paper. Namely, your most recent experience.

You might also experiment with other formats like functional resumes, which put skills at the top of the page. Now, this is a lot riskier and is not really expected by hiring staff. 

That said, even if you’re struggling to get relevant experience on your student athlete resume, it’s still best to stick to a reverse-chronological layout if you want to see wins from your template.
We’ll explain how that’s done further down the page.

What File Format Should I Use?

Don’t forget the little details that count whether you’re applying for a job, including the file format you save your document in.

When you’re all done writing your resume it’s important to consider how a recruiter is going to receive your finished profile.

Most companies today use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to check through the hundreds of resumes that get sent to them every, single, day. 

In short: this means your finished file needs to be machine-readable.

Your best option is to use either one of the following file types:

• PDF
• TXT

You might be used to sending your student athlete resume as a Word file. That’s fine a lot of the time. 

However, it can be a messy file format for some systems. Especially if you’ve added too many custom design features or specialized fonts.

Of course, if the recruiter specifies a file type, make sure to follow their instructions.

Ok, so we’ve made this all sound easy.  But what should college athlete resume examples look like when they’re completed?

Good question.

To give you some ideas, let’s take a look over the student athlete resume example below to see what you need to be an MVP during your job search.

Resume Example

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[John Galford]

[Student Athlete]

[47 Harter Street, Dayton, OH 45402 | 937-635-9846 | GalfordJ32@gmail.com]

Summary

Goal-oriented Student Athlete with a BSc in Sports Management with a focus on marketing. Possess strong skills in teamwork, planning, people management, branding, budgeting as well as rich leadership experience from my position as Basketball Captain for Uturica College’s NCAA team. Eager to apply these abilities to the Marketing Assistant position being offered by Tronton Visions LLC.

Experience

NCAA Division | Basketball Captain

Uturica College | Mississippi, LA

2019 – 2020

• Planned strategic methods to enhance defense and improve overall team scores by 25% on average.
• Created a strong communicative environment to facilitate strong in-game performance. Helped recruit 5 new freshman players.
• Created training structure to help team members reach over 90% of their training and performance goals for the year.

NCAA Division | Basketball Point Guard

Uturica College | Mississippi, LA

2017 – 2018

• Participated in SBC championship-winning team for 2018 in the NCAA Division
• Worked closely with trainers to optimize and plan team organization changes that improved performance by 15%
• Averaged 10.3 points, 3 rebounds, and 3 assists per game during 2 seasons
• Elected team captain after 2 seasons

Education

BSc Sports Management

Uturica College | Mississippi, LA

2017 – 2020

Achieved a 3.5 GPA

Relevant Coursework: Sports Marketing, Team Management, Financial Planning Member of Uturica College Marketing Club

Skills

• Branding
• Planning
• Budgeting
• Teamwork
• Problem-solving
• Leadership
• Attention-to-detail

Award

2017 – College Basketball Rookie of the Year – Uturica College

2018 – NCAA Basketball SBC Champions – Uturica Flyers

Hobbies and Interests

• Basketball
• Cinema

The first thing to think about with your student athlete resume summary is what you should include. 

In this case, the job description can give you a lot of clues on what should be added.

This can tell you the skills they’re looking out for, the level of experience they need, and other desired traits you can show.

What to Include?

The summary has to be short and focused and needs to communicate a lot of info right off the bat.

• To start things off, mention your qualifications. If you’re fresh out of college this will give the recruiter a little context.
• Then pick a handful of skills. These should be tied to the job as well as connected to your experience so everything links up nicely.
• Lastly, if you can, try and directly show how your experience and knowledge will help you in the position. 

This only needs to be short but it’s important to show the recruiter you’ve tailored your resume for them personally.

Let’s look at this in more detail with the examples below on what to do and what not to do on your resume summary.

Student Athlete Resume Summary Example

Getting the college athlete resume summary perfect isn’t rocket science.

But you do need to take care to not make things too generic. 

You want to get the recruiter hyped for you. It’s a bit like a tiny 3 sentence pep rally in a way.

This can of course go wrong if you don’t work to make your summary bespoke. As we can see below. 

*Yawn*, am I right?

This is a pretty uninspiring example of a resume summary right here.

If it hasn’t put the recruiter to sleep, it’s going to be heading towards the trash can as a 3 pointer.  

This example of a student athlete’s resume summary is far too generic for starters. It also doesn’t even try to show why the candidate could fit a marketing role. 

A more focused strategy is therefore needed.

He shoots, he scores!

This is a much more together resume summary all-in-all. It not only gets more into the specifics of why the candidate is qualified. 

It also targets the job directly giving key skills that show our applicant has what it takes to succeed.

You’ve had a glittering career as a college all star athlete.

But what happens when you want to put that experience onto your resume?

Should you talk about your sporting achievements or should you leave that stuff off entirely?

Well, happily the answer is that there are a lot of times when your athletic history can come through for you professionally.

Whether you’re writing a resume for a student athlete-focused role or another less sport-centric sector, your athletic career can often help you out.

But it is important to know when the right opportunity to do that comes up.

So when exactly can your student athlete experience move you closer to a job in another sector?

You can use your sporting experience at college to get jobs directly as:

• Physiotherapists
• Personal trainers 
• Gym employees

You can also use this experience for jobs that require high stamina and good physical fitness. This might prove relevant for potential:

• Firefighters
• Police officers
• EMTs
• Construction workers
• Warehouse workers

Not only that, you can also find other clever ways of using your athletic background to find jobs in more white-collar positions. 

Thanks to abilities such as planning, organization, public speaking, training, leadership, etc., you can create a pretty healthy resume experience section using some or all of your student-athlete credentials.  

Let’s look over a real example of this and see how to do it and how not to do it.

Examples: Experience Section

Ok, so you’re writing your resume’s experience section and you’ve decided to add in some of your history as a student athlete.

Good choice.

However, when you’re putting together a student athlete resume template it’s not just the experience you include that counts, it’s how you write it too.

Let’s first see how not to do it.

This experience section just flew up and bounced off the scoreboard. It’s nowhere near the goalmouth for getting this job.

It doesn’t tell us much at all about how the candidate learned any transferable skills. Furthermore, it’s pretty sparse on measurable details. 

Adding information like this is a waste of time and space on the page. Worse still, it could completely turn the recruiter off your application entirely.

Now here we can see an MVP of a student athlete experience section.

This works much better than our previous example for a few reasons. 

Firstly, it focuses more on results. In this case how the candidate improved team performance measurably.

It also summarizes a few of their top achievements as well. 

We can see they participated in a championship-winning team, they measured their performance over the course of their sporting career.

Not only that, it shows progression too, as they were eventually promoted to team captain. This shows that there was growth potential for our candidate as well as demonstrating they were able to take on roles of responsibility.
A recruiter can use all this information to their advantage by being able to see immediately that you are able to do more than just play a sport well.

You’ve already been a sports hero at college, right?

So it stands to reason you’ll have plenty of useful information to add to your resume education section.

But hold on one minute. A student athletic trainer resume isn’t one size fits all.
To make sure your document’s education section makes the honor roll, you’ll need to give it some attention.

Just listing the course you studied and the college you went to isn’t enough.

As a new grad with student athlete experience, it’s your job to show recruiters how your studies make you the best fit the job available.

Let’s look at what you can do to make that happen. 

Education Section Examples for a Student Athlete

Writing a sports resume for college is very different from a professional resume for a job in another sector.

There are a lot of ways this can be done wrong, as seen below.

A swing and a miss!

This doesn’t go the distance and won’t win over the recruiter much. 

While it covers some of your college experience and shows you had varied activities when studying, it doesn’t help explain why that can help you get hired.

Part of the battle of writing any resume is making it relevant to the hiring manager. 

This means telling them about relevant coursework that makes you suitable for the role and any other activities that make you a good fit.

Let’s see what a more focused example looks like.

Now, this is a student athlete education section that’s going to the winner’s circle.

This tells the recruiter the key information that they need to know to progress you as a candidate. This includes information about:

• Your final grade at college
• Relevant coursework that makes you a viable fill for the role
• Any extracurricular activities that show you’re passionate about the sector

This example is also clearly targeting a marketing role. It explains how the student used their college experience to prepare themselves for a job in this field and why they might be worth a shot in the position.
As you can see, the education section doesn’t need too much information. Yet, you do need to give it a workout to make sure it’s in the best shape to succeed for each individual position you apply for.

There’s more to your student athlete career than just the ability to kick or throw a ball. 

As you can imagine, student athlete resumes allow you to potentially fit a lot of transferable skills on your final resume.

But how should you prioritize the abilities to add to your document?

Of course, the skills you include on the final athletics resume will obviously depend on the sport and the type of role you played in the team. 

However, we’ve collected a few examples of skills almost any student athlete could possess below to give you some inspiration. 

Of course, the real advantage here is you can target jobs across different sectors with this broad range of know-how. 

It’s easy to forget that college athletics can help equip you with a wide variety of mixed skills that can be applied to almost any career path. 

Don’t be afraid to use this to your benefit! 

Ok so you’ve successfully tackled the “big gun” sections.

You’ve got your experience, skills and education beautifully down on paper and they’re ready to impress the recruiter.

However, there are a few more tricks you can pull to make student athlete resumes even more effective.

This calls for other sections.

What do you mean by “other sections” you’re probably wondering? 

To explain a little more clearly, these are the optional sections you can add if you’ve achieved something relevant, or you want to add a little more character to your finished resume.

Perhaps you’ve volunteered at the YMCA as a sports coach. 

Maybe you’ve won awards for your performance on the field or earned special training certificates that could give you an edge in the hiring process.

These can all help add some extra gloss to a student athlete’s bio.

Let’s look over some examples now to see what that looks like. 

Sample “Other” Sections For a Student Athlete Resume

So you want to add a bit more personality to your student athlete resume.

Good plan.

If a job is looking for a certain type of character to fill the role, you can add a little more about your hobbies, interests, or special achievements to do that.

But remember, space is at a premium on resumes. Even if you want to add more individuality to your finished profile it needs to help you from a professional standpoint.  

First of all, let’s see an example of how wrong this can go if it’s done incorrectly.

Do you hear that sound? 

That’s the referee – or the recruiter in this case – blowing the whistle on this resume. 

This is not going to create many fans for your application. In fact, it’s just going to be all washed up and nowhere near the major leagues. 

Not only are the subject matters inappropriate to share with a recruiter. They don’t tell him or her anything

That’s the real problem with this example here. 

Instead, you need to focus on promoting achievements, experience or personal passions that help ensure you fit the role like a ball in a net.

Let’s see how that should be done.

Now, this is on target for the goal. 

Here we get a bit of brief insight into the candidate’s personality. It’s kept short and succinct and gives a clearer view of the person’s most significant achievements.

It helps to round everything off nicely while adding to the completeness of the applicant’s profile.

You know all about how to win the big game. It’s now time to get your game strategy down for creating a perfect student athlete resume PDF.

These are your golden rules to follow when you create your student athletics template:

• A resume can focus on athletics if your experience links well to the job you want to get.
• Your work experience section should always highlight how your athletics career ties in with the position on offer.
• Use your education section to further emphasize the transferable skills and training you had at college.
• Additional sections such as awards, hobbies or volunteering can make your resume go from good to great.

Of course, this can be made even easier.

With our expert resume builder you can take some of the challenge out of getting your template in shape. 

Get help with the tricky bits like organizing your sections and adding information for each job without extra effort. We can help you do it all step-by-step.