Here's a scenario that plays out on teams at every level, every season.
You pick acaptain. Maybe they're your best player, maybe they're a senior, maybe they're just the person who seemed most ready for the job. You put a C on their chest, say a few words about leadership, and walk away.
What happens next is predictable. They try to be everything — the voice, the enforcer, the motivator, the connector, the person who mediates when two teammates stop talking, the one who steadies the room when you're down three goals with ten minutes left. They burn out. Their teammates get frustrated. The culture doesn't improve. And at the end of the season, someone says: "We just didn't have the leadership this year."
That's not a leadership problem. That's a structure problem. And there's now enough research to make a clean case for what to do instead.
What the Research Actually Says
In 2014, Fransen and colleagues published a foundational study on leadership in sport teams using social network analysis — essentially mapping who actually influences who inside a team, not just who holds the title (Fransen et al., 2014). What they found should change how every coach and captain thinks about the role.
Leadership in teams is not centralized. It's distributed.
Different athletes naturally lead in different domains: task leadership (driving execution and standards), motivational leadership (sustaining energy and belief), social leadership (maintaining relationships and team cohesion), and external leadership (representing the team to the outside world). Critically, no single athlete in their research ranked highest across all four domains. Not one.
This is the structural problem with the traditional captain model in plain language: the role demands something that the data says no individual can fully deliver.
Loughead, Hardy, and Eys (2006) laid additional groundwork by establishing that athlete leadership is multidimensional and that teams organically develop multiple leaders, regardless of formal structure. Even when only one athlete holds the captain title, informal peer leaders are already operating alongside them — the teammate people go to when something is wrong, the player who sets the emotional temperature in the locker room, the one who holds standards in practice when the coach isn't watching. Leadership is already being shared. Most programs just aren't designed to acknowledge or develop it.
The Real Cost of the Captain-Centric Model
Research from Voelker, Gould, and Crawford (2011) examined what high school captains actually experience in the role. The findings were consistent: role overload, significant social pressure, and a pattern of avoiding accountability conversations precisely because of the relational stakes involved.
This makes sense. Being a captain in a peer environment is a fundamentally different challenge than being a manager in a professional context. You're not holding strangers accountable — you're holding your roommate, your closest friend, the person you've trained alongside for three years. The relational cost of enforcing standards is real, and without the right preparation and structural support, most athletes default to one of two responses: avoidance or aggression. Neither serves the team or the leader.
Gould and Voelker (2010) made the development problem explicit: all thirteen former high school captains in their study reported receiving no formal preparation for the leadership role from their coaches. Zero. They were handed a title and expected to figure it out. The conclusion from that research was direct — leadership must be developed intentionally across athletes, not simply assigned and hoped for.
Vella, Oades, and Crowe (2013) extended this by demonstrating that peer leadership significantly influences team cohesion, confidence, and overall functioning — and that multiple peer leadership influences produce stronger collective outcomes than concentrated, single-captain models. More developed leadership voices, not fewer, build stronger teams.
What Role Clarity Actually Requires
If leadership is distributed — and the evidence consistently says it is — then the question for every leader, formal or informal, stops being "how do I lead everything?" and starts being "what is my actual role?"
Role clarity in this context requires honest answers to three questions.
What are your real leadership strengths? Not the ones you wish you had — the ones your teammates already experience. Are you the communicator who can say the hard thing without destroying the relationship? The tone setter whose body language in warmups signals what kind of day it's going to be? The connector who notices when someone has mentally checked out before anyone else does? The competitor who raises intensity just by being present? Every team needs all of these functions. No one person is all of them.
Where do you need to grow? This is where most leaders are least honest with themselves. Maybe you avoid difficult conversations to protect the relationship. Maybe your tone in pressure situations becomes reactive and your teammates start managing you instead of following you. Maybe you lead privately but disappear publicly. Price and Weiss (2011) found that effective peer leaders are characterized by relational competence and social credibility — qualities built through consistent, honest behavior, not performance. You cannot build that on pretense.
Are you modeling what you expect? This is the question that cuts deepest. Teammates don't follow instructions — they follow examples. If you want effort, they need to see effort. If you want composure in adversity, they need to watch you find yours. The research on athlete leadership, from Fransen's network analyses to Gould's developmental work, consistently returns to the same point: influence in a peer environment is relational and behavioral, not positional. The player who models the standard daily — without needing recognition for it — is the player teammates actually follow.
The Case for a Leadership System
The shift this research demands is a move from asking "who is our leader?" to asking "what is our leadership system?"
A functioning system distributes the leadership functions that no single athlete can carry alone:
- A standard setter who models effort and accountability without needing an audience.
- A connector who maintains the social fabric and bridges fractures before they widen.
- A stabilizer who doesn't panic, whose calm in the hardest moments gives everyone else permission to stay level.
- A motivator who brings genuine energy and belief — not performance, not theater.
- A communicator who can say the honest thing to a teammate and preserve the relationship at the same time.
Flemington, Loughead, and Desrosiers (2023) provided recent support for this framework using social network analysis with a professional hockey team. Their findings showed high network density and low degree centralization for both leadership and cohesion — meaning leadership connections were spread widely across the team rather than flowing through one or two central figures. Importantly, nearly half of the participants in Fransen et al.'s earlier research (43.6%) did not identify their captain as their strongest leader. The formal role and the actual influence are not the same thing, and pretending otherwise costs teams.
Why Peer Leaders Are Motivational Assets
One more layer that deserves attention, especially for coaches who design their leadership development around the relationship between staff and athletes.
Fransen and colleagues (2017, 2018) ran controlled experiments with existing basketball teams, comparing the motivational impact of coaches versus athlete leaders providing competence support — encouragement, positive feedback, expressions of confidence — to teammates. In several conditions, athlete leaders had an equal or greater effect on teammates' intrinsic motivation and competence satisfaction than coaches did.
The explanation is relational. Feedback from a peer who is grinding through the same physical and psychological demands carries different weight than feedback from a coach. The credibility is earned differently. The trust is built differently. Athletes who receive positive feedback from a well-regarded peer don't just feel better — they perform better. And as Mertens et al. (2018) demonstrated, even a brief, intentional intervention that equips athlete leaders to provide competence support produces measurable performance improvements.
The practical implication: your athlete leaders are not just culture carriers. They are performance multipliers — but only when developed with the same intentionality coaches apply to physical and tactical preparation.
What to Do This Week
The research is clear. The implementation is the work.
Start with role clarity. Write down your biggest leadership strength and your biggest growth area. Not the aspirational version — the honest one.
Model before you manage. Pick one behavior you want your team to improve and ask whether you're demonstrating it every single day. Not most days. Every day.
Ask for an outside view. Find a teammate or coach you trust and ask them what they see as your leadership strength and what they think you could develop. Then just listen. No defending, no explaining — just take it in.
Take one rep. Choose one action this week that reflects your role clearly. Speak up in a moment you'd normally stay quiet. Pull aside a teammate who needs an honest conversation. Bring genuine energy when the team is flat. Stay regulated in the moment that usually gets you.
Leadership grows through small, repeated actions done consistently over a season. Not a speech. Not a ceremony. Reps.
The Bottom Line
The myth of the one great captain — the single athlete who carries the whole culture — doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The research is consistent across more than two decades of study: leadership in sport is naturally distributed, no individual can fulfill every leadership function effectively, and teams with multiple developed leadership voices consistently outperform captain-centric models.
The job isn't to find the right captain. The job is to build the right system — one that names roles, develops leaders across the roster, and reinforces the behaviors that actually move a team forward.
Know your role. Own your role. Lead through your role.
That's how teams actually win.
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References
Flemington, A., Loughead, T. M., & Desrosiers, M. (2023). Assessing athlete leadership and cohesion using a social network analysis approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1050385. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1050385
Fransen, K., Boen, F., Vansteenkiste, M., Mertens, N., & Vande Broek, G. (2017). The power of competence support: The impact of coaches and athlete leaders on intrinsic motivation and performance. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 28(2), 725–745. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.12950
Fransen, K., Van Puyenbroeck, S., Loughead, T. M., Vanbeselaere, N., De Cuyper, B., Vande Broek, G., & Boen, F. (2014). Who takes the lead? Social network analysis as a pioneering tool to investigate shared leadership within sports teams. Social Networks, 43, 28–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2015.04.003
Gould, D., & Voelker, D. K. (2010). Youth sport leadership development: Leveraging the sports captaincy experience. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 1(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/21520704.2010.497695
Loughead, T. M., Hardy, J., & Eys, M. A. (2006). The nature of athlete leadership. Journal of Sport Behavior, 29(2), 142–158.
Mertens, N., Boen, F., Vande Broek, G., Vansteenkiste, M., & Fransen, K. (2018). An experiment on the impact of coaches' and athlete leaders' competence support on athletes' motivation and performance. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 28(12), 2734–2750. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13273
Price, M. S., & Weiss, M. R. (2011). Peer leadership in sport: Relationships among personal characteristics, leader behaviors, and team outcomes. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 23(1), 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2010.520300
Vella, S. A., Oades, L. G., & Crowe, T. P. (2013). The relationship between coach leadership, peer leadership, and team functioning in sport. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 25(2), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2012.725703
Voelker, D. K., Gould, D., & Crawford, M. J. (2011). Understanding the experience of high school sport captains. The Sport Psychologist, 25(1), 47–66.