This study provided support for Worthy and Markle's thesis that whites excel at self‐paced and blacks at reactive sports activities, by assessing the performance of 55 white and 122 black fourth‐grade boys playing a modified soccer game. The research also explored the relationships between several dimensions of socialization (e.g., father presence‐absence) and relative performance on the self‐paced‐reactive dimension. Two significant correlations emerged: Regardless of their own racial identity, boys who excelled at the self‐paced activity tended to have several younger siblings and to attend schools with a sizeable representation of white students. Subsequent interviews revealed that black and white boys did not differ in their preference for self‐paced and reactive spor