This question originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge-sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

MORE FROM QUORA: Little-known facts about the Olympics

Answer by Shaheer Sajid:

There are several reasons why the United States is so good at sports, and why the U.S. pumps out top athletes all the time.

1. A culture of sports

Sports are ingrained within American culture, partially due to the longevity of organized sport in the United States.

The first spectator sports in the world, in their modern forms, arose out of Britain — cricket, various football codes (association football, rugby) and the like. These sports became organized in the 1880-to-1900 timeframe. Think the English FA (1863), Rugby Football Union (1871), Imperial Cricket Conference (1905), and FIFA (1904). Sports that organized themselves around that time are generally understood to be the most popular ones today.

The U.S. has also played organized sports that long. Baseball’s National League was founded in 1876, the oldest professional sports league in the world. Soccer’s American Football Association arose in 1884. College (American) football was played on an organized basis starting around the 1870s and 1880s, and the NCAA formed in 1906. Basketball was idealized in 1895. Ice hockey’s Stanley Cup dates to 1893.

Sports, therefore, are well-integrated into American culture, and they have been played here ever since sports were first organized. The U.S. is sports-crazed. The sports market in the United States in 2012 was worth $69 billion. That was 50 percent larger than the sports market of Europe, the Middle East and Africa combined. The entire global market was $141 billion. The U.S. alone accounted for almost half of that, according to Reuters.

This culture leads to . . .

2. Infrastructure

Everywhere you go in the U.S., no matter the size of the community, you’ll see basketball courts, baseball and softball fields, football fields and soccer fields. Every middle school, it seems, has a track and open spaces where people can play anything. Most high school have facilities — at the minimum, a big field that hosts football, soccer field hockey, and baseball; at the most, there are separate fields for each of those sports, plus indoor training and practice facilities. Multiple basketball courts in one location are a common sight.

MORE FROM QUORA: What sports should be removed from the Olympics?

And then there are American colleges. They have athletic facilities that professional clubs worldwide would kill to have. Colleges spend fortunes on those facilities.

That brings me to . . .

3. Sports and education

In the U.S., sports and schools have been integrated for decades. American football’s professional leagues weren’t even popular until the 1950s, but college football has been overwhelmingly popular since the 1890s.

This tradition of amateur sports being an essential element of an educational experience is not just an American tradition, but an Anglo one as well. Early organized sports were played mostly by colleges in England, but the rise of professional sports there killed the importance of college sports in the country. The U.S., outside of baseball, was not quite as susceptible to that.

Indeed, college basketball and football are multimillion-dollar enterprises. The 15 largest stadiums in the United States are all primarily college football stadiums, and eight of them have capacities in excess of 100,000. Europe has no stadiums for any sport, professional or otherwise, that seat over 100,000. That’s how popular and entrenched college sports are in this country.

Why is that a good thing? Well, in some countries, particularly Asian countries (where my family is originally from), sports are often seen as a distraction from academics. Athletes are considered dumb. While plenty of people in the United States believe that, too, the longstanding convention is that sports are beneficial to an individual’s development, including their academic development.

Indeed, the Ivy League is a sports conference, not an academic association. It has a tradition of not offering sports scholarships. Does that mean their students are inactive kids who do nothing but study? No. In fact, 80 percent of students at Harvard are involved in some form of athletics. Athletic involvement is a prized tradition of the Ivies. The prohibition on sports scholarships harkens back to the tradition of amateurism (the Ivies, after all, invented college sports).

With infrastructure all around, most every young person has access to sports through their schools. Those students have access to coaching and instruction in fundamentals, and they are encouraged to take part in athletics.

This system has a global impact, too. Colleges that can’t attract top American athletes in sports like track or swimming frequently seek athletes overseas. The college system is the only system in the world (for sports other than soccer) that can develop athletes in the 18-to-22 age range, and it is known for turning such athletes into Olympians. The NCAA had more than 17,000 international athletes as of 2010.

For the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, there were 110 former NCAA athletes and 21 current NCAA athletes across 10 sports and 13 countries.

The system has its faults, but it is the best system available in the world. And it’s a result of an American culture that places a huge importance on sports.