> "Do you play any sports?"<br>
> "Yes, I swim competitively."

This is perfectly good English. You can find plenty of examples of it published in books [here](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22play+any+sports%22+swimming). With the generic term **sports**, we use **play** as a generic verb, but we don't say **play** as the verb for many specific sports. For example, you don't "play bowling" or "play swimming", you just "bowl" or "swim".

Another example of the same phenomenon in English is that to **cook** food, in its primary sense, means to prepare food by exposing it to intense heat, but we also use the verb **cook** generically for preparing dishes, even though not all foods are prepared with exposure to heat and some specific foods don't take the verb **cook**:

> "Charlie Brown, what kinds of foods do you know how to cook?"<br>
> "Not many. Just toast and jello."

That's fine, even though one doesn't "cook toast", one "toasts bread" or "makes toast", and jello is prepared by chilling, not by cooking. Given the wide variety of verbs for specific sports and for preparing specific foods, it's impractical to list  all the possible specific verbs for every known form of sport or food when you want to speak generically. Instead, you "round off" and just use the most common specific verb.

Of course, some people will be jerks about it. Some people enjoy calling upon a kind of streamlined rigor that English doesn't have and that is unrealistic to demand:

> "Nuh UH! Swimming is a sport, but I don't _play_ swimming! I _participate in_ swimming [said with supercilious condescension]. By the Liskov substitution principle, one should be able to apply the same verb to each of a noun's hyponyms [the esoteric term 'hyponyms' said particularly pungently], which is demonstrably not true in all cases with regard to 'sports'." [This type loves to hold things to the standard of "true in all cases", since that makes it easy to find almost anything lacking.]

Sadly, examinations are sometimes conducted on the assumption that English works so rigidly, because that makes grading easier. For the IELTS, you're on your own.