Student athletes competing in interscholastic sports today live a very unique lifestyle, and arguably quite different than student athletes from years ago. School sports can be intense, time-consuming, and pressure-packed, yet we often overlook the growing number of challenges student athletes experience today. While school sports can be fun and help kids develop in countless healthy ways, we are also witnessing more student athletes proactively reaching out for mental health support to help handle all the stress and pressure they experience. So why are so many student athletes struggling today? To better understand student athletes concerns, we must first understand today’s student athlete and the identity and related challenges that come with this role.
The uniqueness of being a student athlete
Unlike non-athletes, student athletes are held to different standards and expectations relating to how their time is spent, the physical and mental toll sports can take on their bodies and minds, and ongoing expectations relating to role modelling and being a school leader. When it comes to mental health challenges, the following is a list of issues that commonly flow through my office:
- Pressure to perform. Sport success is established through wins and losses, and student athletes today have a lot placed on their shoulders when it comes to school success. In fact, in most towns across the country it is quite common to “take the temperature of a town” by the success of their school sports — especially football. For example, locals often refer to the Friday night games in terms of “we” won, or “they” lost, personalizing their descriptions as an entire community, not simply one school team.
- Maintaining grades for eligibility. Student athletes are required to maintain minimum grade point averages, and when grades drop below specific thresholds they are ineligible to play.
- Making time for schoolwork. When you take into account the time devoted to practices, travel, and games, many kids today feel pressured to find time to study and complete homework assignments, leaving them vulnerable to mental health struggles.
- Expectations about being a leader and role model. Student athletes are often viewed as school and community ambassadors, even though they are teenagers still working their way through puberty and the typical challenges that come along with being a kid.
- Dealing with social media. Social media can be tough, especially for student athletes reading about their bad game and poor play. When kids read negative posts about themselves, it can impact mood and create increased performance anxiety.
- Pressures to compete in multiple sports, often at the same time. Previous generations of student athletes usually competed in a new sport each sport season (i.e. the three-sport letter winner). Today, however, increasingly more student athletes are playing on 2, and sometimes 3 teams at the same time. Can you imagine the time commitment and organization/communication skills needed to successfully balance this kind of schedule?
- Attending special training, off-season programs, and year-round expectations. If you think student athletes only practice and play games, you might be surprised to learn about all the other things they do including working with specialized coaches, attending ID camps, creating online sport profiles for college coaches to view, and working with mental health specialists to help deal with the stress and pressure they experience.
Final thoughts
We expect a lot from student athletes today, and even more concerning is that there are not many signs showing that things will slow down anytime soon. As more sport and training opportunities emerge, increasingly more kids are being caught up in trying to attain good grades in school, participate in non-sport activities and clubs, and still find time to dedicate to practices and traveling to games. Making things worse, while some things are changing favorably when it comes to mental health, most kids still do not speak up about their struggles because of fear of looking weak, or simply not knowing who to trust and talk to about their issues. Sport participation can be one of the best developmental experiences kids can ever do, but when we push too hard by means of commitment and intensity we risk kids missing out on learning invaluable life skills, and may even leave kids vulnerable to unintended mental health problems, too.
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