5 Ways Caregivers and Coaches Can Support Mental Wellness for Student-Athletes

 

As national statistics and stories continue to unveil, young athletes are in crisis in the U.S. right now, thanks in large part to a plethora of pressures placed on them.

With this in mind, how can you best support their mental wellness while helping them grow as people and athletes? Here, one of the authors of a recent recommendations report on mental wellness in youth sport—longtime sports sociologist Jay Coakley, PhD,—is helping break down the tangible ways that caregivers and coaches can support athletes.

1. Humanity Over Athleticism

The title of the report is “Humanizing Sport,” speaking to the fact that taking care of young people needs to be the top goal for coaches and caregivers. Adults often struggle to remember that young athletes are under immense amounts of pressure while still developing the life skills and resilience necessary to cope with that pressure. It’s important to understand that the situations a young person is dealing with are valid and important, even if as an adult, you can look back and see how minor those problems are in retrospect. For example, an athlete fighting with a teammate may seem minor, but for that athlete, it can take a huge mental toll.

As a coach, it’s also easy to see a team of athletes as one singular mass—' the team’—but Coakley urges coaches to remember that each team member is their own individual with a different set of skills and struggles. For family members too, it’s easy to focus on a young athlete’s talent on the field rather than prioritizing their happiness on that field.

2. Relieve Pressure

Even without meaning to, caregivers and coaches can add huge amounts of pressure on athletes. “For example, sports are often expensive these days, which is a source of pressure for a child who knows that parents are using discretionary money for their sports participation, and because of that, they feel trapped,” says Coakley. Mentioning things like the price of sports or the need for an athletic scholarship can put an unhealthy burden on your young athlete.

Coaches often create similar pressures for the team or for certain players by setting outcome-specific goals like winning certain games and placing more emphasis on wins than progress. Coaches and caregivers who limit unnecessary triggers for stress and pressure, while seeking opportunities to develop athlete resilience, create an optimal environment to support student-athlete mental wellbeing.

3. Take Mental Health as Seriously as Physical Health

Often in youth sport, mental health is an afterthought, if it comes up at all. But Coakley says that mental health is potentially more important than physical health for young athletes. “Unfortunately, within sport culture, it used to be defined as a weakness if you had a mental health problem,” he says. “It’s hard to change that culture, but that’s our goal.”

To start, have open conversations with athletes about mental health, let them know that they can come to you if they’re experiencing any distress, and focus on mental wellness alongside physical wellness on the team. You can do goal-setting exercises throughout the season, make sure athletes and their families understand your open-door policy, and host weekly check-ins with the team to tackle any issues that have come up.