How Early Influences Impact Student-Athletes’ Minds and Bodies
When Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed during a Jan. 3, 2022, NFL football game, much of the public attention was on the pressures athletes face to perform despite the dangers on the field.
However, as a scholar specializing in youth sports, I have found that this pressure often begins well before a player enters the pros – often very early in a young athlete’s life. Sometimes the biggest forces behind this pressure are coaches, peers, and parents.
Here are five ways young athletes experience unhealthy pressure and the effects these influences have on their minds and bodies.
1. Harsh Criticism
Coaches who belittle athletes, yell, and emphasize winning over personal improvement use a “controlling style” of coaching. Rather than provide constructive feedback on technique, tactics, and attitude, controlling-style coaches tend to communicate objections to mistakes and personal insults during crucial moments.
This style of coaching shifts athletes’ attention away from their abilities and toward mistakes, fostering a win-at-all-costs attitude, unethical behavior, injury, and burnout. Athletes often value their coaches’ perceptions more than their own self-perceptions. When coaches focus on the negative, athletes tend to do the same. It’s much more effective to give athletes concrete instructions, like “push the ground away” or “aim for the rim.”
Old-school controlling-style coaching methods, such as punishing athletes with physical activity (e.g., running “suicide” sprints, staying late to run laps, or dropping for 20 pushups), do more harm than good. These methods increase the likelihood of fatigue and injury by expending energy randomly at the end of practice.
2. Peer Pressure and Influence
Peers often mimic the behavior they see from coaches. Athletes who perform well in matches and scrimmages find acceptance and opportunities for meaningful connections with teammates. For many athletes, making friendships outside of sports is challenging, especially in collegiate athletics.
However, teammates who engage in ridicule, bullying, and exclusion can create conflicts within the team. As a result, athletes may approach practice with the aim of avoiding conflict rather than mastering skills and making friends. These mental and emotional distractions negatively affect their performance.
Coaches and players who focus on athletes’ appearance and weight contribute to a culture of body shaming that values physical attributes over abilities. Athletes who believe others want them to be smaller or bigger can experience anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Expectations like public weigh-ins, avoiding sweets, and wearing revealing uniforms are common in sports like gymnastics and wrestling.
3. Parental Expectations
The effects of competition begin long before the start of a season, game, or match. How kids feel about themselves in sports, especially after a loss, is often linked to how parents view, value, and teach competition.
When parents pay their kids for scoring points or winning games, they turn their kids into selfish teammates and decrease long-term motivation. Even students who earn scholarships tend to lose motivation when paid for performance. Parents can behave badly when seeking external signals of their children’s achievements, such as trophies, elite team selections, scholarships, endorsements, and name-image-likeness deals.
When kids sense their parents’ stress over expectations, they become more prone to perfectionism, burnout, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
4. Early Specialization
Parents push their kids into year-round intensive training in a single sport as early as age 7. Overuse injuries, psychological stress, and burnout are well-documented consequences of early specialization. Super-early training is not beneficial for sports where athletes peak later, such as marathon running.
Transitioning to higher levels of play during adolescence strengthens athletic identity as training expectations expand to diet and exercise. To conform, athletes may use anabolic steroids, overtrain, play through injury, and restrict their diets. Encouraging a healthy diet for training purposes can lead to orthorexia nervosa, a disorder characterized by an obsessive focus on healthy eating.
Trying out various sports while young helps athletes discover what they enjoy most and which activities suit their body types.
5. Overtraining
Overuse injuries like “Little League elbow” and Osgood-Schlatter disease are becoming more common. American high school athletes who specialize in one sport are 50% more likely to experience overuse injuries than those who play multiple sports. Athletes focusing on two sports are 85% more likely. High-pressure environments that expect athletes to endure injuries can lead to long-term conditions like arthritis and tendonitis.
In sports like football, boxing, and mixed martial arts, the culture often rewards injuries and risk-taking. However, when an injury forces an athlete into early retirement, coping with the transition can be tough, leading to identity loss and exacerbating mental health issues.
Witnessing sports-related injuries, as millions of NFL fans did with Hamlin’s collapse, can also have psychological consequences for observers. Symptoms, including intrusive thoughts, nightmares, and anxiety, can last from a single day to more than a month and may develop into post-traumatic stress disorder.
As people watch and cheer young athletes to run faster, jump higher, or score more points, it’s important to consider the question: At what expense?