According to an article from Johns Hopkins, children are starting sports earlier and earlier. Yet, 70% of young athletes stop participating in organized sports by age 13. The article said intense training from a young age can lead to burnout, depression, stress, anxiety and unhealthy perfectionism.
Upper School (US) Athletic Trainer Alessia Pesaturo said burnout in student-athletes can present in different ways and varies per individual. She said burnout doesn’t only consist of physical fatigue.
“Many students have multiple commitments during the season, so a typical day could look like captain’s practice in the morning, attending school, after-school BB&N sport, night club practice or evening workout and needing to complete any academic work,” Ms. Pesaturo said. “The accumulation of all activities with little rest can lead to overtraining or athletic burnout, and that workload can be interpreted as emotional, physical and mental.”
Students tend to feel more burned out around recruiting season.
“The pressure student-athletes face can be very challenging and hard to manage alone,” she said. “In a lot of cases, the athlete has been playing their sport for years and has in some way tied their identity and success to it. Shifting the main focus from performance and recruitment expectations to outcomes the student-athlete can control, like being a good teammate, leader and remembering that they are also looking for a right fit mutually can help relieve some stress that may come from the process.”
Though she loves soccer and looks forward to practice, Girls’ Varsity Soccer Midfielder and Williams commit Kate Sullivan ’27 said the pressure can be mentally taxing.
“Especially in times when it’s a big recruiting season, it’s really hard for people with the amount of pressure,” Kate said. “It’s getting more normalized now, feeling burnt out with your sport. After a long day of school and practice, sometimes all I want to do is just sleep and let it all out. If I’m super tired after my game, I’ll just go home, eat, take a shower and go to bed, and I’ll wake up early to get my work done.”
Athletes can experience different levels of burnout, Kate said.
“Burnout to different people means different things,” she said. “There’s a difference between being tired after everything and then truly feeling just a more complete exhaustion. Also mentally, it kind of builds up and at some point you just break. And that’ll happen maybe like once a year or a couple times.”
Kate said her relationship with soccer has changed as she’s gotten older.
“When you’re younger, it’s a little bit more free and fun,” Kate said. “Now, there’s a lot of pressure put on us with college and recruiting. The stress makes it hard to say you still love your sport and balance everything because it turns into a love-hate relationship sometimes. You need to do things that help you stay grounded and have an identity outside of your sport to counteract it.”
Girls’ Varsity Hockey Forward and Brown University commit Kate Glantz ’27 started hockey when she was 3 and has had a similar experience to Kate Sullivan.
“When you’re younger, you don’t really know what’s going on, you’re just running around on the ice, and it’s just a thing that’s purely for fun,” she said. “Getting older, when you start to get expectations for yourself and feel a bit more pressure, it can easily turn something that you love into something that’s more of a stressful thing.”
Despite the pressure, Kate said she looks forward to hockey practice all day.
“It’s important to remind yourself as you’re getting older that you’re still doing this for fun. It’s not supposed to be anything but fun,” she said. “While hockey is such a big part of my life and it’s not just a game, it also kind of is just a game. It’s important to remind yourself of that because you should be having fun with the sport that you play.”
