Creating a mental health playbook for student athletes

As head coach for the University of Toronto Varsity Blues men’s volleyball team, John Barrett knows that sport offers young athletes so much more than physical fitness. It nurtures discipline and perseverance. It fosters teamwork and leadership skills. It provides a sense of achievement and teaches them how to handle adversity, both on and off the court. 

“What I really do is I mentor boys to men through the tool of sport,” explains the two-time Ontario University Athletics coach of the year.

But he also knows the toll it can take on athletes’ mental health, especially for teenagers competing at elite levels. 

They juggle academics with gruelling training and travel schedules that don’t leave much room for a social life. They deal with the expectations of parents and coaches. They feel self-imposed pressure to impress sports recruiters and make it to the pros. And that’s on top of all the standard 21st-century teenage stresses, from navigating social media to the existential threat of climate change.

There’s a lot at stake. A recent study found 41 percent of Canadian Olympic and Paralympic athletes met the criteria for at least one mental health disorder.  So how do coaches like Barrett — as well as parents and teammates — help young athletes enjoy the benefits of sport while avoiding those pitfalls? 

That’s a question Katherine Tamminen aims to answer. As head of the University of Toronto’s Sport and Performance Psychology Lab, the professor of sport psychology and registered psychotherapist is exploring different aspects of mental health in athletes, particularly during their teenage years.

Investigating the power of interpersonal support

One area she’s focused on is the drive home after a game or practice. Tamminen notes that this can be an important opportunity to debrief about the athlete’s experience and for parents to provide positive feedback. But it also provides space for kids to learn how to cool down emotionally and self-reflect.

Thanks to CFI-funded equipment, she was able to go beyond traditional research methods of questionnaires and sit-down interviews, installing GoPro cameras in the participants’ cars to capture real conversations. 

Although this “in the wild” approach still has limitations — participants know they’re being filmed — it captures more open and natural interactions, non-verbal behaviour and tone of voice. That, in turn, yields deeper insights into how parents can better support young athletes. 

Those insights include having non-sport-related conversations to help keep things in perspective and providing positive feedback to counter their self-criticism. It also includes asking more open-ended questions and giving teens the time to reflect on their experience, encouraging the development of emotional regulation skills. 

Young athletes are still developing those skills, which Tamminen explains “will be helpful for them in sport, but also outside of sport and as adults.”

Meanwhile, to investigate how athletes influence the emotions of their teammates, Tamminen brought players together in a room set up with cameras, connected them to heart rate monitors and observed the healthy and unhealthy ways they discussed the stressors they faced.  

Co-rumination was frequently observed, where athletes commiserated about a shared challenge. That’s healthy to a point: talking about an overly critical coach or pre-competition nerves can validate each other’s experiences and strengthen team bonds, Tamminen says. But too much can suck athletes into a quagmire of negative thinking.

“Individuals do not experience stress and challenges and concerns in an isolated individual vacuum,” she explains. “Other people are contributing to those experiences in both positive and negative ways.”

What’s at stake, I think, is the generation of people that are growing up to be able to become the best, most well-rounded individuals they can be.

– John Barrett, men’s volleyball head coach, University of Toronto

Creating low-cost mental health toolkits

Looking ahead, Tamminen and her team aim to use their data to inform best practices for creating sports environments that are psychologically safe and healthy. Among other things, they hope to develop a suite of low-cost, evidence-based strategies to help athletes, coaches, clubs and parents cope with stress.

According to Tamminen, support from the CFI has played a crucial role in driving her research forward. “I can’t imagine how I would have been able to do all of these things without that funding,” she says. At the same time, the CFI projects have opened the door to other exciting research opportunities. 

Recently, the lab received funding from the Tanenbaum Institute for Science in Sport to pilot a program that will embed mental health champions within elite youth sport organizations to share information with athletes and parents.

Transforming young athletes into well-equipped adults

Barrett welcomes all the insights that Tamminen can provide. Good coaches need to keep learning, he says, so they can help their athletes thrive in an ever-changing environment and become well-rounded leaders.

Like he tells his players at the beginning of each season, things rarely turn out exactly as you hope, in life or on the court. “It’s not really important what happens, it’s how we react to those things,” he says.

And that’s where the right emotional toolkit makes a world of difference.

I can’t imagine how I would have been able to do all of these things without [CFI] funding. And that means being able to do this research but also develop the partnerships with other researchers, collaborators and institutions.

– Katherine Tamminen, University of Toronto

The research project featured in this story also benefits from funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Sport Canada.