How Coaching Sports Can Quickly Destroy Your Mental Health

Being a sports coach can be an exhilarating experience. You have a unique opportunity to help young athletes grow and develop. But you may not have realized how much pressure was involved with taking the position.

You want your players to have fun. You hope they win a lot of games.

You’re trying to help them get all the natural benefits of playing team sports — building skills in leadership, teamwork, camaraderie and problem solving.

That’s already a lot to deal with. In addition to all of those expectations, you probably also put a lot of pressure on yourself to be the best coach you can be.

Perhaps at times you may think, “If only I could do something differently — if only we could spend more time on this or that, then we could win more games.”

But when you’re constantly pointing fingers at yourself for things outside of your control, it starts to have a serious impact on your mind and body.

You certainly do all that you can to look after your players — but who’s looking after you?

Who’s concerned with your stress level and how overwhelming your coaching responsibilities can be? You give a lot of yourself to your team. Who gives to you — supports you — when you’re feeling stressed or emotionally dysregulated?

You need to acknowledge the emotional challenges of coaching and develop a game plan to deal with it.

Coaching is stressful. With everything else going on with your team, you may sometimes forget how the pressure of coaching can quickly destroy your mental health.

Whether you’re coaching professionally or just a neighborhood team of kids, there’s always someone who expects you to be more and more successful. At times, you start thinking about how your mistakes may have adversely affected your players and affected their future performance on and off the field.

The relentless pressure of coaching can be exhausting.

Typical challenges of being a sports coach that can add to your stress:

• Losing particular games or overall having less wins than losses
• Meeting the needs of growth, development and fairness for your players
• Players unhappy with individual progress and/or playing time in games
• Parents and other fans being angry and unsporting at practices and games

Coaching sports can have a profound effect on your moods, self esteem and relational health and you may find yourself confused or frustrated when most of those around you think you can handle all the stress with little support.

As a sports coach, you actually deal with two different types of stress. The first is your primary coaching stress — the stress you directly feel from your expectations as a coach.

The other kind of stress is secondary vicarious coaching stress — which has the indirect impact on you from supporting others and their challenges (i.e. players, parents, etc.)

The idea of leading your team to victory and the reward of developing athletes can be magnetically appealing, but many coaches find themselves struggling to cope with the stress and pressure that come along with the job.

It’s probably not just the fear of losing the big game that eats away at you. It may be all of the other responsibilities that come with the coaching job that’s piling up and having its impact.

“Coaching baseball was my dream job for as long as I can remember,” says Mark Riesenberg, a former college baseball coach. “It’s what I went to school for and had worked towards my whole life.”

When he got the chance to coach at the college level, he felt like he’d reached the pinnacle of his career — until the pressure started to take its toll on him.

“I would lie awake at night thinking about games, or how I could motivate my team better,” he explained. “I tried hard not to let it show, but I was mentally exhausted.”

For many coaches, this type of stress isn’t a matter of simply trying harder and working through it. It may be triggering other emotional challenges. You may struggle with anxiety or depression that’s being exacerbated by the stress of coaching.

The best way to remain mentally healthy is to take care of yourself — a kind of coach’s self care.

That means the usual healthy living stuff — eating well, exercising regularly, getting plenty of rest, and taking time off from coaching every now then to recharge your batteries. The key here for you is balance — coaching sports can easily become all-consuming!

Stress is a disconnection between your mind and body. Kind of like a clogging of your equilibrium. There are lots of sensory regulating things you can do to help get your mind and body better connected and help workout your emotional struggles:

• Meditation
• Daily routine mindfulness
• Nature walks/sounds
• Soothing music (no lyrics)
• Journaling
• Producing anything musical or artistic

You can also empower yourself to think about your stress differently. The way you think about your stress may be doing you the most harm. You can think of your stress as a signal and use it to motivate and energize you.

Your stress is not all bad. You can change your stress into strength and resilience. Save your mental health — start today!

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Inspired by my work with former professional and other elite athletes — Get the SportsBrain coaching app and Train the SportsBrain for Peak Performance.