For a majority of athletes, playing at the collegiate level is the pinnacle of their career. To have made it to college for any sport marks a significant number of years spent training, refining, and marketing their craft, a feat few accomplish. Only approximately 3.2% of high school swimmers will continue into Division 3 (DIII) athletics, which is still a large number when compared to the 1.2% of wrestlers who do the same.
Even with these small portions of athletes continuing to compete in their years of higher education, college sports hit a new record in December of 2022 with over 520,000 athletes in competition around the country across all three divisions. Of that half a million, less than 2% will “go pro,” or continue their athletic pursuits full-time, leaving the other roughly 510,000 athletes to pursue their non-athletic professional careers. But that number doesn’t quite tell a full story.
Approximately 30% of college athletes will quit before completing four years of athletic eligibility, according to a study at Brown University. The umbrella term for quitting is often referred to as “athletic burnout,” or simply, “burnout:” a term researchers have defined as a cognitive-affective syndrome, which consists of “emotional and physical exhaustion, sport devaluation, and a reduced sense of accomplishment.” This scenario has seen a lot of explanations and names, including “training stress syndrome,” where too much stress can produce “staleness […] and eventually burnout” of an athlete. This experience is all too common in college athletics; a quick Google search on quitting college sports returns articles from other schools such as Williams College and Oklahoma Christian University where former college athletes reflect on walking away from their sport, likening their relief to “ripping a Band-Aid off” and how their decisions were “ultimately […] best for [their] future.”
The physical and mental fatigue of burnout associated with athletics has quantifiable repercussions, summarized in a 2019 study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The results were alarming at best: for current athletes, mental health symptoms and disorders included 34% anxiety/depression and 19% alcohol misuse, whereas with former athletes, rates stood at 16% distress, and 26% of anxiety/depression. For those that do leave a sport, they find relief in walking away from something so demanding at 20 hours a week on paper, meaning, not accounting for time spent traveling to and from practices and games, preparing for practices, visiting athletic trainers for injury prevention, team bonding activities, recruiting events, mandatory trainings, and more.
The effects of the physical demands of college athletics are compounded by a lack of proper sleep. A survey of University of Arizona athletes found that 68% of their athletes reported poor sleep quality: 87% slept less than eight hours a night and 43% slept less than seven hours a night, a far cry from the 10-12 hours of sleep college athletes would need to be at peak performance on the court and in the classroom, due to the amount of muscle recovery necessary that only occurs during deep sleep. Sleeping less than 8 hours a night makes student athletes 1.7 times more likely to sustain an injury, but more often than not, that sleep is secondary to athletics and academics, which have more easily quantifiable measures of good and bad performance.
Can burnout be prevented? It’s tough to say. Factors that contribute to it include, but are not limited to, team culture, intensity of training or coaching, tendency of perfectionism in a given athlete, and the unquestionable fact that the likelihood of having a future career out of the sport is near zero for the majority of college athletes. Once an athlete has hit a point where they devalue a sport and have experienced a decline in performance along with emotional and physical exhaustion, the biggest help becomes mitigation in forms of encouraging support, in an academic setting and especially in terms of mental health. If you have begun to feel the onset of burnout, make sure to stop by the student-athlete walk-in counseling hours and check out other resources for athletes at Stevens.
