Pressure leading to burnout

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By Eric Page | Friday, July 25, 2008 |

Anthony Losasso loves wrestling. Has his whole life, as long as he can remember.

But how can you love a sport so much, and yet it can be … “your worst nightmare?” Losasso said, finishing the sentence.

“It’s always a love-hate relationship with wrestling. You love to win, you love the competition, and I just love being out there. But then, on the other hand, it’s long practices, waking up really early and having to cut weight. It just takes its toll throughout the year.”

Burnout — defined by Webster as fatigue, frustration or apathy resulting from prolonged stress, overwork or intense activity — has claimed its share of high school athletes. Losasso, a former Bettendorf wrestling and football standout, was one of them.

As a junior, he went 21-5 and was the Class 3A state runner-up at 189 pounds. Then, after finishing his football season last fall, he decided not to finish his career on the mat. He’d been wrestling since he was a toddler, sometimes more than 100 matches a year. He had won several AAU state championships coming up and would have been among the favorites to win the IHSAA state title as a senior.

It just got to be too much.

“It was getting to a point where it was just repetitive, and I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again,” Losasso said. “It just wasn’t fun.”

More and more, young athletes are exhausted — physically and emotionally — by the time they finish high school. With a regimen of youth sports that starts as early as 5 years old, studies have shown 70 percent of children give up a sport by age 13 simply because it’s not fun anymore.

It’s an alarming trend.

“A lot of talented kids who probably could make it to the next level burn out,” said New York-based sports psychologist Jay Granat, founder of the Web site stayinthezone.com. “I’ve had a number of kids who started playing baseball at age 5, and by 15 they’re sick of it. Some of that is overuse, some of that is too much pressure from parents. A game that they at one time loved, they have grown to hate.”

Why is that, though?

Aren’t sports supposed to be a break for kids — from school, from family, from life?

When and how did it all become so stressful? How is it possible that more than 40 percent of Dr. Granat’s patients are between ages 11 and 18?

It’s partly because of the explosion of organized sports over the past decade, says Dr. Larry Lauer, director of coaching education and development at the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University.

“Everything is treated almost like a job,” Lauer said. “You go to a structured practice, you go to your lessons, you go home and do your homework and go to bed. The kids are very scheduled.

“When I was growing up, you’d go in the backyard and play ball for three hours and then go home and go to bed. It’s more a job now. It’s more what I do, rather than what I love.”

With all the increased opportunities to compete, young athletes are putting more time into organized sports than ever before. Parents are investing more money in the athletic careers of their children, and expectations never have been greater.

The investment and expectations lead to pressure, pressure leads to stress, stress gives way to burnout.

The physical damage is easy to identify. According to a 2007 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics, overuse injuries among teens are at an all-time high. High school athletes account for more than 2 million injuries a year, and more and more of them are having serious surgeries to repair ligament damage resulting from years of competition or improper use.

The emotional damage is harder to trace. We’ve all read stories about the amazing athletes who started competing at age 3, hit the national scene at age 8, accepted a college scholarship at 15 and went on to star as professionals. But that’s one in a million.

What about the others?

“We always interview the people who made it and want to know how they made it,” Lauer said. “In terms of the research, we need to start interviewing the people who did all those things — invested the money, put in the time — and didn’t reach their goals. What kind of effect has that had on their quality of life? That’s an interesting question.”

For Losasso, it wasn’t a matter of not reaching his goals. It was the pressure and time demands of being an athlete 12 months a year in a world where high school sports seasons never end.

Until his sophomore year, he had done all of it, wrestling a full schedule of Greco and freestyle through the spring and summer, keeping up with his weightlifting and other workouts for football and playing on the baseball team.

Bit by bit, he gave it up.

It just got to be too much.

“It’s really hard. If you’re out of season for all your sports, you’ve got that pull from all your coaches to go in for that sport’s workouts. It’s hard to keep every coach happy because every coach expects so much from you,” Losasso said.

“If you’ve singled out one sport, it’s great. It keeps you busy, keeps you out of trouble. But if you’re a multisport athlete, it just takes a toll on you, and you end up getting frustrated with the whole situation. You end up wanting to quit all of them in order to get the pressure off your back.”

Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com.

Advice for parents

How can you make sure your child has a healthy, fulfilling career in athletics? Here are a few tips from Dr. Larry Lauer, director of coaching education and development at the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University:

- Take advantage of the “fun and fundamental years” early in your child’s life. Play in the backyard. Teach them skills and make it fun so they enjoy competing.

- Provide opportunities for your children to compete but not at a cost that you can’t afford. If the cost is too great, it will put too much pressure on the child to succeed.

- Maintain balance. Don’t let a child’s athletic career become the only family activity. Talk to your child about more than athletics — bring up academics, friends, other activities. Allow your child to build an identity other than that of an athlete.

- Be supportive. Encourage your child through his/her athletic endeavors. Emphasize strengths. Let the coach handle the coaching and the criticizing. Allow child to make mistakes and learn from them.

- If your child does prove to be an elite athlete, find elite coaching and back way off, and let the coaching take over.