Who am I?

Athletic Identity, Performance and Well-being

I recently read an article detailing WNBA All-Star Kelsey Plum’s struggles with mental health during her historic senior year. In 2017, Plum won every major Player of the Year Award en route to becoming the All-Time leading scorer in NCAA Division 1 history.

Plum explained, “In college, people really noticed all the records and accolades and all the stuff broken, but I was really hurting in terms of my identity and trying to figure out who I was as a person at that time. It was all people cared about, you know? There was never a, how am I doing? And it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s human nature.”

In this week’s 3 Points, I’ll discuss athletic identity, its impact on performance and well-being, and how we can help athletes expand their identity’s beyond performance.

1. What is Athletic Identity?

Athletic Identity is the degree to which an athlete identifies with the athlete role (Brewer 1993). Essentially, if you asked an athlete to use a pie chart to define who they are, how much of the pie would be filled by being an athlete? Research has found that there are benefits to identifying with one’s athlete role. For example, research has found that athletic identity is positively associated with commitment to performance, self-esteem, and being oriented toward mastery.

2. The downside of Athletic Identity:

The benefits of Athletic Identity begin to fade as athletes over-identify with their athletic performance.

As Sport Psychologist Dr. Riley Nickols described, “If my value and worth are predominantly tied to my sport performance, I would be an anxious mess before and during competition. This anxiety would certainly diminish the ability for me to enjoy and have fun participating in competition, and of course, all of these factors decrease the likelihood that my athletic performance could be consistent and or maximized.”

The research agrees. Over-identification in the athletic role has been found to result in poor physical health, emotional well-being, and social isolation. Further, other research found that “Over-identification with the athlete role may lead to dysfunctional practices within the role, such as overtraining, anxiety when not training, disordered eating, or substance use.”

3. How can we help our athletes avoid over-identifying with their athletic role?

Educate:

• There is a lot of myth about high performance. Particularly around obsession and not taking days off. Many athletes fear that broadening their identity may hinder performance. Instead, we know that it is helpful, not harmful to performance. We can be committed to high performance and exist outside of it. As sport psychologist Rebecca Levett put it, to be great you need to give 100% to your performance while you are training, but you are not training 24/7.

Encourage:

• Encouraging your athletes to explore other things outside of performance. Whether it be hobbies, interests, or relationships by encouraging your athletes to explore life outside of performance you are giving them permission, which some may need. Dr. Riley Nickols used a great example: Our identities are like balloons holding us up. If our only source of identity is from performance, when that doesn’t go well, we fall hard.

Model:

• While less research has been done on the identity of coaches, I don’t think it’s a massive leap to consider that the research would apply to the performance identity of coaches. How as coaches can we model that our worth and value aren’t tied to performance?