Alex Bolowich is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant, founder of Elite Mental Performance and Co-Founder of Ibex Tactics. Alex is based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, where he specializes in working with athletes and teams to help them perform in the most intense situations, building practices for sustained excellence at elite levels like the NCAA, NFL, MLS, NBA, and Olympics. If you are interested in any of his signature programs, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!

Are Athletes Becoming Mentally Weaker?

What I've Seen on the Sidelines, and What the Science Actually Says

I've coached youth soccer. I've stood on sidelines watching players crumble after a single missed pass, as if the sky had just fallen on them. I witnessed it coaching in Jacksonville, and I hear it now regularly from college coaches across the country: "These kids can't handle anything."

A player makes a mistake and disappears mentally for the next ten minutes. A tough call gets made, and suddenly the whole bench is rattled. A close game turns into a pressure cooker, and the composure that looked solid in practice evaporates completely. Coaches at every level see it. The question they keep asking, sometimes loudly, sometimes in frustration after a loss, is this one: are athletes becoming mentally weaker?

Here's the problem with that question. It assumes we already know the answer. And in sports, assuming you already know the answer is how you stop learning.

The Stigma That Makes Everything Worse

Before we go any further, let's deal with the elephant in the room.

When a coach labels a player "mentally weak," that label does not motivate. It isolates. Research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine identified stigma as the single most commonly reported factor preventing athletes with mental health challenges from seeking help, driven by the belief that struggling mentally is a sign of weakness rather than a human experience (Gulliver et al., 2012). Athletes are already less likely to seek help than non-athletes. Mental illness is typically underreported in athletes specifically because of the stigmas embedded in athletic culture.

Think about what that means in practice. An athlete is already struggling with performance anxiety or composure under pressure. A coach calls it mental weakness. Now that athlete does not just have a performance challenge. They have a label to avoid. So instead of addressing the issue, they hide it. They white-knuckle through it. They perform around it as best they can while the underlying problem grows unchecked.

Stigma operates on the belief that mental challenges are incompatible with being a winner, and athletes fear, reasonably, that disclosing mental health symptoms would affect their standing, their contracts, and their reputations. That is not weakness. That is a rational response to an irrational culture.

So before we ask whether athletes are becoming mentally weaker, we need to ask a sharper question: are we creating environments where mental challenges are treated as character flaws instead of developmental opportunities? Because if the answer is yes, the "weakness" we are observing might be something we built ourselves.

Okay, But Is Something Actually Changing?

Let's not dismiss the concern entirely. There is real data suggesting that anxiety and mental health challenges among competitive athletes have been rising.

The NCAA Student-Athlete Well-Being Study found that student-athletes with mental health problems are 1.5 to 2 times more likely to experience mental health issues compared to the pre-COVID-19 era, with higher rates of anxiety and mental exhaustion observed across the population (NCAA, 2022). Performance anxiety in young athletes manifests with somatic, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms, and the unique stressors athletes face, along with rising trends of sport specialization and athletic identity pressures, are contributing factors (Patel et al., 2025).

What coaches are observing on the field, that players struggle to refocus after mistakes, that composure dissolves under pressure, that minor adversities feel like catastrophic mountains, is consistent with what the research is showing. The rise in performance anxiety is not anecdotal. It is measurable, documented, and increasing.

The bigger context matters here too. Social media has created a layer of public exposure that no previous generation of athletes had to navigate. A bad play in a game twenty years ago stayed in that gym. Today it gets clipped, uploaded, and commented on before the athlete even reaches the locker room. The psychological weight of performing under that kind of constant scrutiny is genuinely different, not imagined. Youth sports have also been professionalized at younger ages, compressing the developmental runway and accelerating burnout before many athletes even reach high school (Brenner, 2016).

Something has shifted. The question is what we do with that information.

The Case for Asking a Better Question

Here is where coaches and parents tend to lose the thread.

"Mentally weak" is not a clinical term. It is a cultural judgment. And cultural judgments tend to reveal the biases of the person making them far more than any objective truth about the athletes being judged.

Research in sports psychology draws a clear distinction between mental toughness as a trait and mental performance as a skill. Mental toughness, as defined by Clough and Earle (2002), is characterized by commitment, control, challenge, and confidence. Mental performance, on the other hand, is a trainable, developable skill set. It can be built through deliberate practice regardless of what you started with. A meta-analysis by Gucciardi et al. (2015) found that psychological skills training programs consistently improved mental toughness scores in competitive athletes. This is not a fixed trait you either have or you do not. It responds to deliberate work, the same way a muscle does.

Which brings us to the real question: are athletes being trained in mental performance with the same rigor and intentionality that we apply to physical training? In most programs, at every level, the answer is no. And a training deficit is not a character flaw.

The EMP Perspective: Mental and Physical Are the Same

At Elite Mental Performance, we operate from a foundational belief that the mental and physical are not separate domains. They are the same domain. You are not born mentally tough or mentally weak any more than you are born a finished athlete.

You may have predispositions, absolutely. Some athletes are naturally taller and stronger. Others are built for endurance or quickness. But a naturally strong athlete can develop endurance, and a shorter athlete can build strength. Nobody looks at a 5'9" point guard and says, "Well, he just wasn't born tall enough. There's nothing to work on." That would be absurd.

The same logic applies mentally. An athlete may be predisposed to performance anxiety based on genetics, developmental history, or what they absorbed from their environment growing up. That predisposition is real. It is not an excuse, and it is not a life sentence. Composure is a skill. Focus is a skill. The ability to reset after a mistake and stay present in the next moment is a skill. All of it can be trained.

At EMP, weakness is a specific thing. Weakness is knowing what you could do to improve and choosing not to do it. That is the only version of weakness we concern ourselves with. Everything else, the anxiety before a big game, the spiral after a mistake, the composure that disappears under pressure, those are not weaknesses. Those are human experiences. And human experiences can be worked with. The athlete who acknowledges those experiences and chooses to develop skills around them is doing something that takes real courage. The one who hides behind a tough exterior while the problem grows unchecked is the one running from development.

Our goal is straightforward: challenge athletes to stop mistaking discomfort and insecurity for deficiency. Those are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are signs that you are human, and that you now have a choice. You can do something about it, or you can not. That choice is where mental performance actually begins.

Who Needs to Take Responsibility Here?

Here is the question that most people in sports are not willing to sit with: even if athletes are becoming less resilient, who is responsible for that?

That is a much bigger question. And it is one that a lot of coaches and parents are not ready to wrestle with, because answering it honestly requires setting the ego down for a moment.

Athletes do not coach themselves. They do not design their training environments. They do not set the culture of the locker room, the tone of practice, or the standards around how mistakes are handled. Adults do that. And if the adults in an athlete's development pipeline are not modeling composure under pressure, are not creating environments where adversity is trained deliberately, are not normalizing the development of mental skills alongside physical ones, then pointing at the athletes and calling them soft is not a diagnosis. It is avoidance.

The coaches and parents who are willing to examine their own role in this conversation are the ones who are already ahead of the majority. Not because self-examination is comfortable, but because it is the only thing that actually moves the needle. Athletes are looking to the adults around them for a model of how to handle hard things. If the model is "suppress it and grind," the athletes will suppress it and grind, until they cannot anymore. If the model is "develop the skill, embrace the discomfort, and keep competing," athletes tend to do that instead.

If you are a coach or parent reading this and you are genuinely unsure how to create that kind of environment, that is not a failure. That is just an honest gap in your own development. Connect with us. At Elite Mental Performance, we work with coaches and parents as readily as we work with athletes, because the environment is part of the performance equation. You cannot separate them.

What the Research Tells Us About Mental Toughness

Clough and Earle's 4C model gives us a practical foundation: Control, Commitment, Challenge, and Confidence. Athletes who develop strength across these four dimensions are more resilient, more consistent, and more capable of performing under pressure (Clough et al., 2002).

Critically, this is trainable territory. Gucciardi et al. (2015) confirmed across their meta-analysis that deliberate psychological skills training produces measurable improvements in mental toughness outcomes. The athletes who are struggling with composure and resilience are not fundamentally broken. They are operating in high-demand environments without the mental skills infrastructure that performance at that level requires.

Physical training programs have become extraordinarily sophisticated. Strength and conditioning science, recovery protocols, biomechanical analysis, nutritional periodization. Every physical variable gets optimized. Mental training? Most programs still treat it as an optional add-on, something you bring in when there is a problem, not a foundational element of athlete development. That gap is where the answer to this whole conversation lives.

Practical Application: Building the Mental Foundation

Stop Treating Mental Skills Like Emergency Medicine

Mental performance training is not what you call when an athlete is falling apart. It is what you build into the program from day one, the same way you build strength and conditioning. If mental skills only come up when something breaks, you are already behind. Programs that integrate systematic mental skills work from the beginning of an athlete's development are the ones that don't waste thousands of hours of training only to watch it completely unravel on game day.

Separate Identity from Performance

One of the primary drivers of what looks like mental fragility is an athlete whose entire self-worth is fused with their performance outcomes. Every mistake becomes an identity crisis, not a data point. Research by Brewer et al. (1993) found that high athletic identity is associated with significantly greater difficulty coping with adversity, slumps, and transitions. Teach athletes to hold their identity separately from their performance. You can care deeply about competing well without your sense of self depending on the result. That distinction changes how athletes respond to pressure entirely.

Train Adversity Deliberately

Comfortable training environments produce athletes who perform well in comfortable environments. If you want athletes who thrive when the stakes are high, you have to build meaningful pressure into practice. Consequence-based drills, competitive simulations, environments where athletes practice making mistakes and resetting quickly. Mental agility, the ability to refocus and redirect attention after an error, is a trainable skill (Moran, 2012). But it requires repetition in conditions that approximate real competition. If practice is always safe and stakes-free, do not be surprised when the athlete has no tools for the moment that counts.

Normalize Mental Skills Without Lowering Standards

There is a false choice that has poisoned athletic culture for decades: the idea that developing psychological skills somehow conflicts with toughness. It does not. An athlete can be psychologically educated and ruthlessly competitive at the same time. In fact, the research suggests athletes with higher psychological skill sets sustain elite performance longer, recover from adversity more effectively, and experience less burnout over a career (Gucciardi et al., 2015). The coaches building genuinely mentally resilient programs are not the ones dismissing this conversation. They are the ones taking it seriously enough to make it systematic.

Measure What You Are Trying to Develop

You cannot manage what you do not measure. Programs that track physical performance metrics obsessively but have no system for assessing mental performance are flying blind on half the equation. Basic mental skills assessments, attentional control measures, pre-competition readiness checks, confidence inventories: these tools exist and they are accessible. Using them creates accountability and gives athletes something concrete to develop toward, not just a vague instruction to "be tougher."

A Fictional but Familiar Scenario

Imagine a sophomore point guard at a competitive high school program. Elite physical tools. Coaches love her in practice. But in the fourth quarter of tight games, her shot selection gets conservative, her passes become hesitant, and her performance drops noticeably.

Her coach calls it nerves. Her parents call it a mental issue. She calls it a mystery.

What is actually happening is well-documented. Under pressure, her attentional focus narrows, she shifts from external process-focus to internal self-monitoring, and the resulting conscious over-control degrades the automatic execution she spent thousands of hours building (Beilock and Carr, 2001). She is not weak. She is untrained in the psychological skills that would allow her to maintain automatic execution when the stakes are highest.

With targeted mental performance training, specifically attentional focus work, pre-performance routines, and deliberate pressure simulation in practice, that gap closes. It closes reliably, because the research says it should. That is not a soft conversation. That is performance science.

The Closing Challenge

So, are athletes becoming mentally weaker?

Here is the most honest answer available: that question is getting far more attention than it deserves, and the attention it is getting is being aimed in exactly the wrong direction.

Whether athletes today are softer than athletes from a previous generation is a debate that produces exactly zero useful action. It is nostalgic noise dressed up as insight, and it keeps the conversation focused on judgment instead of development.

The real questions are these: Are we training mental performance with the same rigor we apply to physical training? Are we creating environments where mental challenges are treated as developmental opportunities instead of character indictments? Are the adults in these athletes' lives modeling and teaching what they are demanding?

If you are an athlete reading this, here is your challenge. Stop waiting for someone to give you permission to take your mental performance seriously. The discomfort you feel before a big game, the spiral after a mistake, the pressure that makes you tighten up: those are not signs you are weak. They are signs you are human, and that there is real work to be done. The choice is yours.

If you are a coach or parent reading this: the most powerful thing you can do for the athletes in your program is be willing to examine your own role in this conversation before pointing fingers at the players. That kind of self-awareness is rare in competitive sports. It is also the thing that separates environments that develop great athletes from environments that just push them until they break.

Get after it. Contact us for tailored mental toughness training to you.

References

1. Beilock, S. L., and Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701-725.

2. Brenner, J. S. (2016). Sports specialization and intensive training in young athletes. Pediatrics, 138(3), e20162148.

3. Brewer, B. W., Van Raalte, J. L., and Linder, D. E. (1993). Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel? International Journal of Sport Psychology, 24(2), 237-254.

4. Clough, P., Earle, K., and Sewell, D. (2002). Mental toughness: The concept and its measurement. In I. Cockerill (Ed.), Solutions in Sport Psychology (pp. 32-43). Thompson Learning.

5. Gucciardi, D. F., Hanton, S., Gordon, S., Mallett, C. J., and Temby, P. (2015). The concept of mental toughness: Tests of dimensionality, nomological network, and traitness. Journal of Personality, 83(1), 26-44.

6. Gulliver, A., Griffiths, K. M., and Christensen, H. (2012). Barriers and facilitators to mental health help-seeking for young elite athletes: A qualitative study. BMC Psychiatry, 12, 157.

7. Moran, A. P. (2012). Sport and Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.). Routledge.

8. NCAA Student-Athlete Well-Being Study. (2022). National Collegiate Athletic Association.

9. Patel, R., et al. (2025). Sport-related performance anxiety in young athletes: A clinical practice review. Translational Pediatrics.

10. Reardon, C. L., Hainline, B., Aron, C. M., et al. (2019). Mental health in elite athletes: International Olympic Committee consensus statement. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(11), 667-699.