The Nerves We Don't Talk About: What the Research Says About Performance Anxiety in Young Athletes

Explore the research behind sport-related performance anxiety in young athletes and how to distinguish normal pre-game nerves from deeper distress.

By Scott K. Wilder · Young Athletes and Parents

GAME READY MINDSET

The Nerves We Don't Talk About: What the Research Says About Performance Anxiety in Young Athletes

A few seasons ago, I started working with a talented college soccer player. On the field he'd sometimes play like another person, shying away from the ball, hesitant on plays he'd made a hundred times in practice. After a bad touch, he would play the rest of the game with the weight of the world on his shoulders. It wasn't a skills problem. It was something else, and a clinical review published in Translational Pediatrics gives it a name: sport-related performance anxiety.

Nerves vs. Something More

Last year, Translational Pediatrics published a review that draws a distinction I think every coach and parent should know. Pre-competition jitters are normal. Performance anxiety is different in degree. It causes real distress, and it can push a young athlete's performance well below what they're capable of. When it doesn't let up, when it's still causing real distress or getting in the way of a kid's life, it can cross into an actual diagnosable disorder. That classification only became official in 2013. Which tells you something: the medical world is just now catching up to what athletes have felt for a lot longer.

Who's At Risk

A few risk factors stood out to me. Athletes in individual sports — tennis, gymnastics, golf — tend to show higher rates of performance anxiety than athletes on teams; there's nowhere to hide and no teammate to share the moment with. Personality plays a role too. Kids who are just wired to worry more — psychologists call it high neuroticism (terrible name) — tend to be more susceptible. And their additional pressures in today's youth sports: early specialization, year-round schedules, an identity built entirely around one sport, etc. don't make life easy for these players. I've watched this play out with a 13-year-old softball pitcher whose whole sense of herself had already narrowed down to her ERA, before she'd even started high school. If you ask her how old she is, she would probably tell you 3.00.

The Kid Who Goes Quiet

Researchers classify the issues into three buckets: 1) physical (racing heart, sweaty palms, nausea), 2) mental (negative self-talk, replaying the failure on a loop), and 3) behavioral. In reality, it's hard to see the first two. What you actually see is the third one. A kid who suddenly doesn't want to go to practice. A kid who goes quiet in the car ride home instead of replaying the game like he used to. I had a player who started "forgetting" his cleats on game days — not once, but three Saturdays running. That's the tell. If you notice a pattern like that holding for more than a couple weeks, it's worth a direct, low-pressure conversation — not right after a game, but later, when the stakes of the conversation itself feel lower.

The Brain on Game Day

Researchers have found that anxiety lights up a specific part of the brain — it's called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex — and in controlled studies, more activity there doesn't just line up with worse performance. It appears to cause it. In a separate study of college athletes, the anxious ones reacted much harder to their own mistakes when they knew someone was grading them: coach watching, game on the line, etc. Sports shouldn't cause more anxiety than academics, IMHO — though for a lot of these kids, right now, it does. In plain terms: for an anxious athlete, the exact same mistake gets treated as a bigger deal the moment someone's watching and keeping score.

The Inverted-U

Every coach knows the kid who plays relaxed in warmups and freezes by the second inning. That's the Inverted-U in real time, and every athlete I've coached bends the curve their own way. One theory suggests that arousal actually helps performance up to a point, after which additional pressure leads to a gradual decline. A competing theory proposes that athletes with high cognitive anxiety may experience a much more abrupt drop-off once pressure exceeds their optimal level — not gradual, but sudden. Where any individual athlete falls on that curve depends on their self-efficacy, skill level, and the team environment around them.

What Actually Helps

Cognitive behavioral therapy remains the most well-supported approach. The catch: most of that evidence comes from studies on adults, not teenage athletes, so I treat it as a strong lead, not a settled answer. The core move: teach a kid to catch himself mid-spiral, when he says "I'm the worst player on the team," and swap it for something closer to the truth. Avoidance tends to work against athletes here: skipping a rep or sitting out a moment they're afraid of can offer short-term relief while quietly strengthening the anxiety over time. One preliminary study found encouraging results comparing a mindfulness-based approach to more traditional psychological skills training. I'd call that promising, not proven — I'll believe it once someone's run it on more than a couple dozen athletes. That broader toolkit — self-talk, imagery, goal-setting, breathing work — is a lot of what we build into Game Ready Mindset's daily work with athletes. In practice, that can be as simple as teaching a kid one phrase to say to themselves after a mistake, or a 60-second breathing routine to run before stepping onto the field.

What Adults Get Wrong

For younger athletes especially, the adults around them shape the outcome. Keeping the emphasis on fun and effort, not just results, tends to produce better outcomes. Here's a trap I see all the time: a kid melts down — crying, freezing, refusing to go back in — and a coach or parent pulls him aside for comfort and attention. Nobody means any harm by it. But you've just taught him that avoiding is the way out. That doesn't mean withholding care or dismissing real distress. It means supporting the child in the moment while also noticing and rewarding the smaller acts of courage — the kid who asks back in, the one who takes the next rep anyway.

Three Things to Try This Week

If you're a coach or a parent, you don't need a clinical background to start:

Watch for the pattern, not the single bad game — sudden reluctance to go to practice, or persistent silence after mistakes, holding for more than a couple of weeks.

Catch and name the brave moment out loud — "I saw you ask for the ball right after that turnover, that's exactly it" — rather than only addressing the moments of avoidance.

Know your limit: normal nervousness doesn't require intervention, but anxiety that's causing real distress, avoidance, or a kid pulling away from a sport they used to love is worth a conversation with a qualified mental health professional.

As for the player I mentioned at the start — the shift didn't come from a single conversation. It came from a small, repeatable habit: after every mistake, name it, let it go, move to the next play. Some weeks it looked like real progress. Other weeks it didn't. That's consistent with what the research says too — mental readiness isn't a trait a kid either has or doesn't. It's a system you build, one rep at a time.

Scott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset™, a mental performance program for athletes and teams in baseball, soccer, softball, and volleyball. He holds graduate degrees from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University), New York University (MBA), and Johns Hopkins University, along with coaching credentials from Georgetown University, Brian Cain's MPM Program, the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), and FC Barcelona. He is the author of Millennial Leaders and the forthcoming Compete in Any Weather.

Source: Beenen KT, Vosters JA, Patel DR. Sport-related performance anxiety in young athletes: a clinical practice review. Transl Pediatr. 2025;14(1):127-138.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11811592/

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