The Nerves We Don't Talk About: Performance Anxiety in Young Athletes

Explore what research reveals about youth sports performance anxiety, how it differs from normal nerves, and key risk factors coaches and parents should know.

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 college soccer player who was, by any measure, talented. But on the field he'd become someone else — shying away from the ball, hesitant on plays he'd made a hundred times in practice. After a bad touch, he'd carry it for the rest of the half. 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

In January 2025, Translational Pediatrics published a review that draws a distinction I think every coach and parent should know. Pre-competition jitters are normal — almost universal. 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 symptoms persist and cause significant distress or impairment, some presentations can meet the criteria for a psychiatric disorder — a classification that only came into place in 2013, which tells you how recently the medical world caught 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 score high on neuroticism, meaning they're more prone to worry and emotional reactivity generally, are more susceptible. And the pressures common in youth sports today — early specialization, year-round schedules, an identity built entirely around one sport — are named directly in the research as contributing factors.

Recognizing the Signs

The researchers break the symptoms into three groups. Somatic: racing heart, sweaty palms, nausea. Cognitive: negative self-talk, confusion, replaying images of failure. Behavioral: withdrawal, fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, sometimes avoiding the sport altogether. That last one deserves the most attention from parents and coaches, because kids rarely announce "I'm anxious." What you're more likely to see is a kid who suddenly doesn't want to go to practice, or who goes quiet in the car ride home. If you notice a pattern like that lasting 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

The neuroscience here is genuinely interesting. Researchers have found that anxiety activates a specific brain region, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and that increased activity there doesn't just correlate with a breakdown in performance — in controlled studies, it appears to cause it. Separately, in a study of university athletes, those with high performance anxiety showed a much stronger neural response to their own mistakes when they knew they were being evaluated, compared to when they were simply practicing. 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

There's a useful model here, though it's worth remembering it's a model, not a rule for every athlete. 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.

Building the Toolkit

Cognitive behavioral therapy remains the most well-supported treatment approach, though it's worth noting that research specifically involving young athletes is still fairly limited. Its core move is teaching athletes to catch an automatic negative thought — "I'm the worst player on the team" — and replace it with something more accurate. 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, though larger studies are still needed before drawing firm conclusions. 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. There's also a subtle trap worth naming: when a child avoids a stressful moment — crying, freezing, refusing to play — and that avoidance brings comfort and attention from a parent or coach, it can unintentionally reinforce the very avoidance we're trying to reduce. 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. First, watch for the pattern, not the single bad game — sudden reluctance to go to practice, or persistent silence after mistakes, over a couple of weeks. Second, 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. Third, 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/