The COVID-19 pandemic has been harmful to kids’ mental health, but participation in sports has mitigated some of that harm. While the physical and mental health benefits of sports are fairly well known, recent research sheds light on how sports have helped kids’ mental health during the pandemic — and it underscores the importance of making a wide variety of sports easily accessible to kids.
Simply expanding opportunities for youth to play sports may protect and improve mental health, but sports programs that go a step further and address mental health, either directly or indirectly, may be even more helpful to youth who are struggling.
The Pandemic and Mental Health
The pandemic has been difficult for kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 42% of high school students reported that in 2021, they felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks that they stopped doing their usual activities. The report was released in February. And the problem is worse for girls: 57% of girls were persistently sad and hopeless — the highest level reported over the past decade — compared with 29% of boys, the CDC reported. Thirty percent of girls and 14% of boys seriously considered attempting suicide during the past year.
The Women’s Sports Foundation’s report “The Healing Power of Sport: COVID-19 and Girls’ Participation, Health and Achievements” found that the pandemic had widespread harmful effects on kids’ physical and mental health and well-being, but that sports protected kids from some of that harm.
The report found that youth who played sports had higher levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and social support — and lower levels of depression, loneliness, self-derogation, and fatalism — than their peers who didn’t participate in sport. (Self-derogation refers to the tendency to think and speak poorly of oneself, and fatalism involves expecting that things will turn out badly). The report used data from the 2019, 2020, and 2021 Monitoring the Future study of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders. For depression in particular, the Healing Power of Sport report found that 12th-graders’ depression increased from 2019 to 2021, and those who participated in sports during 2021 had lower levels of depression than their peers who did not.
Sports participation declined for both boys and girls during this period, but declines were particularly steep among Hispanic and Black youth, youth in urban areas, and 12th graders. The report noted that “12th-grade girls experienced significantly greater declines in participation than any other group examined, with participation rates dropping by an alarming 17 percentage points (66.4% to 49.4%).”
Renata Simril pays close attention to such numbers as president and CEO of the LA84 Foundation, which supports Southern California youth sports organizations and works to level the playing field so that sports are accessible to all children. She says the foundation’s most recent youth sports survey revealed that girls have been returning to sports participation more slowly than boys. “We’re unpacking that to understand why that is the case. I’m curious if it’s perhaps tied to the CDC report that mental illness and stress is affecting girls much more than it’s affecting boys,” she says.
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