“You're made to feel like you're the crazy one”: an interpretive description of former college student-athletes’ views of emotional abuse
Open accessAbstract
Many normalized coaching behaviors are often abusive yet are seen by coaches and athletes as instrumental in achievement and competition. The current study was designed to extend past research and theory by subjectively exploring how and why former intercollegiate athletes identified their head coach as emotionally abusive. Twenty former intercollegiate student-athletes (Mage = 26.0 years) from nine sports participated in semi-structured interviews ranging from 65 to 189 min (M = 105.8, SD = 58). Interpretive description methodology was used with reflexive thematic analysis to generate a coherent conceptual description of the themes and shared experiences that characterized emotionally abusive coaching. The themes that associated with an athlete labeling a coach as emotionally abusive fall under two aspects of Stirling and Kerr's 2008 definition: non-contact coach behaviors and the resulting harmful outcomes experienced by the athletes. Non-contact behaviors were ones that diminished performance, neglected holistic development, and were inconsistent. The harmful effects were the negative emotional responses and dehumanization experienced by athletes. Finally, participants felt that a coach's desire for power and control over athletes explained the coach's behaviors generally. Based on these results, we put forth the conceptual claim that emotional abuse, and psychological violence more broadly, cannot be defined or identified based solely on the perpetrator's behaviors. The athlete's cognitions, perceptions, emotions, and behaviors are critical in determining whether emotional abuse occurred, and these interpretations are shaped by an athlete's existing relationship with the coach.
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Division I college sport has time constraints and conformity, where athletes are expected to forgo non-sport elements to maintain uniformity and dedication to the team.
“This is particularly impactful given the presence of time constraints and conformity within Division I college sport where athletes are expected to forgo non-sport elements to maintain uniformity and dedication to the team (Adams et al.,2024).”
From “It’s Not Just About Competition – It’s Ceremony”: Introducing the Embedded Indigeneity Framework for Understanding Identity, Mission, and Practice in TCU and NASNTI Athletics (2026) · cites this paper as Adams et al.,2024
The Introduction (page unavailable) describes a large time commitment in intercollegiate sport, and Results > Coach demonstration of power and control (page unavailable) records a participant being barred from going home or using social media during the season. These passages support time constraints and an example of restrictions on life outside sport, but they do not establish a general Division I expectation that athletes forgo non-sport activities for team uniformity and dedication; the study discusses athletes across competitive divisions. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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- Authors
- Adams, K. V., Alexander, K. N., & Dorsch, T. E.
- Affiliations
- Utah State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Adams, Kat V.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Sports and Active Living
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2024-10-28
- Volume
- 6
- Pages
- 1428682-1428682
- ISSN
- 2624-9367 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC11550930
- OpenAlex
- W4403806631
- Cited by
- 7
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 5.46
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Sport Psychology and Performance
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Sexual Assault and Victimization Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child Abuse and Trauma
- Keywords
- emotional abuse, coaching, psychological violence, head coaches, athlete perceptions, coach-athlete relationship, power and control, dehumanization, athlete development, college athletics
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