Sports neuroscientist and Levelling the Playing Field researcher, Morgan Mitchell, offers tips for looking after participants' mental health as they return to sport participation following the easing of Covid-19 restrictions.

With more and more children and young people returning to their usual sports and physical activities, after and among an incredibly turbulent time for sport, now more than ever we have to consider how to allow young people to re-engage positively.

Children and young people are only able to engage and thrive when they feel safe. Here are some tips to creating a psychologically safe environment that will bring the best out of your participants:

Be transparent – the brain has the incredible ability to predict a range of different types of information, which it then feeds into various related regions to inform how the body responds in similar situations. As a result, when key pieces of information are missing, the brain has the capacity to fill in its own blanks and create a plausible but not necessarily accurate narrative. As coaches of athletes and amateur players, it is important to be clear about any unknowns or uncertainties regarding changes to guidelines or expectations of your sport, team, competitions etc. This will help stop your participants’ brains running wild with predictions about the worst case scenario and keep them focused on the task at hand.

Connect and collaborate – throughout times of uncertainty, it is important to cultivate genuine connection with your athletes. In doing so, you’ll be able to work in tandem with the brain’s natural motivation systems (governed by the neurotransmitter dopamine). The feelings of psychological safety and motivation experienced by athletes and sport participants are not static; it’s normal that they would see some fluctuation – and this is what you should expect to work with. It will therefore be crucial to create a check-in system with your players. This check-in system should be able to assess both how your players are feeling when they turn up to training and games, and how you’re meeting their needs (being open to how you could be doing things differently or being better at supporting them where they’re at). Connecting and collaborating could also mean acknowledging your players' individual feelings, offering meaningful choices that tap into their individual and team-focused goals and nurturing your players’ interests (sporting and otherwise!)

Mind your language – as a coach, it is important to recognise that the language you use with your athletes will influence how they respond to you and the possibility of rapidly changing situations. Using phrases like “I’m wondering”, “I’m interested to know why”, “I’ve noticed that”, “I’m guessing” or “I’m sensing” helps re-frame what you experience as challenging behaviour in your players when responding to difficult or challenging situations (performance-related or otherwise) so that you are able to see their distressed behaviour. This will help your participants feel that their struggles are seen, as well as their distress and psychological safety valued. Ultimately, this should lead to you being able to resolve on-field issues quicker.

Strike a balance between responsibility and accountability – creating psychological safety for the return to sport in a rapidly changing and uncertain world requires you as a coach to create an environment where players and staff are kept accountable for their actions and act responsibly. This will help create an environment with some degree of certainty – they know what they can expect from their coaches and team-mates, week in week out. Encouraging and cultivating the principles of responsibility and accountability in your team or club alongside your developing players will help to avoid establishing a “blame culture”. This means when conflict arises it can be managed without escalation, which often leads to player and participant disengagement, which then leads to disengagement from performance-related goals, especially those shared by the team. Fostering a team-focused accountability culture could look like co-creating a “team charter” that outlines the expectations for the upcoming season or block of training sessions, including some basic guidelines that all players and staff sign up to. That way, everyone knows what’s expected of them, when they may be veering away from the mutual agreement they subscribed to and what implications this could have for team success toward shared goals (and ultimately, more fun!)

Morgan Mitchell is a Research Fellow on the University of Birmingham's Monitoring & Evaluation team. Read more of her thoughts on her blog.