How Do Team Sports Protect Mental Health in Adolescent Athletes?
Maria Blanes
University of the Balearic Islands (Spain)
To be part of a team
The importance of being part of a team is often underestimated. When an adolescent athlete joins a sports club at the start of a new season, they are committing to more than just regularly attending practices. They are choosing to become part of something greater than themselves: a team. And given that peer influence becomes increasingly significant during this stage of life, sports teams represent one of the most influential social groups for adolescent athletes (Vella et al., 2020).
Sport practice is a context for learning that goes beyond athletic development. Adolescents not only improve their physical health and sport abilities, but also develop essential life skills, such as learning to work collaboratively within a team to achieve a goal, solving problems, and communicating effectively with others (Mossman et al., 2021). Moreover, sports teams contribute to the development of social identity (Bruner et al., 2017). When an athlete feels a strong sense of belonging, it becomes not just a team, but their team. With its many positive effects, sport programs as a universal prevention strategy have shown significant benefits for mental health (Simpson et al., 2024). Specifically, they have been associated with reductions in symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as increases in well-being and self-esteem (Eime et al., 2013).
The key question: What makes team sports a protective factor for mental health in adolescent athletes?
Participating in a team sport has been recognized as more beneficial for mental health than engaging in an individual sport (Andersen et al., 2018). Due to the social nature of sports, this enhanced protective effect is believed to result from the peer support that occurs within team environments.
Imagine you are playing the final minutes of a crucial basketball match. Your body is exhausted, but you keep pushing, the score is tied. Today’s match is decisive. Adrenaline is surging, but so are the expectations and pressure.
One last chance to win.
Someone passes you the ball.
You take a deep breath.
You aim for the basket.
You shoot.
You hold your breath.
You miss.
The team loses the match.
As soon as the game ends, your teammates walk over to you. Although they are also disappointed by the result, they hug you. They comfort you. They remind you that it’s okay to miss a shot, and they tell you they trust you and value you.
Teammates have the power to regulate one another’s emotional and psychological states, for example, by helping manage negative emotions and cope with failure after a lost match (Reardon & Hitchcock, 2024). But now imagine a very different ending. Imagine your teammates do not comfort you but instead ignore you or make hurtful comments. How would this affect your emotional well-being? This contrast highlights the critical role of social interactions, particularly those with their closest social environment such as teammates, in shaping adolescent athlete’s mental health. In this regard, a focus on team dynamics (e.g., team cohesion, team climate, role clarity) have been proposed as key factors that mediate the influence of sport participation on mental health (Vella et al., 2020). However, the specific mechanisms through which these dynamics operate within teams to impact adolescent athletes’ mental health remain underexplored.
Our line of research
Our line of research, led by Prof. Joan Pons, focuses on promoting positive mental health through sports teams. Starting from the premise that adolescence is a vulnerable period in which half of all mental disorders have their onset (WHO, 2024), many institutional bodies (e.g., Horizon Europe, Spanish State Research Plan 2024-2027) have emphasized on the importance of identifying protective factors during this critical stage of development.
Given that team sports are associated with multiple benefits (physical, psychological, social), we have focused on the protective role of team sports. Since our findings have shown that demographic characteristics (i.e., competition level, sport category, age) do not account for differences in adolescents’ mental health, our research shifts attention to the role of team dynamics, the interpersonal processes and interactions that occur within a team, as potential explanatory factors.
Team dynamics have long been studied in relation to athletic performance. Although they have also been associated with positive outcomes such as commitment and sport satisfaction (Tamminen et al., 2016), their relationship with mental health has yet to be explored in depth.
In our current project “The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: Promoting Positive Mental Health Through Sports Teams”, we have collected data from more than 2,000 Spanish adolescent athletes across five autonomous communities, all of whom compete in team sports. We assessed well-established team dynamics, such as team cohesion and team climate. However, our research placed particular emphasis on interpersonal emotion regulation, that is, the intentional attempts between members to intensify, reduce, or maintain current emotions, both positive and negative (Niven, 2017). Taking these interactions into account, we mapped all self-reported, habitual positive and negative emotion regulation efforts aimed at influencing teammates’ emotional states within the 225 sports teams assessed, using Social Network Analysis. In addition, we also evaluated the perceived team environment and both individual and collective sense of group unity. We then examined the influence of all these interactions on adolescent athletes’ mental health.
Our results revealed significant effects of all assessed team dynamics on mental health. More specifically, we observed that athletes who are highly attracted to the group (i.e., high cohesion), who rarely engage in negative emotion regulation exchanges (i.e., low negative emotional regulation), and who belong to teams that are strongly orientated towards task-related goals and values such as effort and learning (i.e., task climate), tend to report better mental health outcomes. These findings are currently being developed into a series of scientific publications aimed at advancing research in the field of youth mental health and team-based interventions.
Conclusions
Sports teams represent a valuable and underutilized resource in the filed of mental health prevention. Sport practice offers a valuable context for adolescents not only to acquire essential life skills and foster personal and social development, but also to safeguard their mental health.
Intervening at the team level is not only effective but also cost-efficient compared to individualized approaches. Moroever, it enables the implementation of mental health prevention strategies at a community level, while engaging diverse stakeholders to build an integrated and sustainable support system.
With our ongoing results, we aim to contribute to the promotion of mental health among adolescent athletes and to support the development of future preventive interventions.
Preparing for the next EUSPR Conference (September 23-26, 2025 in Berlin)
Are you planning to participate in the next EUSPR Conference? If so, do you intend to present further details about your work?
Yes! My team and I will be presenting a methodological symposium at the next EUSPR Conference, focusing on Social Network Analysis and its application in our research on interpersonal emotion regulation within sports teams. We’ll be sharing insights from our current project and discussing the value of network-based approaches in prevention research. Our symposium is titled: Advancing Prevention Science Through Social Network Analysis: From Theory to Practice
Is there anything specific you’re looking forward to at this year’s conference?
I’m especially looking forward to connecting with other Early Career researchers and exploring the beautiful city of Berlin!
About the author
Maria Blanes is a Psychology graduate student at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain). She is a research collaborator on the AKO project, which explores the role of team sports as a preventive factor for mental health. As part of her undergraduate curricular internship, she also contributed to the development of a school-based intervention aimed at preventing suicide among secondary school students.
Maria volunteers as Blog Editor-in-Chief for the EC Forum, and she is always eager to learn and contribute to initiatives that promote well-being in adolescence.
You can contact her at m.blanes1[at]estudiant.uib.cat for any enquiries
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
EUSPR Early Careers Forum (July 21, 2025). How Do Team Sports Protect Mental Health in Adolescent Athletes? Preventing disease and ill health. Retrieved May 19, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14eah


