Burnout in Young Athletes – Why Many Kids Quit Sports

This fall, my youngest daughter started high school. We’ve looked forward to watching her play basketball in high school ever since her team started in the 4th grade. This is what all her work had been leading up to, so it was quite a shock when she told us that she wanted to hang up her jersey and quit the sport of basketball for good.

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We hoped she would change her mind and had some long talks to see if we could figure out why she wanted to quit. I didn’t want her to quit out of fear of failure or the unknown. If she loved the game, I wanted to help her overcome any concerns she may have had. Turns out, her concerns were not fears, or a missed opportunity (as ours were), but how her parents and friends might handle her decision.

Apparently, she stopped loving basketball more than a year ago, but had kept up to please everyone else. This was a tough pill to swallow, knowing that our daughter was not having fun anymore – just afraid of disappointing us. I wanted her to be happy above all else, so of course I supported her decision to quit. And then I wondered, how often does this happen?