The Coaching We Carry: Supporting Sports Coach Wellbeing

Written in partnership with Casper Farrimond, HCPC Registered Sport & Exercise Psychologist.

Sports coach wellbeing can be overlooked when the focus is on what coaches give to athletes: their knowledge, time, feedback and emotional support. These contributions help create environments where athletes can develop and perform.

Less attention is given to what coaches carry away from those environments. Coaches witness injury, deselection, disappointment, conflict and uncertainty about an athlete’s future, while managing their own performance expectations and responsibilities.

Supporting athletes through these experiences can be rewarding. It can also be emotionally demanding. This article explores what coaches carry, how those demands can accumulate and how reflection, boundaries, recovery and self-compassion can support more sustainable coaching.

Coaches Experience the Athlete Journey Too

Coaches rarely observe an athlete's journey from a distance. They invest significant time in understanding their athletes, developing relationships and helping them pursue goals that may have taken years to achieve. When those goals are threatened, coaches can experience the situation alongside the athlete.

Research increasingly recognises the emotional demands involved in coaching. Coaches are regularly required to manage their own emotional responses while simultaneously influencing the emotions of the athletes around them. They may feel frustrated but need to remain composed, experience disappointment while providing reassurance or feel personally affected by an athlete's situation while continuing to lead the wider group.

Athletes may also turn to coaches when difficulties extend beyond performance.

Conversations can involve relationships, family circumstances, identity, mental health or uncertainty about life outside sport. Being trusted in these moments can be an important part of the coach-athlete relationship, but repeatedly supporting other people's difficult experiences can leave something behind.

The conversation might finish. Training might continue. The emotional experience does not always disappear with it.

The Responsibility of Helping Someone Reach Their Potential

Coaching carries considerable responsibility. Decisions about selection, playing time, feedback and development opportunities can influence both an athlete's performance and their wider sporting experience. Coaches who care deeply about their athletes can therefore place considerable pressure on themselves to make the right decisions.

This responsibility can gradually become difficult to switch off. Coaches may replay conversations after training, question whether they could have done more or feel personally responsible for solving problems that are not entirely within their control. The desire to support athletes can also make boundaries difficult, particularly when being available is interpreted as evidence of being a caring coach.

Research into coach burnout suggests that these relational and organisational demands can accumulate over time. Burnout is rarely the result of one difficult training session or competition. Instead, persistent responsibility, emotional labour, workload and performance pressure can gradually reduce the psychological resources available to the coach.

Caring deeply is an important coaching strength. Sustainable coaching requires recognising that caring for somebody does not mean carrying everything for them.

The Harshness of Coaching

Sport can also be an unforgiving environment for coaches. Their work is frequently evaluated through results, athlete performances and decisions that other people may disagree with. A coach can prepare thoroughly, communicate effectively and create a strong environment, yet still experience disappointing outcomes.

Coaches also have to make decisions that will hurt people they care about. Selecting one athlete can mean disappointing another. Changing someone's role may benefit the team while being difficult for the individual. Honest feedback can be necessary while still being uncomfortable to deliver. These moments are part of coaching, but knowing a decision is necessary does not remove its emotional impact.

Repeated exposure to criticism and uncertainty can also encourage coaches to become increasingly harsh with themselves. Reflection can shift from "What can I learn from this?" towards "How did I get this wrong?" High standards remain important, but persistent self-criticism can make it harder to maintain perspective and respond constructively when things do not go to plan.

The challenge is therefore not to become unaffected by coaching. It is to develop ways of experiencing difficult moments without allowing every outcome to become a judgement of your competence or worth as a coach.

Self-Care Is Part of Coaching Competence

Coach self-care can sometimes be viewed as something separate from performance. In reality, the ability to coach effectively depends upon many of the same psychological resources that coaches encourage athletes to protect.

Coaching requires attention, patience, decision-making, emotional regulation and perspective-taking. When coaches become physically exhausted or emotionally overloaded, these resources can become harder to access. Research examining coach wellbeing has associated chronic stress and burnout with poorer psychological wellbeing, reduced coaching effectiveness and difficulties within coach-athlete relationships.

This makes performance self-care part of coaching competence. Recovery is not simply about feeling better after a difficult day. It is about maintaining the psychological capacity required to return and coach effectively again.

Research exploring rest in coaches suggests that meaningful recovery involves more than sleep. Coaches also need opportunities to stop thinking about coaching, reduce effortful thinking and reconnect with parts of life that exist outside their professional role. Social support appears equally important, with supportive relationships associated with lower stress and burnout and greater wellbeing among coaches.

Protecting recovery therefore does not mean caring less about athletes. It helps protect your capacity to continue caring well.

Notice What You Are Carrying

Coaches become accustomed to checking how their athletes are coping. Developing the same awareness of themselves can help prevent experiences from quietly accumulating.

After a demanding training session, competition or athlete conversation, it can be useful to consider:

What am I still carrying from today?

What is within my responsibility and what belongs to somebody else?

What do I need before I coach again?

The response will not always require an intervention. Sometimes recognising that frustration, disappointment or emotional fatigue is present can create enough distance to prevent it travelling into the next conversation or training session.

For more significant experiences, coaches may benefit from having somewhere to take what they are carrying. Trusted colleagues, mentors, psychologists and reflective supervision can provide spaces where coaches do not have to lead, solve the problem or have the answer. Social support is consistently identified within research as an important resource for protecting coach wellbeing.

Respond to Yourself Like Someone You Coach

Coaches frequently encourage athletes to respond constructively to mistakes while holding themselves to a much harsher standard.

Self-compassion provides an alternative without removing accountability. Emerging research with high-performance coaches suggests that self-compassion may provide some protection against burnout, while mindfulness may support greater psychological wellbeing.

A compassionate response does not mean ignoring a poor decision. It means creating enough psychological space to understand it properly. What happened? What influenced the decision? What was within your control? What can be learned? What would you choose differently next time?

Accountability remains, but unnecessary self-punishment does not have to accompany it.

This distinction matters because effective reflection requires curiosity. Coaches are more likely to learn from difficult experiences when they can examine them honestly rather than immediately using them as evidence that they are not good enough.

Final Thoughts

Coaches carry more than tactics, training plans and performance decisions. They carry relationships, responsibility, difficult conversations and sometimes parts of the experiences athletes have trusted them enough to share.

That emotional investment is not a weakness. In many cases, it reflects how deeply coaches care about the people they support. However, sustainable coaching requires recognising that this care also consumes psychological resources.

Developing awareness of what you are carrying, protecting recovery, maintaining boundaries, accessing supportive relationships and responding compassionately to your own difficult moments can help preserve the capacity required to coach effectively over time.

Perhaps sustainable coaching is not about becoming better at carrying everything. It is about recognising what needs to be carried, what can be put down and when you might need somebody else to help you hold it.

At bMindful Sport Psychology, we work alongside coaches to develop psychologically informed approaches to both performance and wellbeing. Through reflective support, performance self-care and compassionate coaching practices, we help coaches develop the psychological capacity to support others while sustaining their own performance and longevity within coaching.

Get in touch to find out how we can support you, your athlete or your team.

At bMindful, we work alongside athletes, coaches and organisations to integrate evidence-informed sport psychology into everyday practice.

Our aim is to help create environments where psychological development sits alongside technical, tactical and physical preparation, enabling athletes to perform, develop and thrive throughout their sporting journey.

If you would like to explore how a psychologically informed approach could support your athletes or coaching environment, we’d be pleased to start a conversation.

Call 0161 510 0111 or email enquiries@bmindfulpsychology.co.uk 

Find out more about bMindful Sports Psychology.

This article is written in partnership with Casper Farrimond.

Casper Farrimond is an HCPC-registered Sport and Exercise Psychologist who is trusted to support athletes, coaches and teams competing at the highest international level. Alongside leading the BSc Psychology with Applications in Sport and Exercise at the University of Greater Manchester, he has contributed to international championship campaigns, national performance programmes and coach development initiatives across a range of sports. His research explores how coaching environments shape optimism, and long-term athlete development, helping translate evidence into practical strategies for performance and wellbeing.