Resilience & coping in collegiate athletes during the COVID-19 pandemic: A pilot study

Abstract

Background

Compared to their non-athlete peers, collegiate athletes undergo stressors from both university and sport environments. Unique to collegiate athletes, these stressors often overlap, causing greater opportunities for distress with the COVID-19 pandemic deepening discomfort and uncertainty. Assessing resilience and coping skills during the COVID-19 pandemic could improve future collegiate programs’ abilities to boost athletes’ capacity to withstand these challenges.

Objective

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the presence of coping and resilience and to determine the relationship between different types of coping and resilience in collegiate athletes.

Methods

Division 1 collegiate athletes (N = 56) completed online questionnaires including demographic information, the Connor Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), and the Brief COPE.

Results

Higher resilience scores were associated with using higher levels of active coping and acceptance (p < 0.01), and lower levels of behavioral disengagement (p < 0.05). Athlete resilience was predicted by older age and higher use of active/adaptive coping skills, accounting for 42.2% of the variance (R² = 0.4224. p = 0.0000).

Conclusions

This research extends previous research on the relationship between resilience and coping in high performance populations (e.g., U.S. military) supporting the association of increased use of adaptive coping skills with higher resilience. Age was also found to be a significant predictor of resilience in this collegiate athlete population, suggesting noteworthy growth in capacity for change over each year in the athlete experience competing for their university. Future programming should utilize these findings in collegiate athlete training to boost athlete resilience.