If your teenager plays a sport at a high level, you’ve probably felt a strange kind of stress. It shows up in your own chest when they miss a shot. It shows up when a coach doesn’t call back, or when a scholarship offer doesn’t come through. On this week’s episode of Kids These Days, I talked with Dr. Megan Cannon about what’s actually happening for high school athletes right now. Dr. Megan is a licensed psychologist specializing in sport and performance psychologist and the founder of MVP Mindset Sport & Performance Psychology. We talked about what parents can do to support their athlete without becoming another source of pressure.
Dr. Megan spent years as a competitive swimmer, softball player, and dancer before training as a clinical psychologist. That combination shapes how she works with the teen, college, and professional athletes in her practice. What struck me most in our conversation wasn’t the performance-enhancement side of her work. It was how often the conversation came back to a much simpler question: who is this kid when the sport is taken away?
When "Athlete" Becomes the Whole Identity
High school is already a season of trying on identities — the musician, the student, the friend, the athlete. Dr. Megan described what happens when sport swallows all the others. She’s had teenagers tell her, without hesitation, that they don’t do anything outside of their sport. That’s not because they’re lazy or uninterested. The schedule and culture around competitive athletics simply don’t leave room for much else.
That becomes dangerous in a specific way. Sport comes with a long list of things a teenager can’t control — playing time, a coach’s decisions, an opponent’s performance, even their own body on a given day. When a kid’s entire sense of worth gets tied to that unpredictable system, a bad game stops being a bad game. It starts to feel like a referendum on who they are.
A Story That Stuck With Me
Dr. Megan shared a story about a college athlete sidelined by injury. He told her the hardest part wasn’t the pain. It was watching his team keep playing without him and realizing, for the first time, that they could.
The fix isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t easy. Dr. Megan encourages families to help teens build other “identity bubbles” — a job, a hobby, a hiking habit, an instrument, anything unrelated to their sport. These bubbles give a teenager something to stand on when the season goes sideways. They also offer protection if an injury or a coaching change ends the sport altogether.
Healthy Drive vs. Performance-Based Self-Worth
Not every intensely dedicated athlete is in trouble. Some kids genuinely love the grind — the early practices, the repetition, the challenge. That internal drive looks different from a kid whose mood, grades, and sense of self are unraveling under pressure. Dr. Megan watches for the emotional pattern underneath the schedule: persistent irritability, a short fuse, a kid who’s white-knuckling their way through a season instead of wanting to be there.
Her recommended antidote is simple. Build in regular time together that has nothing to do with the sport. Try a Sunday cooking project, a hike, or learning an instrument as a family. These moments do double duty. They give a teenager practice existing outside their athletic identity, and they give the whole family something else to talk about besides the last game.
What Burnout Actually Looks Like
Burnout in a teen athlete isn’t the same as being tired after a long week. Dr. Megan described it as a persistent shift. A kid who used to love practice starts to dread it. Motivation drains out of something they once organized their whole life around. This shift doesn’t happen overnight, and people often mistake it for laziness or an attitude problem. The real tell is the “used to” — something they cared about deeply has quietly become something they just endure.
When that shift shows up, Dr. Megan takes it seriously rather than pushing through it. That doesn’t always mean quitting entirely. Sometimes it means finishing out a season commitment and then genuinely reevaluating. Other times it means turning down the volume on a sport’s intensity instead of eliminating it. The real goal is to help a teenager figure out whether they want to step back because the sport got hard, or because it’s genuinely run its course. Those are very different conversations.
The New Reality of College Recruiting
Recruiting puts sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds on the phone with adult coaches. That’s a genuinely unfamiliar power dynamic. Dr. Megan pointed out that many of these teenagers have never even had a phone conversation of that kind before. Parents can help enormously here, but the most helpful role isn’t the one many parents default to.
Dr. Megan’s framing: act as support staff, not the agent. That might mean taking notes during a call so a nervous teenager can focus on the conversation. It might mean simply asking what would help right now — listening, problem-solving, or just showing up.
How Parents Can Stay Involved Without Adding Pressure
The recruiting process puts sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds on the phone with adult coaches, negotiating a genuinely unfamiliar power dynamic — many of them, as Dr. Megan pointed out, have never even had a phone conversation of that kind before. Parents can help enormously here, but the role that helps most isn’t the one many parents default to.
Her framing is to act as support staff, not the agent. That might mean taking notes during a call so a nervous teenager can just focus on the conversation, or simply asking what would be useful right now — listening, problem-solving, or just being present. It also means checking in with yourself about whose dream is actually driving the process. A parent’s own hopes for a certain school or level of competition can quietly override what a teenager actually wants, and Dr. Megan encourages families to make space for a kid’s evolving preferences, even when they don’t match the original plan.
Whose Dream is it?
This role also means checking in with yourself about whose dream is actually driving the process. A parent’s own hopes for a certain school or level of competition can quietly override what a teenager actually wants. Dr. Megan encourages families to make space for a kid’s evolving preferences, even when they don’t match the original plan.
Supporting a Teen Through Injury or a Pivot
When an injury or a hard decision ends a season or a career, Dr. Megan’s guidance is to let the loss be a real loss. That applies to the athlete and to the parents who built years of routines, friendships, and identity around that sport. Rushing to solutions or reassurance can minimize what’s actually a significant grief process. Sitting with a teenager in that disappointment, without immediately trying to fix it, tends to help more than any pep talk.
Dr. Megan also flagged something families easily miss: the mental comeback often lags behind the physical one. A doctor might clear a teenager to play, but their brain doesn’t always follow along that quickly. A cleared athlete may still feel tense or anxious about getting hurt again, and that tension itself can raise the risk of another injury. This is part of why working with a sport psychologist during a comeback can matter so much.
If you’re wondering whether your family could use that kind of support, Dr. Megan’s answer was simple: there’s really never a bad time. A sport psychologist can help with proactive skill-building before a transition to college athletics, with navigating an injury, or with working through recruiting stress. Either way, teenagers walk away with tools that serve them well beyond their playing days.
If this conversation resonated with you, you can hear the full episode with Dr. Megan Cannon of MVP Mindset Sport & Performance Psychology wherever you listen to podcasts. And if your family could use extra support navigating the pressures of youth or teen athletics, our team at Integrated Behavioral Health in Denver is here to help.
- Dr. Megan Cannon / MVP Mindset Sport & Performance Psychology: mvpmindsetsportpsychology.com
- Dr. Megan Cannon on Instagram: @drmegancannon
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