History of Professional Sports in the U.S.
Between the years 1880 and 1899, sports in America, both amateur and professional sports, were becoming fashionable. The privileged embraced croquet, archery and tennis, while boxing, baseball and wrestling became the passion of the urban factory worker. Major League Baseball was the first professional league to be formed and remained the most popular for nearly a century. Boxing followed close behind. Many sports were male dominated until World War II when the first female professional baseball league was formed (Derks: 2009). Recently, that has changed with women’s sports gaining more coverage due the expansion of the media and the internet in the early 2000s. (Derks) Athletes, both male and female, put their bodies and more severely, their mental health at risk everyday they step onto the field. A lot of stressors go into being a collegiate or professional athlete. Many of these stressors to perform well and please audiences result in, stress, anxiety, depression, a sense of being overwhelmed, loss of passion, athletes also experience mental health challenges due to external triggers such as sexual assault and physical or verbal abuse. (Glick and Horsfall: 2009)
Gender Norms in Professional Sports
Gender norms and expectations play a significant role in how male and female athletes are expected to handle issues of mental health. Male athletes are expected to be tough, self-reliant, masculine, non-emotional, and are met with little to no support (Souter, Lewis, and Serrant: 2018). Walsh, Blom, Bolin, and Bowman(2021) focused on American Football players, a male dominated sport. They suggested that male athletes saw their competition as a battlefield (2021). They wanted to see how this stereotypically masculine competitive mindset affected men’s psychological well-being and life satisfaction. Their results found that as football players’ masculine and athletic identity grow, their life satisfaction and positive relationships decrease. This study is just an example as to how masculine norms can affect the mental health of male athletes.
Header Image Credit: A neutral human profile silhouette composed of the words “mental disorder” and various mental disorders by Paget Michael Creelman CC BY-SA 4.0
