Most kids who love their sport keep loving it. But every parent of a competitive athlete has seen the other kind of kid, at least from the side. The one who used to run into the club and now walks in like somebody is forcing them. In fencing, it is the kid who used to beg for one more bout and now sits on the bench during open fencing with a phone in their hands.
Our first reaction as parents is to find an explanation, and we find plenty of them. They are tired, their school load is heavy this semester, and the parents’ favorite, it’s the age.
Sometimes this is exactly what it is, and in a month it passes. But sometimes it is the beginning of a mental crash, and if we miss the beginning, often there is nothing left to fix later.
Anyone who has been in fencing long enough, as a coach, an athlete or even a parent, has watched their share of talented, hardworking kids who broke mentally exactly when they were in the best physical and technical shape of their lives.
We don’t talk about this enough, as if it were a taboo. It’s bad for coaches’ business, it’s sad for the parents whose kids went through it, and the parents of current athletes, well, just hope it never happens to their kid. So instead we talk about medals, we analyze losses and bad tactical calls, we even discuss how a kid approached a bout mentally. But a mental crash is something parents whisper about after the kid has already quit, and somehow the lessons from that kid never reach the parents of the next one.
Unfortunately, it’s too late to help the burned-out athletes who already quit fencing, but I hope that parents whose kid is close to the edge will find this post helpful.
Every athlete has bad tournaments, bad months, and sometimes a whole season that goes completely wrong. In fencing you lose more than you win, regardless of your level, and the emotional swings come with it. Nobody comes to a competition wanting to lose, even when they know their pool bouts will be against much stronger (at least on paper) opponents. You never hear anybody say “My goal is to lose every bout today” when they are asked about their goals for the upcoming tournament. Still, losing is part of every fencer’s everyday life.
A mental crash is something else. This is when the inner engine that keeps an athlete going, the motivation and the ability to recover after a loss, simply stops working. The kid is not lazy and is not refusing to try harder. They can’t. You can give them the best pep talk in the world or change the whole tactical plan, and nothing moves, because the problem was never tactical, or technical, or physical. The kid is carrying more than they can carry. The kid has a mental crash.
It looks different in different kids. Some become anxious before competitions, and I don’t mean the normal nerves that help you focus. I mean real dread. Some become apathetic and go through practice with empty eyes. Some explode at referees, coaches, parents and themselves over things that never bothered them before. And some just go quiet. The kid who couldn’t stop talking about fencing doesn’t mention it anymore.
It is hard to catch because it almost never has one source. Usually several pressures pile on top of each other.
Fencing itself is demanding. Group classes, private lessons, conditioning, competitions most weekends, travel, equipment, video review. A serious competitive fencer basically has a part-time job on top of being a full-time student. This is the price of competing seriously, but it creates a constant background fatigue, and everything else lands on top of it.
And with the modern educational system and the reality of college admissions, there is brutal academic pressure on kids: AP classes, standardized tests, college applications, extracurriculars chosen because they look good on paper. I wrote before about the truancy letters we got because of fencing travel. Schools don’t bend for athletes, and this constant friction between sport and school creates stress that parents underestimate, because they are not the ones living inside it every day.
And of course, other kids’ success adds to this pressure. Who got the higher seed, who made the travel team, whose rating went up, how long it took them to go from U to E to D to C to B and to A, and whether they skipped a rating along the way. Who is in Elite and who is in Challenger. Social media makes it much worse. A kid loses their first DE in the morning event, and by lunch sees someone posting their win from the same competition. For a teenager who is still figuring out who they are, this comparison never switches off, even when the other kid is a close friend.
And then there is us, the parents. And I must tell you that parents are the biggest source of stress of all.
This is the hardest part to hear, and I am not an exception. No sports parent is. I learned the hard way not to analyze bouts in the car, and not to ask about results before I ask how they feel.
It starts innocently. We invest in our kids’ sports because we love them. We drive them to practice, pay for lessons, fly across the country for tournaments. All this investment creates expectations we never meant to create. We tell our kids there are no strings attached. They feel the strings anyway.
When your child walks off the strip after a loss, they look at you. They always look at you. Your face tells them how you took the result, whether you say a word or not. They have been reading your face since they were toddlers.
When our support starts to feel connected to results, even if we never say it out loud, it turns into pressure. The kid starts to feel they owe you for the lessons, the flights, the lost weekends. They fence for you and not for themselves anymore. From that moment, the countdown to a crash has started.
Some parents go further, not out of malice but out of love that went in the wrong direction. Coaching from behind the strip. Analyzing every bout on the drive home. Comparing their kid to other kids in the club. Making fencing the topic of every family dinner. The kid has nowhere to hide from it. There is no corner in their head that isn’t taken by the sport and by your feelings about the sport.
I recommend Andre Agassi’s Open to every fencing parent who will listen. Eight Grand Slam titles, and he hated most of it, in large part because of how he was pushed as a child. The book makes you ask yourself a number of uncomfortable questions about yourself as a sports parent, and there are no easy answers to them.
Agassi’s father never let up, and most of us are nothing like him. But we don’t have to be like him to do damage. A kid doesn’t need a tyrant at home to crash. A loving, involved, slightly too invested parent is often enough.
The good news is that a mental crash almost never comes without warning. Kids send signals long before they stop. We see most of these signals every week, in the car, at the dinner table, at the club, and we just not always know how to read them. In Part 2 I will go through these early signs and what you as a parent can do when you notice them. I will also talk about the moment that worries me most, when more training can’t fix anything anymore.
Image by Serge Timacheff
Thank you for writing this, it’s such an important topic and I agree with you completely.
As a coach I see it from the strip every day. Research on youth dropout shows the same thing you describe: around 70% of kids leave sports by age 13, and it’s rarely because they lack talent.
What the science adds is this: they leave when they lose enjoyment, autonomy and the feeling of belonging. This is Self-Determination Theory by Deci & Ryan. When a kid feels: 1) I choose to be here, 2) I’m improving, 3) I belong to this team, his motivation becomes intrinsic and he can handle losses, school pressure and bad tournaments.
When those 3 needs disappear, even a talented kid with supportive parents starts to shut down, not because he’s lazy, but because the sport stops being his.
That’s why in my practices I try to protect that: give them voice, celebrate small progress, and keep the club as a safe place where they want to come back.
Thank you again for opening this conversation, it helps all of us, parents and coaches, to do better.
Ruperto Gascón Carreño