Resilience in youth football players
Resilience in youth football players
Stress is part of everyday life. Whether it comes from work, studies, family responsibilities, or major events such as a pandemic, stress triggers physical and mental responses that require recovery. The same is true in elite sport. This PhD thesis of Jurriaan Brauers focuses on resilience: the dynamic process through which athletes experience stress, recover, and adapt.
During this project, professional youth football players were followed across multiple seasons to study how different stressors, including training load, daily life demands, and injuries, interact with recovery processes. The findings show that resilience is not a fixed personal trait, but a highly individual and time-dependent process.
We found that stressors outside the football field, such as work or education, are relevant for understanding injury risk, although simple cause–effect relationships are often absent. A meta-analysis further revealed that the commonly assumed strong link between training load and responses such as fatigue or muscle soreness is, on average, weaker than expected.
We also identified changes in mood and self-confidence as potential early warning signals for health problems. When players sustained injuries, recovery trajectories varied widely: physical recovery sometimes preceded psychological recovery, and sometimes the opposite occurred. Finally, we validated a Dutch stress–recovery questionnaire for use in sport and performance contexts.
This dissertation offers new possibilities for continuously and individually monitoring resilience. A personalized approach is therefore important. These insights are valuable for athletes and coaches, but also for anyone who wants to better understand how people deal with stress, both on and off the field.