The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women’s Sports—from the Schoolyard to the Stadium

Family therapists Steele and Brown debut with an empathetic guide to supporting female athletes at the high school and college levels. Illustrating the psychological challenges athletes face on and off the field, the authors describe how a college soccer player became clinically depressed after tearing her hamstring and watching “her team grow and thrive without her.” Opining on how parents can help their daughters through such hardships, Steele and Brown recommend making it clear that one’s love is not contingent upon athletic performance and refraining from pushing children to continue a sport if they no longer enjoy it. Suggestions for coaches can feel obvious (don’t “use personal attacks, belittling, or degradation to ‘motivate’”; focus “on sport-specific corrections, avoiding critiques about personality or appearance”), but the anecdotes make clear that such abusive practices remain common. (A 2021 exposé on the University of Oregon track-and-field team revealed that one coach would measure body fat with calipers to shame runners into losing weight, leading some to develop eating disorders.) Such stories outrage, and the advice on how to do better by female athletes is well-considered. This should be required reading for parents and coaches. Agent: Susan Canavan, Waxman Literary. (June)