College coaches are often expected to be the steady people in the room.
They set standards. They manage practices. They recruit. They make difficult decisions. They respond to losses. They communicate with athletes and families. Increasingly, they are also expected to recognize when a student-athlete may be struggling and help connect that person with appropriate mental-health support.
What receives less attention is what happens when the coach is struggling too.
New research appearing in the August 2026 issue of the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching puts that question directly into focus. Ye Hoon Lee, affiliated with Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and the University of Houston, studied 235 NCAA head coaches across Divisions I, II and III to examine stress mindset, resilience, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction.
The study found that a more positive view of stress was associated with higher resilience, and resilience was strongly associated with fewer depressive symptoms and greater life satisfaction. The findings are useful—but they can also be misunderstood.
They do not mean coaches should simply learn to think positively about unreasonable demands.
They do not prove that resilience prevents depression.
And they certainly do not mean that struggling coaches are failing to be resilient enough.
The study was cross-sectional, meaning it measured relationships at one point in time and cannot establish that one factor caused another.
For coaches, athletic departments, athletes, and families, the more useful message is this:
Resilience can help people respond to pressure. It should not become an excuse to leave the pressure itself unexamined.
Coaching College Sports Involves Chronic Stress
The August study begins from an important premise: college coaching involves chronic exposure to stress.
That pressure comes from more than competition.
A coach can simultaneously be responsible for recruiting, athlete development, practice planning, competition, travel, staff management, communication with administrators, compliance responsibilities, roster decisions, and the emotional needs of athletes.
Depending on the program and division, financial uncertainty and staffing limitations may add another layer.
The modern college-sports environment has also changed rapidly.
Transfer rules, roster management, athlete compensation, conference realignment, changing budgets, and evolving expectations around athlete welfare have all altered the work surrounding competition.
Coaches are expected to adapt while continuing to produce results.
That makes “handle stress better” an incomplete response.
The New Study Looked At 235 NCAA Head Coaches
Lee’s research included 235 head coaches from NCAA Divisions I, II and III.
Participants completed measures examining stress mindset, resilience, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction.
A stress mindset refers broadly to beliefs about what stress does to a person.
Someone may tend to view stress as primarily debilitating, for example, or recognize that certain stressful situations can sometimes produce adaptation, learning, motivation, or growth.
The study found that a positive stress mindset was associated with greater resilience. Greater resilience, in turn, was strongly associated with lower depressive symptoms and higher life satisfaction.
Mediation analyses also found significant indirect associations between positive stress mindsets and psychological outcomes through resilience.
That makes resilience relevant.
It does not make it magical.
Because the research was cross-sectional, we cannot conclude that teaching a coach to think differently about stress will cause depressive symptoms to decrease.
Nor can the findings tell us that coaches experiencing significant psychological distress simply need a different mindset.
Association is not treatment.
Resilience Does Not Mean Stress Is Good
This distinction matters because sports culture can turn useful psychological concepts into slogans.
Stress can sometimes accompany meaningful challenges.
A championship game is stressful.
A difficult conversation with an athlete can be stressful.
Learning a new role can be stressful.
Taking responsibility for an important decision can be stressful.
It would be unrealistic to build a coaching career around eliminating every uncomfortable experience.
But that does not mean all stress should be embraced.
There is a meaningful difference between the temporary stress of an important competition and months of inadequate sleep, job insecurity, unreasonable workloads, understaffing, harassment, discrimination, or constant fear of being fired.
Calling both situations “opportunities to build resilience” can hide important differences.
A person can develop better coping skills while the environment around them remains unsustainable.
NCAA Data Already Showed Coaches Were Struggling
The new research builds on an issue the NCAA has documented before.
The NCAA Coach Well-Being Study, conducted in spring 2022 and released in 2023, collected responses from more than 6,000 coaches across all three NCAA divisions. NCAA coach well-being research examined coaches’ own well-being alongside their growing responsibilities around student-athlete mental health.
The results were substantial.
Approximately 40% of head coaches reported feeling mentally exhausted constantly or most every day. Among assistant and associate coaches, the figure was 36%.
About 37% of head coaches reported feeling overwhelmed by everything they had to do that frequently, while 34% reported frequent sleep difficulties.
Younger coaches reported particularly high levels of mental exhaustion. The NCAA reported rates of 46% among millennials and 44% among Gen Z coaches, compared with 34% among Gen X coaches and 19% among baby boomers.
These figures came from the pandemic-era coaching environment and should not automatically be treated as estimates of coach well-being in 2026.
But they provide useful context for why newer research on coach resilience matters.
The problem did not begin with one study.
Coaches Are Supporting Athlete Mental Health While Managing Their Own
There is another pressure that makes the issue particularly complicated.
Coaches increasingly participate in mental-health conversations with athletes.
More than 80% of head, assistant, and associate coaches in the NCAA’s survey said they were spending more time discussing mental health with student-athletes than they had before the COVID-19 pandemic.
That development can be positive.
A coach who takes psychological health seriously may help reduce stigma and make it easier for an athlete to seek appropriate care.
But there is a boundary.
Coaches are not automatically mental-health professionals.
They should not be expected to diagnose depression, treat anxiety disorders, conduct therapy, or personally manage serious psychological crises simply because they have close relationships with athletes.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association recently emphasized a similar distinction for strength and conditioning professionals: people working closely with athletes can recognize changes, listen, respond appropriately, and connect someone with qualified support without trying to become the clinician themselves.
The same principle applies to coaches.
Supporting someone is different from being responsible for treating them.
Being The Leader Can Make Asking For Help Harder
Leadership creates another psychological complication.
Coaches are often expected to project certainty.
Athletes look toward them after losses.
Staff members bring them problems.
Parents may want answers.
Administrators evaluate their decisions.
Media attention can intensify mistakes.
The coach becomes the person who is supposed to know what happens next.
That role can make ordinary vulnerability feel professionally dangerous.
A coach may wonder:
If I admit I am overwhelmed, will athletes trust me less?
Will my athletic director think I cannot handle the job?
Will another coach use it against me in recruiting?
Does needing help mean I am not built for this level?
Those questions cannot be solved by another resilience slogan.
Sports organizations need environments where seeking legitimate support is compatible with being competent.
Burnout And Mental-Health Conditions Are Not The Same Thing
The language around coaching stress also needs precision.
People often use burnout, stress, depression, and anxiety interchangeably.
They are not interchangeable concepts.
Research involving 144 NCAA coaches in North Carolina, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, found that workplace and perceived stress were associated with burnout measures. Perceived stress was also associated with depression, anxiety, stress symptoms, and lower well-being. However, most relationships between the researchers’ burnout subscales and mental-health outcomes were negligible.
The findings reinforce why coaches should not diagnose themselves—or one another—based on casual labels.
Feeling exhausted after a demanding stretch does not automatically mean someone has depression.
Experiencing burnout does not mean someone has an anxiety disorder.
And a clinical mental-health condition should not be dismissed as ordinary occupational stress.
When symptoms are persistent, severe, worsening, or interfering substantially with everyday functioning, appropriate professional assessment matters.
A Better Stress Mindset Is Not Permission For A Worse Workplace
The 2026 study’s findings about stress mindset deserve particular care.
Suppose two coaches face the same difficult week.
One interprets every stressful experience as evidence that the job is destroying them.
Another recognizes that some pressure is temporary, focuses on what can be controlled, and believes they can adapt.
Those interpretations could plausibly affect how each person experiences the situation.
That is where stress mindset can be useful.
But now imagine something different.
A coach is chronically understaffed.
They sleep poorly for months.
Their job security changes with every loss.
They cannot take meaningful time away.
They are expected to provide extensive emotional support to athletes without adequate professional resources.
The answer cannot simply be:
Think about stress differently.
Individual coping operates inside working conditions.
Both deserve attention.
Resilience Can Include Changing The Situation
Sports often portray resilience as endurance.
Keep going.
Absorb the pressure.
Stay composed.
Do not complain.
But resilience can involve other responses.
It can mean asking an assistant to take responsibility for something.
It can mean setting a communication boundary during protected time off.
It can mean telling an athletic director that staffing is inadequate.
It can mean using counseling.
It can mean taking sleep seriously.
It can mean admitting that an approach is not working.
Sometimes it means leaving an environment that has become harmful.
Endurance is one possible response to difficulty.
It is not the definition of resilience.
Recovery Has To Exist Somewhere In The Week
Coaching calendars can make recovery difficult because the work is rarely contained within games and practices.
Recruiting continues.
Athletes send messages.
Staff members need decisions.
Film needs reviewing.
Travel disrupts routines.
A loss can follow someone home psychologically even when the official workday has ended.
That makes recovery worth examining practically.
Not as another optimization strategy.
Not:
How can I recover better so I can work even more?
Instead:
Where does my nervous system actually get permission to stop responding to demands?
For one coach, that might involve family time.
For another, exercise that is unrelated to athlete performance.
It could be an evening when work messages are not continuously monitored.
It could be time outdoors, reading, music, religious practice, friendships outside sport, or simply adequate sleep.
No single activity is universally restorative.
The important part is whether some portion of life exists where the coach is not continuously required to evaluate, decide, lead, recruit, solve, or perform. Nick Warren’s remarkable recovery from brain haemorrhage to rugby coaching.https://www.englandrugby.com/follow/news-and-media/nick-warrens-remarkable-recovery-brain-haemorrhage-rugby-coaching.
Coaches Need Relationships Where They Are Not The Coach
Social support also becomes complicated when someone’s professional identity is built around leadership.
A coach may spend the entire day surrounded by people and still have relatively few places to be emotionally off duty.
Athletes are not necessarily the appropriate people to carry the coach’s personal distress.
Assistant coaches may also be employees.
Administrators evaluate performance.
Parents have their own interests.
Media relationships are professional.
That makes relationships outside the immediate performance structure valuable.
Friends.
Partners.
Family.
Peer coaches.
Mentors.
Professional counselors.
People with whom the coach does not need to provide the answer.
CPCWA’s guide to resilience without constant toughness explores the broader principle: resilience is not the absence of difficult emotion, and needing recovery or support does not cancel a person’s capacity to handle pressure.
Athletic Departments Have Responsibilities Too
Coach well-being should not become another individual compliance requirement.
Imagine an athletic department responding to burnout by giving every coach a mindfulness app while leaving workloads, staffing, job insecurity, communication expectations, and organizational culture unchanged.
The resource itself may be useful.
The response is incomplete.
Older NCAA coach-well-being data give some indication of what coaches themselves identified as problems: roster management, evolving transfer conditions, job and budget concerns, financial stress, childcare, and other personal pressures all appeared in survey responses.
The organizational questions therefore matter.
Are workloads realistic?
Do coaches have access to confidential mental-health care?
Is taking time away actually possible?
Are staffing levels adequate?
Do assistants receive appropriate support?
Are coaches expected to manage athlete mental-health problems beyond their competence?
Do employees believe seeking psychological support could threaten their careers?
Are women coaches and coaches from historically marginalized groups experiencing additional workplace pressures?
Resilience training cannot answer those questions for an organization.
Leadership has to.
Supporting Coaches Can Also Support Athletes
Coach well-being is not important only because healthier coaches might produce better results.
Coaches matter as people regardless of wins.
But their working conditions also affect the environments athletes inhabit.
A chronically exhausted coach may have less patience.
An overwhelmed coach may communicate less clearly.
Someone worried constantly about job security may make decisions differently from someone operating with adequate support.
That does not mean stressed coaches become bad coaches.
It means leadership happens through human beings rather than machines.
Athlete-wellness strategies that ignore coach well-being therefore have an obvious blind spot.
The people being asked to create psychologically healthier sports environments need support themselves.
Coaches Do Not Need To Perform Positivity
Stress-mindset research can also be misused by turning positivity into another expectation.
A coach should not have to describe every setback as an opportunity.
Losing can hurt.
Job uncertainty can be frightening.
Roster problems can be frustrating.
Conflict can be exhausting.
A difficult season does not need to become an inspirational story while someone is still living through it.
A more flexible stress mindset leaves room for two ideas at once:
This is genuinely difficult.
and
I may still have resources, choices, relationships, or skills that help me respond.
That is different from pretending the difficulty is beneficial.
A Practical Coach Stress Check-In
A coach does not need another lengthy wellness checklist.
A few questions can help separate manageable performance pressure from a broader problem:
- What is actually creating the most stress right now? Competition, workload, job insecurity, conflict, recruiting, athlete welfare, finances, family demands, or something else?
- Which part can I influence, and which part requires organizational change?
- When during a normal week am I genuinely off duty?
- Who can I talk to when I do not need to act like the leader?
- Am I recovering from difficult periods, or does exhaustion simply continue into the next one?
- Would I tell an athlete to seek professional support if they were functioning the way I currently am?
These questions are not a diagnostic tool.
They are a way of noticing whether “keep going” has become the only available strategy.
When Professional Support Makes Sense
Stress is expected in coaching.
Significant psychological impairment should not simply be accepted as the price of the profession.
A coach experiencing persistent low mood, severe anxiety, major sleep disruption, increasing substance use, substantial withdrawal, difficulty functioning outside work, or other concerning changes should consider speaking with an appropriately qualified healthcare or mental-health professional.
That does not require waiting for a crisis.
Athletic departments can help by making confidential resources genuinely accessible and by clearly communicating that using them is compatible with professional competence.
The NCAA Coach Well-Being Study remains a useful resource for understanding the broader pressures coaches have reported across college sports.
The goal should not be to pathologize every difficult season.
It should be to make sure coaches do not have to become severely unwell before support becomes legitimate.
Resilience Should Increase Options, Not Reduce Them
The new study of 235 NCAA head coaches provides evidence that resilience deserves attention in conversations about coaching and mental health. Coaches reporting a more positive stress mindset also reported greater resilience, and resilience was associated with fewer depressive symptoms and greater life satisfaction. The 2026 NCAA head-coach resilience study provides the full research abstract and methodology.
Those findings should encourage better conversations about coping.
They should not become:
Resilient coaches don’t struggle.
Or:
If pressure is hurting you, change your mindset.
Or:
Good leaders can handle anything.
A healthier interpretation is that psychological resources matter alongside working conditions, relationships, recovery, professional support, and organizational responsibility.
College coaches spend enormous amounts of time teaching athletes how to respond when things become difficult.
They deserve environments where the same principle applies to them.
Sometimes resilience means staying composed in a high-pressure moment.
Sometimes it means recovering afterward.
Sometimes it means asking for help.
And sometimes the resilient response is recognizing that the person should not be required to adapt indefinitely to a system that also needs to change.
