How emerging career and mental health evidence can shape your support work
For women in sport, the highest-risk periods often come after the final whistle. Retirement, entry into coaching or management, and decisions around motherhood can destabilize mental health, yet practitioner support frequently tapers off at exactly that point. A newly funded UAB project, announced in September 2026, is now mapping these trajectories across athletes, coaches, referees, and managers.
For applied sports psychologists, the tension is practical: tools built for active competitors may miss the role-change pressures, hormonal contexts, and dual-career demands that shape distress after retirement or during leadership transitions. Knowing which stressors and transitions raise risk, and how to screen for them, matters before symptoms escalate.
For applied sport psychologists, the newly funded UAB project is less an academic curiosity than an early signal of evidence that can shape screening, referrals, and organizational support for women across athlete, coach, referee, and manager roles.
Led by principal investigator Marta Borrueco Carmona within the Sport Psychology Research Group (GEPE-UAB), the project received funding through the UAB Pre-Competitive Projects Call (PPC 2026) under its emerging leadership track. The study uses qualitative interviews combined with an expert panel to examine career trajectories of dual-career athletes, retirement transitions toward alternative professional areas in sports, motherhood decision-making, and the resources or barriers that affect work-life balance in leadership positions. International collaborators from Verona, Brussels, and Valencia extend the network, but the project is currently in its initial funded phase.
The planned open workshop for sports institutions stands out as a practical transfer route. Rather than waiting for peer-reviewed papers, practitioners may be able to use that session to translate early insights into team, federation, or club protocols around career transition support, parental leave planning, and leadership development. The UAB Institute of Sport News item published on September 22, 2026, describes the award and its aims. Because the project is early-stage funded research rather than published findings, the immediate value is preparatory: watch for the workshop announcement and treat current UAB materials as a research update, not finalized practice guidance.
Symptom checklists are a practical screening route, but they often miss the career-stage and systemic pressures that shape women athletes' mental health.
Among elite female athletes, a 2026 proportional meta-analysis estimated clinically significant symptoms at 19.4% for anxiety, 18.7% for depression, and 18.6% for disordered eating. Distress is higher at 34.7%, sleep disturbance at 28.8%, and alcohol misuse at 40.2%. Some female athlete samples show disordered eating rates up to 45%, with relative risks of roughly two times for eating disorders, three times for bingeing behaviors, and six times for vomiting behaviors compared with male athletes.1 Low energy availability often travels with these eating concerns, though it is less consistently counted in prevalence research.
A 2024 meta-analysis found elevated female relative risks for anxiety, 1.17; depression, 1.42; distress, 1.98; and disordered eating, 2.19.1 It also calculated relative risks of 1.58 for moderate depression, 1.85 for severe depression, and 1.39 for moderate-to-severe depression. However, a separate 2026 review found female excess for distress, anxiety, and sleep disturbance but not depression or alcohol misuse. Alcohol was higher in men in that review but not significantly so. Burnout has no pooled female-male comparison yet, so sex-based conclusions there remain premature. Injury-related distress is frequently described by athletes but has weaker pooled sex-specific evidence.
For female student-athletes, one review reported depressive symptoms in up to 35% of participants, underscoring the importance of student athlete mental health resources.2 Abuse, inequitable funding, reduced visibility, and career insecurity add further load. Most prevalence studies stop at the athlete role and ignore whether a woman is retiring, moving into coaching or leadership, or navigating motherhood. That career-stage blind spot is exactly what the UAB project aims to address, and it means sport psychologists should ask about role transitions rather than treating current symptoms as a fixed picture.
Career transitions for women athletes are the moments when they leave one role in sport and attempt to enter another, whether by retiring from competition, exiting through injury or deselection, or moving into coaching, refereeing, or sport leadership. Each shift can challenge identity, planning, and support.
Retirement is the most studied pathway. Research by Torregrossa, Ramis, and Jordana has repeatedly pointed to identity continuity and support as protective factors. Jordana and colleagues' work on elite-sport retirement highlights that athletic identity can become so central that leaving competition feels like losing a self, not just a schedule, a recognized athlete identity crisis. Torregrossa and colleagues have shown that junior-to-senior transitions and dual-career planning before retirement can shape later adjustment. A scoping review of women's dual careers similarly suggests that building a non-athletic identity before retirement may ease the shift.
Deselection and injury exits are less visible but often feel more abrupt because the athlete may not have chosen the timing or prepared a next step, which can complicate sports psychologist injury recovery. Moves into coaching, refereeing, or leadership are frequently assumed but less documented for women, and women-specific research suggests these pathways can remain narrow, with fewer visible role models and less structured entry in some sports. Practitioners should listen for pressure around timing, especially when athletes weigh leadership opportunities against family or financial constraints.
Several signs may signal a difficult transition. One is identity narrowing, when a client says something like "without sport, I do not know who I am," a shift documented in I’m More Than My Sport. Another is avoidant planning, such as refusing to discuss life after sport or making vague, unrealistic next-step goals. A third is social withdrawal from former teammates and sport networks during the transition, which can cut off exactly the support that helps people rebuild identity.
Why do a stalled career decision and a persistent low mood often appear together in female athletes, coaches, or referees? The short answer is that mental health and career development operate as a loop. Practitioners are in a strong position to notice this loop because both sides show up in sport settings.
Retiring from competition is a major career transition that can bring role loss, identity foreclosure, and financial insecurity, which raise risk for anxiety and depression. At the same time, untreated low mood or anxiety can narrow a woman's career choices, making networking, interviews, or coach development feel impossible. Work-life balance barriers in leadership roles add another layer: unpredictable scheduling, travel, and limited family supports create strain that can erode wellbeing and push women out of advancement pipelines.
Watch for these signs rather than treating them as motivation problems: - Functioning decline across settings: worsening performance at training, work, or home. - Persistent low mood or anxiety: lasting beyond a normal transition adjustment. - Disordered eating behaviors: restrictive eating, bingeing, or compensatory behaviors. - Self-harm or safety concerns: any disclosure or warning sign means you need to know when to refer athlete to clinical psychologist and escalate immediately.
A coach may present with "poor sideline focus" after leaving competitive play. Assessment often reveals unresolved grief and identity loss, not lack of effort. Addressing the transition restores both wellbeing and job performance.
Screening tools can help practitioners open conversations about female athlete health, but they should not be used as standalone diagnostic labels. Elevated scores should prompt further evaluation or referral to an appropriate clinician, and menstrual cycle plus hormonal factors, including hormonal contraception, can affect interpretation of menstrual-function items. The table below includes only tools with enough athlete-specific evidence in the reviewed sources to summarize responsibly; PHQ-9, GAD-7, SMHAT-1, and EDE-Q are not summarized because their athlete-specific validity details were not available.
| Tool | What It Screens | Format and Use | Validity in Athletes and Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| LEAF-Q | Symptoms associated with problematic low energy availability (LEA) in female athletes, including menstrual function, injury history, and gastrointestinal symptoms. | A 25-question questionnaire scored from 0 to 25; a total score of 8 or higher indicates high risk for low energy availability. | Validated in endurance-sport and dance athletes with 78% sensitivity and 90% specificity. Menstrual-function results cannot be interpreted reliably in athletes using hormonal contraception. |
| Selected LEAF-Q items | Menstrual-function and injury items used to describe menstrual health and injury history in female athletes. | N/A | Findings from a modified LEAF-Q without the gastrointestinal domain should not be treated as a validated comprehensive low energy availability screen. |
Some practitioners wait until mental health symptoms or a forced retirement trigger a referral; others build self-regulation, including coach self-regulation, and transition supports before those identity shifts hit. The emerging evidence favors the second path, but only when expectations are honest.
Self-compassion programming has the most promising, though early, signal. Recent reviews link self-compassion to lower stress, better wellbeing, more resilience, and less burnout. In one 2026 study of Olympic combat-sport athletes, mindfulness predicted self-compassion, and self-compassion predicted lower burnout.1 But this was predictive, not proof that training alone prevents burnout. Women-specific pooled effects are still not established. Mindfulness-based programs show a moderate effect in some analyses, yet the overall mental-health effect was near zero with high heterogeneity. MAC performed better than sport-psychology education in a small elite female sample, but durability beyond four weeks is unclear.2 CBT appears in many athlete mental-health interventions, but recent reviews call the evidence inconclusive and the internal validity low. So use it thoughtfully, not as a default claim.
Transition planning should start before retirement, but the evidence is the smallest and most mixed: only a few studies, diverse methods, no clear best program, and no reliable women-only conclusions. Still, practitioners can act by mapping athletes' non-sport roles and identities, including possible coaching, refereeing, or executive paths. Organizational culture work is different: it targets coaches, teammates, and leadership. Defined roles for coaches and teammates, such as normalizing conversations about motherhood or dual-career tradeoffs, can shift environment. These actions mirror the transfer workshop UAB plans for sports institutions, which could help clubs translate research into mental performance workshops and practical policies.
One low-cost step this season: add a single structured question to pre-season individual meetings, asking each athlete, "What non-sport role or transition worry do you want support with this year?" Use the answer to shape follow-up, not to diagnose.
The central tension for practitioners is protecting an athlete's health and career without framing pregnancy or motherhood as a disruption that must be rushed, hidden, or managed around. These sections sit alongside the existing maternity and dual-career guidance on sportspsychology.org rather than replacing it.
Recent studies show elite and sub-elite athletes often plan pregnancy and continue modified training, yet many face psychological stress, identity conflict, and a lack of tailored guidance.1 In qualitative work, athletes described uncertainty, inadequate support, and fears about losing sponsors or perceived ability when deciding whether to disclose a pregnancy. Those concerns can delay reproductive decisions and create a reproductive autonomy bind.2 For professional mother footballers, return to sport is rarely linear; rigid time-based protocols clash with heterogeneous postpartum recovery, and weaker contracts can make the dual role unsustainable.
Perinatal screening should go beyond mood to ask about identity, financial security, contractual protections, and support gaps. Hormonal transitions around pregnancy and postpartum can affect recovery, sleep, and mental health, so an individualized readiness-based return is more appropriate than a fixed timeline.3
If you are supporting an athlete who is pregnant or planning pregnancy, read the maternity article next. If the concern is balancing education, sport, and career after retirement, start with the dual-career article.
