It's Not Burnout: Why Your Athlete Suddenly Wants to Quit

She wants to quit and it's probably not burnout. Check our free training for sports parents to help her stay in the game → https://trainhergame.com/mom

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⏰ Key Timestamps:
00:00 The Hook: Is It Burnout?
00:16 The Competitive Dancer's Story
01:26 The Gap Between Success and Feeling
03:57 Burnout vs. Mental Game Problem
06:26 Three Questions to Tell the Difference
07:39 My Own Experience With This
08:44 How to Build the Mental Game Toolkit

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre — a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a former head volleyball coach and 4-time state champion.

Your athlete says she wants to quit, and your first instinct might be to call it burnout. 

In this episode, I walk through a true story about a 15 year old competitive dancer who placed top 10 at nationals and still wanted to quit two weeks later, and why that gap between outside success and inside confidence is almost never burnout.

I also share about my own story of walking away from volleyball my senior year and calling it burnout, when it was really unmanaged perfectionism no one taught me how to handle.

🧐 What You'll Learn:
The one gap that separates real burnout from a mental game problem hiding as burnout- Why "get out of your own head" doesn't work, even when it's true
The 3 questions to ask before deciding it's time for a break- What it means when she can't feel her own wins
How comparing herself to teammates, not outcomes, fuels the spiral

💬 Moms — comment below: Has your athlete ever said she wants to quit right after a strong season?

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:
- About 10% of adolescent athletes ages 13-15 report sport burnout, with slightly higher rates among girls (Saarinen et al., 2024, cited in Journal of Adolescence, 2025)
- Estimates of youth athlete burnout prevalence range from just 1% to 12% depending on the study (Systematic review, 2025)
- Higher perfectionism in athletes is linked to increased burnout, anxiety, and lower self-esteem (Frontiers in Psychology, 2024)

The Raising Elite Competitors podcast and YouTube channel is hosted by The Elite Competitor and is dedicated to helping sports moms strengthen their daughter's mental game and confidence in order to help her perform her best when it matters most.

#sportsmom #mentaltraining #youthsports #sportsparenting #confidentathlete

Transcript

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0:00

If your daughter just told you that she wants to quit or she needs a break from her sport, before you decide that means burnout and we're done, I want you to hear how to actually tell the difference. And this is very timely because I recently got on a call with a mom whose daughter is a competitive dancer. She started at age 10, she's now 15, and in five years she's already caught up with her teammates who had been dancing their whole lives. So she made some big leaps. And this wasn't a stage parent situation either, like somebody who's just kind of pushing from the sidelines and telling her to achieve, achieve, achieve. Her mom told me flat out, "We've never pushed her to actually do this. It's always been her own thing." So not a lot of, intense pressure from home. It's all been internal drive, which is great. But then she went to nationals, the biggest stage that she's competed on yet, and against the best dancers in the country. And she didn't get the placements that she wanted. Not because she danced badly. Her mom said she was actually crushing it on stage. She placed 10th in the competition. She wasn't chosen for the dancer of the year that year and from where her parents were sitting, that was a very strong showing for a 15-year-old at nationals, to be top 10. Even though she didn't get chosen for dancer of the year, it was against a lot of big competition. And then two weeks later, she's telling her parents that she needs a break. She doesn't want to go to practice. She won't watch her own performance videos anymore because all she sees are the flaws and what's going wrong. Her mom described this as going through the motions, but defeated underneath. And here's the part that m- stopped me, gave me a little bit of a pause. Her coaches and her teammates were confused by this. They're asking like, "What's going on?" Because from the outside, she's really thriving. And that gap right there I really want to draw attention to, where everyone around her sees her doing great and performing well, but she's having a hard time seeing it herself now. That's the tell. That's actually not burnout. That is a mental game problem and it's wearing burnout's clothes, if you will. So her mom actually did the right thing here. She pulled her daughter aside, asked her directly what she was telling herself, and her daughter said it plainly. She's comparing herself to other dancers, to other competitors, and she's feeling insecure on what she can do because she's in her own head and she's feeling that she's not as good as everybody else. Not what the judges are scoring her, either. That part she was actually just fine with. It was the other dancers in the room that she couldn't stop measuring herself against. So I think the mom did a really good thing there just to ask her like, "Hey, what's going on? What are you telling yourself? What are you thinking about?" And this is one of the most common patterns that I see with athletes who've had really early success, is that they start strong, they get praised early without realizing that that praise becomes part of their identity. So that's the first time that, they start to Or when they start to see their performance dip, slightly compared to a tougher field, it doesn't just feel like a bad competition. It feels like proof that that identity was never true to begin with, and that's a much heavier thing for a 15-year-old to carry than, "I just had an off day." So if you're sitting in this boat too, if any of that resonates with you, here's how to actually tell if it's a burnout, it's time to pump the brakes and quit or, give her a break, or it's a mental game issue. I hate to call it an issue because it's just that, she hasn't been taught the mental skills yet to be able to navigate a situation like this. And I truly believe that all athletes need these skills so that when they do come up against hard competitions or where, when they're comparing, that they have a mental framework to work through on what they're telling themselves. And the problem is that most coaches don't teach this. They expect it. They tell your athlete to be mentally tough. They tell them to, shake it off and stop comparing. That's teaching them what to do, not how to do it. Okay? So here's how to know if she just is lacking some of those tools in her toolkit, and we can help provide them for her. That's the easy part. Or if it is like, okay, this is really leaking into all parts of her life, and maybe we do need to take a break. So burnout is exhaustion that doesn't move on, no matter what happens on the field or the floor. So she's tired of the travel, tired of the practices, tired of the whole structure of the sport, win or lose. It's really steady, and it's global. And maybe you're seeing that this is permeating into other areas of her life, with her friendships, with her academics, things like that. You're noticing, a flatness around. A mental game problem shows up differently. She still really, loves the sport. She's still capable. Often, she's more capable than she's giving herself credit for. But one hard moment, one to- tough competition, one time she wasn't picked for something sends her into a little bit of a spiral of self-talk that she's having a hard time climbing herself out of on her own. So it's specific. It's been triggered by something, and it's sort of loud. The other giveaway is that what she does, uh, with proof of her own success. Okay? So a burned-out athlete shrugs off wins because she genuinely doesn't care anymore. She's like, "I don't care what happens. I am done with this." An athlete who is stuck in a mental game problem gets the win and still can't feel it, right? She got invited to compete on a national team, and, in this exact story that I was giving you an example of, her reaction was still, I see that, but I still feel like I'm not good enough." So that is a disconnect between the results and how she feels about herself. That's the clearest signal that you will get. She's doing all the things that indicate that she's performing really well. She's getting invited to places. She's getting accolades. But she's like, "Ugh, I just don't know if I'm good enough to be able to do it." She can't see her own greatness, so here's what I want, to save you some time around because this mom told me something a lot of parents, recognize, that their default response has been the classic, "Get out of your own head. You're your own worst enemy. You're the one telling yourself these things." And, like, all of that might be true, but it didn't land anymore, right? She said nothing. The coaches said nothing. Her parents said, can really get through in these situations. That's not because the advice is wrong. Mom to mom, you have really good advice. But it's because naming the problem is not the same thing as giving her a tool to actually do something about it, okay? So telling an athlete to get out of her own head or just to be confident or stop thinking about all the other athletes is like telling someone just to relax during a penalty kick. Accurate, but completely useless because that's not actually how you do that. So if you're trying to figure out which one, you're looking at with your athlete, is this a mental game problem, she just needs a mental game toolkit to be able to help her navigate this. Or, we do need to take a break because this is going throughout her whole life is, number one, does, "I need a break," show up everywhere or only after a specific hard moment? So everywhere, all the time, regardless of the outcome, points to burnout. Tied likely to a tough competition or a bad stretch of points, that lends itself more to a mental game problem. Number two, is she still succeeding by every outside measure, but can't see it or feel it herself? That gap between real results and her, internal experience, of those results is almost never burnout. Burnout doesn't usually come with a national team invitation attached to it, okay? Number three, did she just move up to a harder level of competition or a tougher team or a bigger stage? So comparing herself to a stronger field, for the first time is one of the most common triggers. I see, this exact kind of spiral happening, and often it's mistaken for loss of interest in the sport altogether, when really it's just we haven't been here before and so we need new tools to navigate this. And, wanting to quit because she's genuinely burnt out and wanting to quit, because she's stuck in this spiral, it's tough because it could look the same as she doesn't have the mental skills. But hopefully you can sparse some of this out. And speaking from experience as an athlete who did walk away from my sport after my senior year in high school, I told people I was burned out, but I really wasn't. I actually just lacked the mental game tools. And here was my situation, was that I was a highly recruited, talented athlete, but internally, I was dealing with perfectionism and this fear of letting people down. And I didn't know how to manage that. No one was really talking about it. And so I just told people that I was burned out and I wanted to walk away, because I was, just done with the sport, when in reality, I loved the sport. I just didn't have the tools to navigate the mental side of it. And so luckily, I got another chance. I was able to be a walk-on at a Division 2 school that has a phenomenal volleyball program, and I learned some of these mental game tools to help me fall back in love with not just my sport, but also everything that comes with it, and tools to navigate pressure, comparison, burnout, coming back from mistakes. Like, all of that, our athletes need tools to navigate. They're just not inherently born with those things, okay? So if you're in this space and you're like, "Okay, actually, I feel like this might be, solved or helped with mental game tools," and that's exactly what this mom decided to do, the one that I was on the call with. She has her daughter now, doing our mental training program so that she can have the tools to be able to navigate what she's going through, and also so that the mom herself can be supportive of what to say. 'Cause you're not really given the playbook on what to do in these situations, and so that's what we support you with as well. So if you wanna know how, to do this, just like this mom is doing, go to our free training. That's at trainhergame.com. That's where we talk about our approach to mental training, simple things you can be doing as a parent to help, and also we talk about our mental training program that over 6,000 families have been in to date to help with things just like this, to help navigate the burnout, to help navigate the bumps in the roads, and really equip her with a toolkit that doesn't just serve her in her sport, but also across all areas of her life. So trainhergame.com. If you wanna also learn more about our program, I will link that in the description below. And moms, I hope this was helpful. I will see you in the next episode of the Raising Elite Competitors podcast.