How Do They Impact Student Athletes?

There are many studies that look at the correlation between student-athletes and variables that impact athletic and academic performance. Unfortunately, only a small proportion of this research is centered in communication studies. Outside of communication studies journals, I have reviewed literature from psychology, education, counseling, and social issues collections. Within communication journals, authors have mainly focused on the concepts of memorable messages and social support and how they impact student-athletes. Using these frameworks as support, we argue that it is just as important to look at student-athlete identity and the positive and negative effects that certain relationships have on them. By focusing on communication and identity, we will provide a new way of approaching the research on student-athletes, which can hopefully improve the experiences of student-athletes at all competition levels.

Most obviously, this will help student-athletes, beginning as young kids, all the way through college. Starcher (2015) argues that sport and socialization within it begins to affect children from an early age. Socialization is “the process of social interaction through which children, develop, extend, and modify their conceptions of who they are and how they relate to the social world around them (p. 205.)” Ordinarily, the socialization process begins so early and sport is one of the avenues through which this process is completed, so it is important to study the origin or where the student-athlete identity started to form. In this stage, school tends to have less of an impact and parents have most of the control in assisting identity