Motivation’s impact on high-level high school students’ ability to balance academic and athletic stress

All student-athletes are often faced with the choice of spending time on their academics or athletics. However, some students want to pursue their dreams of playing sports at the professional level, often causing stress and anxiety. We aimed to observe the relationship between motivation and stress in student-athletes playing a varsity sport. Participants included high school students from a small town in New Jersey enrolled in four or more AP/Honors courses. Two surveys, the Student-Athlete Motivation Toward Sports and Academics Questionnaire and Perceived Stress Scale, were given to students to measure their motivation and stress levels. Ultimately, there was no direct correlation between motivation and stress, but the results hint at the possibility of other factors contributing to students’ higher stress at both the college and high school levels. Additionally, nonresponse bias and lack of randomization confine the results to the school studied. Further research to look at the factors affecting high-performing collegiate and high-school student-athletes is needed. Diving into this topic further with fewer limitations will benefit collegiate and high school athletes to lower their stress from balancing sports and academics. Possible solutions may result from this project and open new research opportunities discussing the higher stress in not only collegiate but ¬¬also high school students.