Abstract
This study explored the influence of athletic identity and sports participation on the psychological well-being of athletes during a pandemic. The objective of the study was to understand the psychological impact of the coronavirus lockdown measure on athletes who were not able to carry out their normal daily routine. Athletes from nine different sports completed an online survey during the sixth week of the total lockdown in Nigeria. The online survey consists of an athletic identity scale and the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10). Data collected were analyzed using Multiple regression and the Mann-Whitney test at 0.05 level of significance. The result of the findings revealed that category of sports (individual and team) (M = 0.73, β = −6.116) and athletic identity (M = 59.16, β = −0.166) predicts psychological distress to some degree. Few individual sports athletes and athletes with low athletic identity are prone to higher levels of psychological distress than team sports athletes and athletes with high athletic identity during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. Individual sports athletes reported elevated levels of psychological distress compared to team sports athletes (z = −2.186, p = 0.03, r = 0.27). In conclusion, the results have confirmed that some athletes competing in individual sports experience elevated levels of psychological distress during the coronavirus pandemic, therefore they need the support of a sports psychologist during such periods to help in maintaining their psychological well-being.
Highlights
Pandemics have been around for more than a century, and they continue to impact humanity negatively
We were interested in finding out the differences in psychological distress between professional and non-professional athletes, between individual and team sports athletes, and between athletes who earned from sports participation and those who do not earn from sports participation during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown
Based on the result from the multiple regression analysis, our study showed that the age of athletes and the number of years spent participating in sports did not predict psychological distress
Summary
Pandemics have been around for more than a century, and they continue to impact humanity negatively. There have been pandemics such as the H1N1 in Mexico, which rapidly spread to the whole world (Cowling et al, 2010), the MERS-COV, Ebola, and SARS which came later These pandemics cause enormous negative economic, social, and security impacts on the global community (Qiu et al, 2017), but their psychological influence is hardly recognized. With the large-scale spread of this coronavirus and the knowledge of its transmission, most governments introduced heightened measures to control its spread (Taylor et al, 2008; Dong and Bouey, 2020) These measures include the use of protective equipment and the introduction of non-pharmaceutical protocols such as social distancing, hygiene guidelines, and, in more severe cases, a total lockdown (Cowling et al, 2010; Schinke et al, 2018).
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