Team Sports Participation and Depression Among US Adolescents

Background and Purpose

Depression is a pervasive and potentially life-threatening issue, with 20% of adolescents in the US experiencing a major depressive episode each year. Depression in adolescence is associated with adverse outcomes, including poor social functioning, low academic achievement, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation. Substantial evidence highlights the association between regular exercise and a reduction in depressive symptoms. Physical exercise alters physiological and biochemical reactivity to stress, and is associated with improved sleep, mood, self-esteem, and body image. Research also emphasizes a positive link between social group identification and enhanced mental well-being. The current study explores associations between participation in team sports, which intersects exercise and social group identification, and depression in a population-based sample of US adolescents.

Methods

We use data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a population-based longitudinal study of approximately 5000 children born between 1998 and 2000, and followed-up at child ages 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15. The FFCWS oversampled births to unmarried mothers (3 to 1 ratio) and is representative of such births in all large US cities at that time. Analyses are based on a sample of approximately 2500 youth interviewed at year-15.

Our primary independent variable is adolescents’ self-reports of how often they spend time on athletic or sports teams at year-15, with responses of: never, sometimes (<once/month, at least once/month; once/week), or often (several times/week). Adolescent depression at year-15, our primary outcome, is based on five adolescent self-reported items derived from the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. We also examine caregiver-reported internalizing behavior problems from the Child Behavior Checklist at year-15, as a proxy measure of adolescent depression. We include a rich set of child, parent, and family-level controls, and importantly, a measure of internalizing behavior problems at the prior wave (year-9). We estimate linear regression models of adolescent self-reported depression and caregiver-reported internalizing behavior problems on frequency of participation in sports and covariates.

Results

Multivariate results indicate that adolescents who often participate in sports have 22% of a standard deviation lower depression score (p<.001) compared to those who never participate. This association is nearly identical (26% SD lower; p<.001) using caregiver-reported internalizing behavior problems and remains robust to various supplementary analyses and alternative specifications. We find no difference in self-reported depression scores between adolescents who participate in sports never vs. sometimes, but we do find such a difference (20% SD lower; p<.001) when looking at caregiver-reported internalizing behavior problems.

Conclusions and Implications

In this population-based sample of urban youth, we find a strong negative association of participation in team sports with adolescents’ self-reported depression and caregiver-reported internalizing behavior problems. These results, consistent with and building on prior work, point to the importance of sports participation in protecting against mental health problems in adolescence, a highly prevalent social problem with serious consequences across the life course. Our results provide important evidence for the integration of team sports into mental health treatment, intervention, and prevention strategies for adolescents’ health and well-being in the US.