Abstract
Not only are college student-athletes expected to excel on the field and in the classroom, but, as reflections of their university, they must abide by codes of conduct that govern their emotions and communicative behaviors. Interviews of Division I athletes at an academically and athletically elite U.S. university uncovered that similar to employees in the retail and hospitality industries, who are paid to express particular emotions, student-athletes also had to perform emotional labor in order to meet institutional demands. Unlike paid workers, however, student-athletes are considered amateurs and do not receive a salary, and their behaviors are scrutinized most of the day, particularly if they are high-profile players. Despite the powerlessness, frustration, and nervousness student-athletes felt, they were expected to express mental toughness and gratitude. Participants coped with emotional labor demands by turning backstage and relying on teammates for social support. In addition to extending emotional labor research to a new context, this study offers several practical applications, underscoring the need for university athletics departments to prepare and assist student-athletes with the performance and negotiation of emotional labor.
Student-athletes, especially those attending Division I (D-I) universities—the highest level of college athletics—are not only expected to excel athletically and academically (Simiyu, 2010), but they must abide by a greater standard of conduct and stricter institutional policies than nonathlete students (Penrose, 2013). Because they are public reflections of the university’s brand, and, in the case of high-profile D-1 institutions, often conferred celebrity status (Thamel & Evans, 2009), student-athletes’ autonomy is limited, and their on- and off-court behaviors are regulated and restricted (Benford, 2007; Kimball, 2007).
Within such a structured environment, student-athletes likely must engage in emotional labor (Hochschild, 1979, 1983), enacting or suppressing their emotions in order to conform to university expectations and requirements. As emotional labor has been associated with a variety of negative consequences (e.g., burnout, dissatisfaction), especially among people who have little autonomy over their jobs, are heavily involved in their work (Wharton, 1993, 1999), and whose identities are still forming (e.g., Schutz & Lee, 2014), the manifestation of emotion labor among D-1 student-athletes is particularly important to examine. After all, although they are considered amateurs, student-athletes’ schedules and playing time are at the discretion of their coaches, they face considerable academic and athletic pressures (cf. Simiyu, 2010), putting them at risk of burnout (Gould & Whitley, 2009), and their identities are not fully developed (Arnett, 2000).
Through face-to-face interviews of D-1 student-athletes and the lens of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1979, 1983), I answer a call to apply emotional labor to new contexts (Wharton, 1999) by exploring if and how college athletes at an athletically and academically elite university manage their feelings and behavior to comply with institutional regulations and expectations. This research is particularly warranted considering efforts to unionize college athletics (Gregory, 2015) among the widespread perception that D-1 athletes are valuable commodities who are taken advantage of and need to be compensated beyond full or partial athletic scholarships (McCormick & McCormick, 2006). I first review literature on emotional labor and the institutional display rules to which student-athletes must adhere before presenting the results of this qualitative study.
Emotional Labor
Inherently communicative (Shuler & Sypher, 2000), emotional (or emotion) labor is an extension of Goffman (1959)’s dramaturgical perspective. Goffman posits that people verbally and nonverbally act a certain way in front of others (the front stage) in hopes of conveying a certain impression in those individuals’ minds. When people are backstage (out of view), they are better able to reveal their true selves. Emotional labor (Hochschild, 1979, 1983) is a strategic form of impression management enacted by people required to express or withhold internal feelings, outward emotions, and communicative behaviors as a function of their employment (Tracy & Tracy, 1998). Through her seminal research on flight attendants (who are paid to display positive and suppress negative emotions), Hochschild (1983) concluded that, in the workplace, emotions are a commodity that can be bought and sold and are regulated by emotional display or expression rules. For instance, Walt Disney World employees are required to act friendly and happy (Reyers & Matusitz, 2012), 911 call takers and firefighters must neutralize their own and clients’ emotions in order to effectively respond to emergencies (Scott & Myers, 2005; Tracy & Tracy, 1998), and teachers need to display positive emotions while withholding unpleasant feelings in order to present a competent, professional, and caring identity to students (Schutz & Lee, 2014).
The ability and willingness to manage one’s emotions are increasingly a job requirement across industries (Zalewski & Shaffer, 2011), with prospective employees screening for the skill (Tracy, 2000). Employees learn display rules through trainings and written codes of conduct (e.g., 911 operators are taught how to manage emotions; Tracy & Tracy, 1998), as well as informally, by observing coworkers’ expressions (e.g., firefighters learn feeling rules from watching how colleagues act; Scott & Myers, 2005). Upon employment, employers monitor workers’ expressions to ensure they are appropriate and deliver rewards and punishments accordingly (cf. Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987). For instance, undergraduate admissions department staff who conformed to emotional rules were rewarded with affirmations and increased job opportunities. Those who did not display required emotions were punished with negative feedback and less-desirable work shifts (Sanders, 2013). Beyond punishments and rewards, the provision of emotion labor can have other positive and adverse consequences. Emotion labor has been associated with job satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, particularly when it supports the individual’s desired identity and true feelings (Tracy, 2005; Zapf, 2002) or helps employees better manage their jobs or perceive their jobs as more entertaining or rewarding (Shuler & Sypher, 2000). Conversely, emotional labor can be associated with burnout, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and identity confusion (Wharton, 1993, 1999). In the case of college athletics, failure to conform to institutional display rules can result in a warning, dismissal from the team, reduction or loss of their athletic scholarship, or university expulsion (Penrose, 2013).
Research indicates that seeking interaction and social support from coworkers backstage—away from public view (Goffman, 1959)—can help workers manage the demands of emotion labor. For instance, joking with colleagues emerged as a way for 911-call operators and correctional officers to ease the burden of emotion work and maintain and restore their desired identities if emotion labor challenges their true self (Tracy, 2005; Tracy & Tracy, 1998). Social support can also help reduce dissonance between real and required emotions, enabling workers to regain some control over their feelings (Abraham, 1998).
Institutional Display Rules Regulating College Student-Athletes
Although typically examined in the context of paid work in the retail and hospitality industries, emotional labor spans jobs and professions, even applying to nonsalaried or volunteer positions (e.g., rape crisis center volunteers engage in emotion labor; Thornton & Novak, 2010). While this process has not been studied in the context of college athletics, analogous to cruise ship employees, who are “ambassadors of our cruise ship when at work and play” (Tracy, 2005, p. 107), student-athletes likely have to be “on” most of the day, displaying emotions that positively reflect their university. On the field, in the classroom, on campus, and around town, student-athletes are representatives of universities whose athletic programs are considered “businesses with brands to preserve” (Penrose, 2013, p. 528). As such, despite their amateur status, student-athletes’ actions are scrutinized year round, with some college athletes treated as celebrities both on and off campus (Thamel & Evans, 2009). However, there are efforts underway to reform the commercialization and perceived mistreatment of student-athletes (Benford, 2007; Jorgensen, 2015).
Although the vast majority of D-1 athletes do not receive full scholarships (Coakley, 2001), by committing to playing college athletics, they surrender their autonomy to their university, which regulates their behaviors (Penrose, 2013; Sagar & Jowett, 2012). Although traditional students’ freedom of speech is protected under the First Amendment, in exchange for the opportunity to play sports, student-athletes must adhere to university and team rules and regulations (Kimball, 2007). Student-athletes must abide by several institutional rules. For instance, they are prohibited from fighting, swearing, and using obscene gestures on and off the field, forbidden from underage drinking, consuming alcohol during team events and activities (even if they are 21), and banned from gambling on sporting events. Student-athletes’ speech to the news media is restricted (Penrose, 2013), and they can only post positive content on social media. Inappropriate posts can result in sanctions not only for the athlete but also for the team and university (Sanderson, 2011). Consequentially, student-athletes’ social media use is strictly monitored (Sanderson, 2011), particularly athletes’ responses to critical comments about them (Browning & Sanderson, 2012). Furthermore, student-athletes must regularly attend and pass their classes and navigate an environment in which they are frequently stereotyped as “dumb jocks” and at risk of prejudice, stigma, and discrimination from faculty, counselors, and peers (e.g., Simons, Bosworth, Fujita, & Jensen, 2007; Wininger & White, 2015).
It is likely that D-1 athletes enact emotional labor in order to express or suppress institutionally required emotions and behaviors. The provision of emotional labor can result in psychosocial consequences, and the failure to conform to display rules can potentially cost students the opportunity to participate in D-1 athletics or, for scholarship athletes, receive a college education. However, how these students display or suppress required emotions is unknown. In order to shed light on the emotion labor likely enacted by these students, I explored the following research questions in this study: How do student-athletes negotiate the performance of emotional labor?
Method
After securing institutional review board approval as part of a larger study on college athletes’ experiences, I interviewed student-athletes at one of the nation’s most academically and athletically elite D-I universities (Brady, 2011). In addition to its high-profile academics and athletics, this university’s sports brand consistently ranks as one of the country’s most lucrative (Gaines, 2014). I recruited participants via word of mouth and snowball sampling, by e-mailing an announcement to a few communication classes, and by reaching out to a football academic advisor who informed his advisees about the study. When applicable, participants received extra credit in a communication course at their instructor’s discretion.
Participants
During the spring of 2013, I conducted face-to-face, in-depth, semistructured interviews of 17 student-athletes, who, while not an interview requirement, were predominately starters and/or marquee players on their teams. Although students at all divisions of college athletics experience challenges (Johnson, 2011; Simiyu, 2010), because D-1 athletes compete at a higher level with more associated pressures (e.g., Singer, 2008), they were the focus of the investigation. Interviews were conducted in order to richly uncover how participants experienced, enacted, and managed their worlds qualitatively (Braithwaite, Moore, & Abetz, 2014). Sixty-five percent of the study’s participants (n = 11) were male and 35% (n = 6) were female. The participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 21 (M = 20.2). Three (18%) of the participants were freshmen, 3 (18%) were in their second year of college, and 11 (65%) were in their third year. Eleven participants were Caucasian/White (65%), four participants were Black/African American (24%), one participant was Hispanic/Latino (6%), and one participant identified as both Black and White (6%). Six participants played football (35%), three participated in track and field (18%), three played baseball (18%), two were on the swimming/diving team (12%), one played soccer (6%), one played volleyball (6%), and one played softball (6%). Participant funding varied from no assistance (n= 1) to full athletic scholarship (n = 9). Participants’ grade point averages ranged from 2.6–3.0 (n = 6; 35%) to 3.7–4.0 (n = 1; 6%).
Procedure
The interviews ranged from 23 to 136 min (42 min, on average), not including time to complete a short demographic questionnaire. I conducted the interviews on campus at a convenient time and place for the participants. I audio-recorded the interviews, which two research assistants and I transcribed verbatim. Prior to data analysis, I reviewed and edited each transcription to ensure accuracy (see Braun & Clarke, 2006). To protect the participants’ privacy, I asked them to choose a pseudonym at the start of the interview.
Instruments and Analysis
After receiving participants’ consent, I first asked a series of background questions before transitioning to a variety of open-ended questions about the participants’ experiences as a college athlete, including what, if any, pressure or stressors participants faced, what they worried or were uncertain about, how they managed that uncertainty, advantages and disadvantages of being a student-athlete, any expectations to act a certain way as an athlete, any differences between how they behaved in public versus in private, and the role of communication in helping them balance student-athlete life. I told participants they could skip any questions or discontinue the interview at any time. While the interview questions were standardized, I followed up on responses, and delved deeper into topics to gain an additional understanding. I ended data collection once additional interviews did not produce new insights, and theoretical saturation was attained (Charmaz, 2006).
Using emotional labor (Hochschild, 1979, 1983) as a sensitizing lens (Bulmer, 1979), a research assistant and I analyzed the data via latent-level thematic analysis. While this stage of data analysis was informed by emotional labor-framed literature, codes were not predetermined but emerged naturally from the data. In other words, I did not enter data analysis exclusively focused on isolating examples of emotional labor, but once this phenomenon was identified in the transcripts, I used constructs from the literature to develop a coding schema. Following Braun and Clarke (2006)’s technique, after transcribing the interviews, a research assistant and I independently reviewed the data, isolating instances of the emotional labor the athletes engaged in and how they managed their emotions and the demands of emotional labor. After comparing my codes and observations to those of my research assistant and talking through any discrepancies, I rereviewed the transcripts, using constant comparative techniques (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985), to refine the data and generate specific themes and subthemes across transcripts.
Results
Consistent with existing literature on the institutional rules governing student-athletes (e.g., Kimball, 2007), participants recounted that their lives and actions were largely governed by the university. As Darren, a baseball player, said: I always joke around and say [student-athletes] are prostitutes of the university … cause I mean, they’re paying for us to go to school but we basically do whatever we’re told, you know? … I don’t feel like they own us but they really do have a large say in our actions.
Theme 1: Emotional Experiences of College Student-Athletes
Similar to 911 call takers (Tracy & Tracy, 1998), the current study found college student-athletes lived an “emotionally charged” existence. Student-athletes commonly felt powerless, frustrated, and nervous.
Feeling powerless
Participants overwhelmingly reported feeling as though they had little control over their lives both on and off the field. On the field, this powerlessness originated from feeling uncertain as to whether and how much time participants would compete on any given day or whether they would sustain an injury. As playing time was completely at the coaches’ discretion, participants—even regular starters—were not sure whether they would actually appear in games. As Richie, who played football, explained, “When like I have a bad practice or something … you think, “Oh, I’m never gonna play, I’m never gonna get, I’m never gonna do this,” you know, ‘cause you got yelled at during practice or something.” Student-athletes also felt helpless about whether they might get injured. As Darren, a baseball player, stated, injury is “always a thought in the back of your head … so, you know like, you’re just kind of waiting to see when that happens, you know, when your arm might blow up on you.”
Off the field, because participants spent so much time training and competing in addition to taking a full load of classes and attending mandatory study halls, participants emphasized the lack of control they felt over their personal lives due to these time restrictions. As Shanazulu, who played football, explained, I had a couple of girls I became close to being in a relationship with, but I couldn’t lie to them. I said, “Look, I think you’re a great person, but I feel like if I get into something with you, I will not have the time to give to you the energy to put in like you will, and I don’t think it would be fair to you.” So I think [the lack of control of his time] prevented me from getting into anything real serious with a girl, or like a friend, anybody who I’m trying to make a personal relationship with. They say when you’re a professional you can say whatever you want, which is pretty much true, so, whenever you’re out there on your own playing for money, you can say what you want but right now they control us.
Feeling frustrated
Relatedly, many participants said they were frustrated not being able to say and do what they wanted due to the restrictions and higher standards imposed upon them by the university. For instance, Darren grappled with irritation regarding institutional social media regulations: I got in trouble for defending our football team against [the school’s] fans. I just said, “Until you’ve experienced the pressures of being Division I athlete, I think that you should watch what you say about these football players.” And I got a call at like six in the morning the next morning from our pitching coach saying, “What the hell are you doing?” I was like, “What do you mean what am I doing?” He was like, “You tweeted something,” and I was like, “Yeah?” And he goes, “You can’t do that” and I was like, “I have friends on that team, like I can defend them if I want to.” He goes, “You can’t win, you won’t win,” and I’m just like, “I’m not trying to win, I’m just speaking my mind, you know?” I just thought it was ridiculous that he got mad at me for that. I can’t do nothing back! I gotta call the cops, you know … I mean, occasionally I go places—dudes like this small are running their mouth and I’m just looking at them like, “I wish I wasn’t an athlete” … So yeah, all that, the criticism is really frustrating, it is. And sometimes you wanna do something but you can’t. You just gotta learn how to take it and move on. Your body’s so drained that sometimes you don’t get a chance to be as social as you want to be, so it’s like you’re putting all your effort into like football and school work and making sure your grades are straight on top of, you know, making your girlfriend happy or you know making your family happy, Mom’s calling saying, “Why you ain’t call in a couple days?” You gotta explain to Mom what’s going on, um, friends ain’t seen you in a couple days, they wondering what’s going on. I mean it’s just like, sometimes it just gets overwhelming. One thing that really kills me is that my mom works for an airline company, and so we get like flight benefits …. And so the past, like, while I’ve been in college my sister’s been to like, Turkey, Spain, Paris. My parents have been to like Hawaii, Caribbean Islands, just a lot places and I’ve missed out of all of them, so it’s kind of a bummer. I hate feeling like, I hate making bad grades. And when I see, when I get that [grade] back, I get more frustrated, like, ‘cause I wanna do well in the class, but [the coaches are] demanding more out of you, you know. So you will just drain from that then you also got to try to find a way to find the same energy for your grades so it’s just frustrating at times, to be honest. It is very frustrating.
Feeling nervous
Nervousness was another emotion participants experienced, particularly with respect to feeling anxious about losing a game or performing badly in school. Darren explained the pressure to win “makes you nervous and you’re not yourself. I mean, of course you always wanna win, like as a competitor you wanna win. But whenever you feel like you have to win, it changes the way you play and you tense up and nobody can play baseball tense.” This nervousness also extended into academics. Aiden felt anxiety about being unable to achieve her academic goals. As she explained: [Student-athletes] are so time consumed that I mean, it’s really hard, like I always wanna make above a 3.0. That’s my goal and it’s really hard to like make that and like my parents push me to get that and if I don’t, they’re disappointed in me, so like having to do well in school and academics is just a pressure in itself, I feel like. When I’m in a class I gotta be careful because I know if I said one thing, they already got that whole mindset towards us already, yeah, so I’m scared. I don’t want to give them any reason to like, if I’m struggling to give me that C or like a B or something on the edge, so I wanna be on my best behavior.
Theme 2: Institutionally Mandated Emotional Expressions
Expressing mental toughness
Despite participants’ internal feelings, they reported having to outwardly display mental toughness, particularly involving injury and performance. For instance, Adam reported that coaches constantly told them to not worry about getting injured because, “If you worry about it you play scared and if you play scared you play poorly. As an athlete, it goes back to mental toughness, that’s just not something you think about. If it happens, well, we’ll deal with it.” Adam continued: I hate to sound cliché, but you just kind of learn and adapt. We can’t control what people say about us, we can’t control what people assume about us, we can’t control what the media writes about us. We can control what we do and so that’s kind of how you go about it. I just use it as motivation to go out and work extra hard and you can’t take it as pressure ‘cause if you take it as pressure, you’re gonna kind of fall into a hole and you’re gonna stress yourself out more than you really need to. My uncle was watching one of my games and he died watching TV. You know, I had to deal with that, I couldn’t go to his funeral because you know it was kind of hard on me and then I had to go play a game the next week. So I couldn’t go, I couldn’t, you know what I’m saying, say my goodbyes or whatnot, I couldn’t, you know, talk to anybody on the other side of my family, you know, cause I had to focus on the game I didn’t really want to think about it. I had to not br[eak] down and cry. My grandpa had to have a stem cell transplant … and my grandparents basically helped my mom raise me so it’s hard not being able to go home and help with that or be around when that happens and having to basically not know what’s going on so that I can focus for the Final Four, which is very hard ‘cause my mom was on the phone and she didn’t know I was listening and she was talking about how they had to shave his head and things like that and that was hard, to try to focus on that and be like, “Okay, now I have to focus on the Final Four right now.”
Expressing gratitude
Participants learned, largely indirectly from teammates, to try to rationalize their lack of control and suppress their sense of frustration by feeling grateful for the opportunity to be a student-athlete. As Aiden acknowledged, “Sometimes I would love to go downtown and have a good time with my friends, but I mean … those are the sacrifices that I gave up ‘cause I wanted to come play softball here, so …” Additionally, as Steven Henry said, despite its drawbacks, the benefits of playing football outweighed the costs: … Without football I don’t think I would have actually had a chance to go to college. You know, cause my family wasn’t like financially like stable; we didn’t have a lot of money, so it was like the fact that football gave me an opportunity to go to any college in the United States … I mean, really, it’s like, when you get down or whatever [think], I’m living the dream, like, you know, people would kill to have their college paid for and just work out. I mean I’m getting paid to work out and go to school.
Theme 3: Communicatively Coping With Emotional Labor
Participants openly acknowledged the pressure of constantly being in the public eye and having their emotions regulated. As Darren explained, whenever student-athletes were in public, “You never feel like you’re completely off.” While participants were able to express university-sanctioned emotions, managing the expectations and pressure and having to suppress feelings of powerlessness and frustration were not always easy. In order to cope with the demands of emotional labor, participants relied on backstage communication with their teammates.
Communicating backstage
Participants overwhelmingly reported that one of the few contexts they could truly relax their guard and be themselves was in private (backstage) with their teammates and other student-athlete friends. Consequentially, participants primarily turned to teammates to vent and recharge and express their true selves without restrictions. As Shanazulu explained, around his teammates, “We all can be goofy and like silly if we want to … we all make jokes …. Like guys in the locker room all get each other to be goofy as much as we want.” Trace, who played football, said he presented a different face in public versus private: “In public I’m probably a lot more serious and a lot more, um, put together, kind of mature. When I’m in private with my friends I loosen up and get goofy and crack jokes and say stupid stuff.” Similarly, Aiden said, “When I’m with my teammates I can let loose ‘cause it’s just us and we’re in private … With my teammates I am myself; we are kinda crazy together. That’s for sure.” Similar to the experiences of 911 call takers, joking and laughing backstage helped participants manage emotional labor demands and combat burnout.
In addition to serving as a forum for participants to let loose, a key component of backstage communication involved social support, also consistent with previous emotional labor studies (e.g., Tracy & Tracy, 1998). Shazazulu described the emotional support common on the football team, particularly with respect to helping one another stay positive after encountering criticism: If a guy heard something on the media or [the media] said something bad about them, we’ll be like, “Don’t worry about it, Bro, we all went through that, Man. Don’t worry about it, Man. They’re just people who don’t understand what’s going on in here.” So you’re just trying to be there for each other and help each other through it. And I think that’s one thing when things get hard outside, of course the coaches get hard on us, but we come together as a family and I think that it’s helped us over the years, that common bond, like, coming together and making sure that we can, know we can work through with them and get through it. So I think that’s really helped us out over the years.
Discussion
Through interviews of D-I student-athletes, this investigation uncovered that participants were expected to abide by institutional display rules, which governed their outward expression and behaviors. This study extends emotional labor to a novel realm and finds that, although student-athletes are not awarded a salary and not considered university employees, in order to retain their position as student-athletes, participants engaged in emotional labor via expressing mental toughness and gratitude, despite experiencing powerlessness, nervousness, and fear. Consistent with other types of emotion labor workers, the participants in this study managed their emotions by relying on backstage communication to cope with emotional labor demands.
The current study showcases the additional burden and potential harm that college athletes must shoulder that has not been examined in the sports reform literature—the communicative work (Donovan-Kicken, Tollison, & Goins, 2012) involved in emotional labor. Unlike most employees who perform emotion labor, who can freely express their emotions when they are not on the job, student-athletes’ emotions are constantly regulated. Because of their high-profile status, student-athletes have to manage their impressions not only when they are playing their sport but throughout their daily lives. In this way, similar to a cruise ship, the university serves as a total institution for the participants. Unlike cruise ship employees, however, many student-athletes have an online following and are considered minor celebrities, heightening the need for student-athletes to enact and suppress required emotions in every avenue of their lives. In this way, student-athletes not only have very limited control over their time as they balance being an elite athlete with being a full-time student but of their feelings and emotions. They have to act appropriately at all times or they could be subject to repercussions. Additionally, as opposed to employees in other industries, who could choose to quit their jobs and potentially work in fields that require less emotional labor, some participants were only able to attend college due to their athletic scholarship, making their sports participation involuntarily if they desired a college education (Simons et al., 2007). Furthermore, college athletes are not awarded vacation days, and they have to live on campus. Compared to workers who traditionally must perform emotional labor, student-athletes have even less power because they have so much at stake.
While existing literature on pressures facing student-athletes, especially at the D-1 level, has detailed the stressors these athletes face, the current study is the first to explore how student-athletes manage the institutional display rules with which they are also expected to comply. The investigation uncovered the additional demands of the online and off-line identity and communication work participants must engage in to control their emotions. For participants, emotional labor compounded the pressure they already felt as student-athletes—the expectation to excel on the field, in the classroom, and act “perfect” at all times. Consistent with other employees in occupations mandating the performance of emotional labor (Tracy, 2005; Tracy & Tracy, 1998), participants coped with emotional labor demands through backstage communication with their colleagues (teammates). Backstage communication is even more critical and prevalent among athletes than in traditional organizational cultures because athletes have limited opportunities to escape emotional labor work and prescriptions. In this safe space, away from public view, student-athletes reported they could be themselves without the confines of emotional regulation. Backstage, participants were able to make jokes, laugh, and provide and receive emotional support, which not only gave them a break from identity management and allowed them to stay true to their real selves but also enabled them to collectively manage the rigors of emotional labor while juggling their dual scholar and athlete roles. Interestingly, the investigation not only uncovered the ways student-athletes provided social support to one another but revealed participants were savvy enough to realize that the provision of this support was necessary to help their peers navigate emotional labor demands. Social support among athletes generally has been studied in the context of coping with injury (Rees, Mitchell, Evans, & Hardy, 2010), not in helping others managing communication, a possible contribution of this work.
Practical Applications
While many participants acknowledged they were aware they would be relinquishing some autonomy when they signed on to play D-1 athletics, they all seemed surprised by how closely their on- and off-line actions were scrutinized and regulated. College is a stressful time for all undergraduate students (Brougham, Zail, Mendoza, & Miller, 2009), whose identities are still forming (Arnett, 2000) and who must manage considerable uncertainty. For high-profile athletes at a highly lucrative sports program (Gaines, 2014), these stresses are exacerbated by the pressure to perform not only in class and on the field but emotional labor.
This study’s findings suggest that university athletics departments should better prepare incoming freshmen for the expectations and rigors of emotional labor. After all, these young adults can be quickly elevated to celebrity status without necessarily possessing the maturity to manage the constant scrutiny and pressure. Student-athletes should not only be instructed about the institutional display rules and the reasoning behind them, but given an opportunity to develop and take ownership of the rules, a practice Sanderson (2011) recommends athletic departments adopt with respect to developing social media policies. In this way, student-athletes could internalize institutional display rules more easily.
As part of a commitment to helping student-athletes learn how to cope with the demands of constantly being in the spotlight, student-athletes should be encouraged and given opportunities (i.e., more downtime) to rely on one another for social support. While the current study did not specifically measure burnout from emotional labor, student-athletes, just like workers who must abide by institutional display rules as a job requirement, need people they can rely on and trust and a place where they can be themselves and decompress. Relatedly, as emotional labor involves a merging of self and work (Wharton, 1999), identity confusion can result—especially for athletes who are emerging adults in the midst of developing their identities (Arnett, 2000). Universities should be sure to provide student-athletes with venues in which they can express and develop their true identities so that they do not lose their genuine selves (Hochschild, 1983).
Limitations and Future Directions
This study has several limitations and future directions. First, as with all qualitative research, the findings cannot be generalized. It is also possible that students at a less high-profile university, or students who were not marquee players, may not engage in the same types of emotional labor performances and management. Several future research directions exist. A forthcoming study could quantitatively measure positive and negative emotional labor-related consequences (e.g., burnout, satisfaction) experienced by student-athletes throughout college to determine the extent to which emotional labor affects student-athletes and how these effects may evolve. Additional research could also examine whether student-athletes’ individual differences (e.g., levels of politeness or self-monitoring) are correlated with their perception and management of display rules and emotions as well as emotional labor consequences. It would also be fruitful to uncover the extent to which student-athletes’ performance of emotional labor can attenuate negative student-athlete stereotypes and combat potential discrimination and stigma.
Conclusion
This study demonstrated that emotional labor is not only required of paid employees in the workforce but amateur athletes at the D-1 level. The investigation provided valuable insight into the ways in which student-athletes experienced emotion, uncovering that while they commonly felt powerless, frustrated, and nervous over the lack of control in their lives, they were expected to conform to university-sanctioned emotions of mental toughness and gratitude. Turning backstage, where they could be themselves around their teammates, enabled participants to cope with emotional labor demands and support one another.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.