The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Sport: Mental Health Implications on Athletes, Coaches and Support Staff

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Background

With the cancellation of, for example, the Tokyo Olympic Paralympic Games, and the European Soccer Championships, the year 2020 will be recalled more readily for the shifts in the sporting season as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic rather than examples of stellar sporting excellence. Restrictions on travel, physical activity, and mass gatherings because of COVID19 pandemic have had major implications for athletes and players, with restrictions of access to training venues, cancellation of events, and loss of earnings. These implications can have commensurate psychological consequences. In recent weeks, many resources have been made available on this topic, including direct interventions for athletes, and indirect for other stakeholders including coaches and parents. How athletes and partners in sport can collectively cope with such adversity is useful from a service provision perspective and instructive for elucidating our understanding of many topics including emotion regulation, coping skills, resilience, mental health stigma, and well-being strategies.

The goal of this Research Topic is to stimulate novel scientific accounts and perspectives on how sport performers, coaches, managers, sport science and medicine support personnel, and major stakeholders have been impacted and responded to the above challenges.
This Research Topic aims to offer athletes, coaches, support staff from across the sport-sciences and sport medicine field, sporting bodies, sport institutes, and international sporting bodies policymakers an evidence-based account of the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and the learning that has emerged, particularly with regard to effectively managing mental health of sporting populations in the face of future adversities.

Important subject areas of this Research Topic include:

• Individual, team, and interpersonal coping with the COVID-19 pandemic events;
• Risk factors of psychological distress at the athlete, team, interpersonal and organisational level (e.g., activity restriction and reduction of competitive events; individual vs team sports; aesthetic sport, weight bearing sports, etc.);
• Impact of mass media and social media on psychological attitudes and behaviours towards the COVID-19 challenges for athletes and sporting stakeholders;
• Coping as an athletic community during the pandemic (e.g., emotions, psychological burdens, anxiety, traumatic experiences, resilience, PTSD);
• Preventative and health-based psychological interventions for athletes including those without access to psychological support services;
• Clinical emergency protocols to manage mental health problems: evidence-based suggestions and recommendations to governments and policymakers;
• Role of athletes as ambassadors for compliance strategies during COVID-19 pandemic;
• Internet interventions, remote psychological support, mHealth-eHealth based treatments, psychology-oriented digital tools and apps in the COVID-19 emergency;
• Monitoring changes in psychological, behavioural and interpersonal responses to the COVID-19 emergency over time;
• Cross-cultural comparisons in responding to and coping with the COVID-19 emergency at the individual, family, and interpersonal levels.

Original research, data reports, case studies, theoretical perspectives, and commentaries are welcome.

***Due to the exceptional nature of the COVID-19 situation, Frontiers is waiving all article publishing charges for COVID-19 related research in this Research Topic submitted in 2020.***

Keywords: clinical psychology, health psychology, resilience, emergency strategies, social psychology, mass reactions, COVID-19, coronavirus disease, sport psychology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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