Protecting Young Athletes From Harmful Body Talk
A teenager is cut from a team without warning. When they ask why, the answer they’re given is about their body — their size, their weight. There’s no conversation about development or follow-up. Just the sense that their body is the reason they no longer belong.
That kind of moment lands hard. Especially at 16, when sport isn’t just something you do — it’s part of how you understand yourself, how you value yourself. When a decision is tied directly to your body, it’s hard not to take it personally. Confused and embarrassed, the athlete looks for somewhere to make sense of it. Like many young people, they turn to the internet.
At first, that feels reasonable. Spaces labeled “sport psychology” or “athlete development” sound like places where care and perspective should live. You’d expect adults there to slow things down, to help put one experience into context. To remind a young athlete that this was one moment, one opinion, in an entire sport journey.
But that isn’t always what happens.
Instead, the advice often goes straight back to the body. Train more. Lean out. Change something. Push through. Even when it’s meant to be helpful, advice like this can quietly reinforce the idea that the cut was deserved — that the body really was the problem.
For a teenager, that message can sink in quickly. Adolescents are still learning how to separate what happens to them from who they are. When rejection is explained through body size, it can turn into a lasting belief: if my body were different, I would be acceptable. That belief doesn’t stay on the court. It follows young people into how they eat, how they train, how they carry themselves, and how they see themselves. And that doesn’t help anyone — least of all the young athlete.
There’s also a line that gets crossed here. Conversations about weight, training, and nutrition carry real risk for young people. These conversations require care, context, and adults who can take responsibility for the impact of what they say. Anonymous advice online doesn’t offer that. Even well-intentioned comments can cause harm when there’s no one qualified to monitor, track, and adjust support in real life.
What’s missing in these moments isn’t toughness or motivation. It’s containment. Young athletes need help slowing things down and understanding that one decision doesn’t define their future or their worth — in sport or beyond. They need to hear that sport has room for many bodies, that development isn’t linear or uniform, and that they are deserving of better, more ethical care from adults in positions of power.
Most of all, they need real people. Parents. Older siblings. Aunties and uncles. Teachers. Elders. Coaches who care. Mentors. Adults who know them, who care about their well-being, and who can sit with disappointment without immediately turning it into a problem to fix.
In reading this young person’s story, I felt moved to be that voice of care and redirection. I felt deep empathy for a 16-year-old who was just trying to make it in a sport they loved. I felt anger toward the national-level coach who made such a harmful comment to an impressionable mind. I felt panic reading the endless advice from self-identified “professionals” telling the athlete to “get back into the gym,” “start working out,” or “eat better.” And I felt a responsibility — as an Ontario psychotherapist in training — to redirect harmful thought patterns and connect this athlete with care that is accountable, culturally informed, and rooted in community.
I was also reminded of my own experience as a young high-performance athlete being told that my body was the problem. Moments like this are exactly why I started Sport ExtendED.
Sport shapes more than performance. It shapes identity. And moments like this — moments where a young person is told their body is the reason they don’t belong — are moments that stay with them.
Young athletes don’t need strangers to tell them how to change their bodies.
They need trusted, qualified adults who know how to protect them when sport falls short.