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“No pain, no gain.”
“Play through the pain.”
“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
Any young person who has participated in sports has likely heard, or maybe even been told, one of these phrases at least once in their athletic career. As a former high school athlete, I’m well aware of how easily these social pressures in sports are engraved in the mind of a young athlete.
This mindset can start a dangerous cycle: Enduring pain, risking severe injury, and sometimes being prescribed opioids.
Opioids are medications prescribed by doctors to treat persistent and severe pain. But it seems the alarming stories of opioid addictions and overdoses aren’t enough to deter some coaches from pushing their athletes to the point of needing to be prescribed opioids.
Coaches pushing their students past their physical limit remains a serious concern in sports.
Athletic trainer Rocco Perez described his time at San Jose State University when a football player repeatedly dislocated his shoulder. His coaches brushed it off and insisted that he keep practicing, telling Perez, “It’s fine. Just tape it. It’s okay. Just brace it.”
Eventually, the athlete needed to get reconstructive surgery because his shoulder was no longer able to stay in place.
Stories like this reflect the high injury rate and toxic sports culture. Football players and wrestlers have the highest rate of severe injuries among all high school athletes, as they participate in some of the highest-contact sports.
According to the American Journal of Public Health, football players and wrestlers are almost 50% more likely to use prescription opioids for nonmedical uses than their peers. And it’s not a coincidence that gymnastics and cheerleading, the top causes of female sports-related injuries, account for less than 6% of the total opioid usage, as reported by Mountain Springs Recovery.
Male-dominated sports often have a culture of pushing their athletes to the point of severe injury, which can lead to surgery being required, and going hand in hand with being medically prescribed opioids.
Especially for male athletes, an explanation for this connection between sports and opioids may be societal pressure. From a young age, boys are taught that strength and endurance are everything and that showing weakness is a vulnerability. We’ve seen these characteristics exemplified in toxic sports environments.
Those environments also tend to glorify victory, having young children believe that winning should be prioritized above all else, including health.
Consequently, we’ve seen how these mentalities manifest later on. Once athletes, especially high school athletes, are prescribed opioids for pain usage, addiction creeps in the shadows of unsupervised usage. They might use them to counter severe pain at the beginning, but after the short-term necessity, any small pain may be reason enough to continue using these drugs, and after that, there may not be a reason at all.
That’s how addiction develops. As stated by the Arthroscopy Association of North America, that’s why lifetime opioid use rates in high school athletes are up 28% to 46%, which contributes to the 22 teenagers between 14 and 18 per week in 2023 who lost their lives due to a drug overdose, as reported by UCLA Health.
Coaches, and sometimes parents, while well-meaning, neglect the fact that what is “normalized” in sports culture is, in reality, damaging.
Pushing their bodies to the point of breakage only has the potential to tip these athletes over the edge of drug misuse. And with the fentanyl crisis being on the rise, no high school student should even be on the cliff to begin with.
This article was written as part of a program to educate youth and others about Alameda County’s opioid crisis, prevention and treatment options. The program is funded by the Alameda County Behavioral Health Department and the grant is administered by Three Valleys Community Foundation.
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