Social influences: the effects of party culture on college athletes
If you are in college or have graduated from college, chances are you’ve heard or have been witness to one version or another of an infamous college party story, whether it’s “my friend got so drunk that he punched a hole in the wall and had to go to the hospital” or “my friend drank so much that she was glued to the toilet until 1 in the morning.”
Across the country, there are 490,000 student athletes at the collegiate level. College athletes are held to a higher standard than regular students in terms of nutrition and responsibility. Despite this higher standard in regards to their mind and body, college athletes unsuprisingly still engage in party culture on campus, including drinking. This begs the question: How much do student athletes drink, and does it effect their ability to perform?
On your mark, get set, DRINK!
Compared to their non-athlete counterparts, college athletes are more likely to binge drink and engage in heavier alcohol use. Many wonder how and why college athletes drink so much, especially when they need to manage their body and mind in order to compete at a high level. Team culture is an essential component of any locker room and any sport. For many teams, engaging in group partying and drinking is a way of bonding. However, the added aspect of team pressure results in althetes engaging in more dangerous drinking habits than non-athletes. Binge drinking is defined as 4 or more drinks for women, and 5 or more drinks for men. The results of Binge drinking are dangerous, and include dizziness, loss of coordination, diarrhea, vomiting, lack of judgment, or even passing out. Younger college athletes, especially freshmen, may feel more pressured to “fit in” with their older teammates, and this may lead them to be more willing to engage in dangerous drinking behaviors.
Ask any high school student what they look forward to in college, and chances are you will often hear the words “independence” and “parties.” Ask any high school parent what they fear most about their child going to college, and chances are you will often hear the words “responsibility” and “parties.” For a student fresh out of high school and out the of reach of constant watch from their parents, college can present almost “too” much freedom. Quite frankly, you can do whatever you want, often without immediate consequence. You want to skip classes for the day? Go ahead. You want to party on a Monday night, take a test the next day, and do it all again? Right this way. Even for athletes, the social scene that colleges present can be distracting, and more importantly can derail their goals as an athlete if they don’t quickly learn how to balance school, sports, and social life.
Numbers don’t lie
Since 1985, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, also known as the NCAA has conducted research on student athletes regarding substance abuse and alcohol consumption. In a 2012 survey, the NCAA prompted students athletes across the country with the question: “When you drink alcohol, typically how many drinks do you have in one sitting?” In response, of the female athletes that responded, 31.9% (division I), 32.6% (division II), and 37.8% (division III) reported drinking more than 4 drinks, which is considered binge drinking. For males athletes, 39.6% (division I and II) and 50.4% (division III) reported having more than 5 drinks. This means that on average, 3 in 10 females, and 4 to 5 in 10 males reported binge drinking. While these numbers raise eyebrows, the following results are eye popping. When prompted by the same question, 15.5% of division I male athletes, 16.8% of division II male athletes, and 20.4% of division III mslr athletes answered 10+ drinks. Consuming this amount of alcohol is well past the “binge drinking” category, and can lead to a range of disastrous consequences.
Your body is a temple
Most college athletes have dreams of playing at the professional level. However, poor drinking habits damage an athletes’ physical and cognitive capacity, making it near impossible to succeed not only at the next level, but at the collegiate level they are currently in. From an athletic point of view, heavy alcohol usage can affect motor skills, hydration status, aerobic performance, as well as aspects of the recovery process, influencing subsequent training and competitions. These negative effects of heavy alcohol usage are the difference between being an average athlete and being a star athlete with potential to jump to the pro level.
Alcohol doesn’t only affect your performance when you are awake, it also affects your sleep. In order for athletes to perform at their maximum ability, they need adequate amounts of quality sleep to properly enhance muscle recovery. Consuming alcohol at night before going to bed, which is when most college students consume alcohol, has been shown to disrupt restorative sleep cycles throughout the night, which results in a decrease in the overall quality of sleep. To make matters worse, athletes who are out enjoying a night of drinking and partying are more likely to stay out later, which results in them going to bed at a later time. This reduces the athletes’ total duration of sleep, and this combined with the negative effects of alcohol on sleep quality is detrimental to an athlete’s success, especially if these habits are repeated over and over again. Athletes, like any other person, can also fall victim to the dreaded hangover, especially the morning after consuming large amounts of alcohol. Hangovers leave an athlete feeling fatigued and drained earlier during a workout than they normally would, leading to a decrease in quality of training and performance.
In order to make it to the pro level, athletes have to not only be physically gifted, but they have to be dedicated to improving their craft on a daily basis. Constantly drinking will make you weaker in the weight room and slower on the field, and while you’re waking up hungover with a headache, your competition is waking up clear headed ready to attack the day and take their talents to the next level.
Your mind matters
When college athletes engage in dangerous drinking habits such as binge drinking, it is often a result of social pressure. However, some athletes turn to the bottle as an escape from reality. Perhaps the most concerning aspect of athletes engaging in dangerous levels of alcohol consumption are the ties between alcohol and mental health disorders. Athletes are faced with a great amount of stressors on a daily basis: from waking up for 6 a.m lifts to keeping up in school academically. In other words, athletes are constantly balancing both being a student and being an athlete simultaneously. Combine the seemingly neverending amount of stress that athletes endure with unhealthy coping mechanisms such as binge drinking, and you get a disastrous result. Higher levels of alcohol misuse are correlated with an increase in depressive and other psychiatric symptoms. Alcohol can be a source of short term mood elevation and stress relief, which is why people feel that they are “more open and talkative” when they are under the influence of alcohol. However, the dangers of alcohol usage become prominent when an athlete depends of the use alcohol in order to supress feelings of sadness and stress. Not only does the alcohol usage harm the athlete physically and mentally, the athlete is never properly medically diagnosed and given appropriate medical care.
One factor is often overlooked is in regards to student athletes is socioeconomic background. 47.1% of NCAA Division I football players are black, despite making up only 13.2% of the U.S. population. Research investigating the top football recruits from the past ten years revealed that black football players come from hometowns that have a lower socioeconomic status compares to the hometowns of their white teammates. If a student athlete comes from a lower socioeconomic background, than they may feel like they need to perform well in order to help their family and friends, and that if they don’t suceed than they are a failure. This amount of mental pressure could cause an athlete to look for something outside of their sport to help them ease their mind, and if the athlete turns to alcohol as a source of stress relieve, then not only could they be putting their collegiate career in jeopardy, but they can also be destroying their brain.
The short term cognitive effects of rapid and heavy alcohol usage are a result of alcohol’s impact on the brain’s communication and information-processing pathways. Binge drinking has negative immediate mental effects, which include confusion and a decline in decision-making ability. Binge drinking can also lead to alcohol poisoning, which can result in seizures, permanent cognitive impairment, and even death. Repeated episodes of alcohol abuse have detrimental effects on the brain. The hippocampus is a complex structure in your brain that has a major role in learning and memory. Alcohol abuse can lead to shrinkage in the hippocampus, which can result in permanent memory loss. Alcohol abuse can also lead to the development of an alchol use disorder (AUD), which may sometimes be reffered to as alcoholism. As an athlete, learning and remembering specific plays or schemes is key to overall performance, and alcohol abuse prevents an althete from perfoming at their best, or even performing at all.
Michael Phelps is recognized by many as the greatest Olympian in history. A famous olympic swimmer, he has won 23 gold metals, 3 silver metals and 2 bronze metals for team USA. What less people know is that Michael Phelps has struggled with mental health issues, and has been arrested multiple times for DUI. “I’ve seen the darkest of the dark, and there are days when I didn’t want to be here,” Phelps said in an interview with CNBC. “Being able to come out of the other side and just to work and learn things about me that I never knew, I didn’t want to know at that point — you know, I think it changed my life,” he says. While Phelps was still able to perform despite his addiction, he was never able to drink away his problems, and to this day he struggles with his mental health.
What can be done?
Associations such as the NCAA are working on preventative measures to better educate college athletes on the dangers of engaging in substance abuse and poor drinking habits. However, it is clear that the tactics of the past are inneffective in properly alerting college athletes about the negative effects of alcohol on the mind and body. Think to yourself, “last time I attended a presentation about drugs and alcohol, did I pay attention, or did I turn to my friend next to me and exchange eye rolls and smirks?” Most likely your answer is more line with the exchange of eye rolls and smirks. More importantly, as an attendee of those lengthy, boring presentation, you aren’t at fault for this response. When told what to do, or not to do, young adults are more likely to look the other way, especially if an older adult is presenting the information. As college students, we feel like we “know it all” and when an older adult tries to tell us otherwise, we are reminded of our parents’ lectures, which causes us to double down on our feeling of independence and figuring out the world by ourselves. In my opinion, the downfall of current efforts to educate student athlete about alcohol awareness is the form of presentation. Slideshows that students are shown throughout our high school years and into college aren’t interactive, and result in the student tuning them out. In order to get college athletes to understand the magnitude of the effects of engaging in unhealthy behaviors, you need to utilize interactive programs that capture the students’ attention.
For an athlete struggling with a mental disorder such as depression, it can be difficult for them to reach out to their teammates, coaches, or family about their struggles. However, something that makes the experience of being a college athlete so rewarding is the bonds that you make with your teammates and coaches. Teammates can look out for each other by checking in on a teammate who has been acting different than they normally do, and making sure that they are doing well mentally. Athletes can also reach out to their coaches if they feel like their teammate needs assistance that they as a college student can’t provide, such as conversations with a professional. Spending countless hours with your teammates builds an unbreakable bond that is only explained by the meaning of family itself, and as athletes, it is our responsibility to look after our brothers and sisters who we shed blood, sweat, and tears with.
