Joy is a Non-Negotiable

Issue 144- Jason Payne, CMPC

A few years ago, I was brought in midseason to consult with a team in crisis. 25 percent of its roster walked away from the sport mid-season.

I made assumptions about what I would find when I started working with the team. I expected a toxic environment that left these young athletes little choice.

I was wrong.

The culture was relatively healthy, although morale was low. Athletes weren't leaving due to injury. They weren’t being cut. They liked their coach and got along with their teammates. The grind had worn them down. Many had played twelve months a year for over half their lives, and they weren’t yet twenty.

They had lost their love of the game.

When I started talking to them, I expected to hear about politics, about playing time, about a coach who had pushed them too hard. None of that came up. What came up, every time, was a version of the same sentence. I don’t enjoy this anymore. I don't love the game. I don’t know when it stopped, but I know it stopped.

This is a conversation almost no coach training program prepares coaches to navigate.

For most of my career, joy was the variable I assumed would take care of itself. I built practices that were demanding. I held standards. I tracked sleep, conditioning, film study, and weight-room hours. I had a checklist for every part of an athlete’s development. None of those checklists ever asked the question that turned out to matter most.

Do you still love this?

I have, more than once in my coaching career, kicked an athlete out of the gym during the off-season. Not because they were a problem. Because they were grinding themselves into paste. Training at a level that guaranteed an injury, and the part of them I was trying to protect was not only their body. The culture of sport had taught them that the extra hour was what separated the good from the great. They were wrong, and the version of them that would walk back into our gym in October sometimes depended on whether I could get them out of it in June.

The most public versions of this story are the ones we are familiar with.

Naomi Osaka withdrew from Roland Garros in 2021 and wrote that she had suffered long bouts of depression since the US Open three years earlier. She was twenty-three, world number two, a four-time Grand Slam champion.

Simone Biles withdrew from the Tokyo Olympic team final and talked about the twisties, but the deeper layer of what she said was about the cost of being expected to perform the impossible for a decade. She was twenty-four, the most decorated gymnast in history.

Andrew Luck walked into a press conference at twenty-nine, three days before the start of the NFL season, and said the most honest thing I have ever heard an athlete say about elite performance. It’s taken the joy out of this game. The cycle of pain, surgery, rehab, pain, etc., had drained the joy from a sport he loved. He also walked away from $58 million in remaining contract value and as much as $ 200 million in potential career earnings. The decision could not have been about money.

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What links these three is not weakness. It is what happens when the sport is no longer worth the cost.

Thomas Raedeke, who developed the most widely used athlete burnout measure in sport psychology, calls this the sport devaluation dimension. When the athlete begins to feel that the sport is no longer worth it, the slide has begun. Devaluation shows up months, sometimes years, before the athlete is willing to say it out loud. By the time they tell you, the joy has usually been gone for a long time.

Here is the formula I now use with the coaches I work with.

Performance = Skill × Energy × Recovery × Joy.

The first three variables are the ones most coaches track. The fourth is the load-bearing wall most coaches ignore. Strip it out, and the others deteriorate much faster. You can extract effort from a tired athlete for a season. An athlete who has dealt with injuries can fight through for a season. You cannot extract effort from an athlete who no longer loves what they are doing. Not for long. Not in the moments that matter.

The off-season is when this work happens.

Most coaches treat June through August as a tactical window. Lift, run, refine the mechanics, watch film, get faster. All of that is real. None of it matters if the athlete arrives in August less in love with the sport than they were in May. The strongest predictor of next season’s performance is not how much your athletes lifted in July. It is whether they arrive at preseason still wanting to be there.

Three moves for this week.

Ask the question. In your next conversation with each of your athletes, somewhere in the middle of the catch-up, ask them what they have been doing this summer that has made them happy. Listen to whether the sport comes up. If the sport doesn’t come up for any of them, that is information about the health of joy in your program.

Audit the calendar. Look at the days between now and the start of preseason. How many of them belong entirely to your athletes? Not skill work disguised as off-time. Actual days when they are not your athletes. If the number is zero, find some.

Get specific about what restores joy. When you sit down with your returning athletes in August, do not ask whether they are excited for the season. Ask them when, during the off-season, they feel the most connected to why they play. Most of them have never been asked. Most of them will tell you. The answers will surprise you, and they will quietly redesign your preseason.

A note on the most committed athletes, the ones who do not stop in the summer because they cannot.

These are the ones most at risk. They are the athletes who feel guilty when they take a week off because they are convinced that a week off is what separates the elite from everyone else. They are wrong. The high-profile cases and the research say the same thing. Sustained effort without sustained joy produces athletes who arrive at twenty-five having played their last meaningful game. Sometimes earlier.

If you have an athlete on your roster who cannot take a week off without anxiety, that is not commitment. That is the early warning sign.

Joy is the variable you were not trained to coach.

Embrace it anyway.

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Are you or your athletes struggling to be their best?

Let's find a solution together.

I help coaches thrive.

As a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and a basketball coach with 25 years of experience, I understand the barriers to peak performance for both you and your athletes.

I would love to help you or your team build a competitive advantage. Here are a few ways I can help:

• Consult with your team or coaching staff
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Book a Free Discovery Call

If you’re feeling the weight of expectations, pressure, or burnout, you don’t have to figure this out alone.

A discovery call is simply a chance to talk through your season, your goals, and your process with another coach who’s been there. No pitch. No obligation. Just a meaningful conversation.

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Shoot me an email at jasonpayne@evolutionmpc.com. I love talking about coaching and seeing how I can help you.

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Thanks for reading, and have a great week.