NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland – After the first Scholarly Colloquium on Intercollegiate Athletics in 2008 determined that intercollegiate athletics was ripe for scholarly research, the sequel at this year’s NCAA Convention in Washington, D.C., focused on specific topics such research could target.

The 2009 Colloquium – titled “Paying the Price: Is Excellence on Sports Compatible with Good Health?” – presented issues on student-athlete health and safety, reviewing factors from injury rates to the ethics of recovery from those injuries and the phenomenon of athlete burnout as inhibitors to student-athlete well-being.

Dan Gould, director of the Institute of the Study of Youth Sports and a professor in the department of kinesiology at Michigan State, talked about the burnout factor in Tuesday’s session, urging further attention to the youth-sports culture and more effort to educate coaches and student-athletes alike about recognizing the sources – and possible prevention – of athlete burnout.

“Studies have shown that it generally takes 10 years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to develop one’s talent in any field,” Gould said. “Sport is included in that, so it’s a long journey for these athletes. While the intent of athletics is educational, many student-athletes are taking a more professionalized approach, even in Divisions II and III.”

Gould said while there is no universally accepted definition (or measurement or diagnostic criteria) of burnout, it essentially is a physical, emotional and social withdrawal from a formerly enjoyable activity. “It is characterized by emotional and physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment and sport devaluation,” he said.

Among the sources are overload (athletes taking on more than they are accustomed to), over-training and “staleness” (the result of overloading and overtraining that produces a deteriorated performance).

Burnout is hard to study, Gould said, because people who are burned out typically are no longer there. But he did emphasize the need to research the problem at its roots, typically the youth-sport demographic. “Parents in many cases are trying to get their kids year-round training,” Gould said. “By the time they get to the NCAA level, these kids already have a lot of mileage.”

Coaches and student-athletes themselves also need to recognize that burnout is real, and that it is a threat to performance. Gould advocated Web-based resources – in essence a “science of winning” project that would offer best practices on training, stress management, recovery and nutrition as it relates to athletics performance. The NCAA national office staff already has begun to work on that concept through a multi-departmental approach to provide online resources along those lines.

Jay Coakley from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, one of two reactors to Gould’s presentation, said the NCAA should convince coaches that preventing burnout is in their best interests as well, even though as Coakley said, coaches are sometimes reluctant to permit analysis of the environments in which train their student-athletes train.

“Burnout is an organizational issue,” he said. “We need to study the social context in which burnout is more likely. When people with ability find themselves in a context in which they are less likely to be creative, they are more likely to burn out. We need to focus on the social context of teams and athletics departments in which there are instances of burnout so we can change those contexts.”

If burnout is a threat to winning, so is injury. Ronald Zernicke, director of the Bone and Joint Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation Center at the University of Michigan, focused his keynote presentation on the injury epidemic in sports, particularly with concussions and anterior cruciate ligament injuries (especially in women). Both have received more research attention than burnout has, but prevention of such injuries continues to be elusive.

Zernicke emphasized education and training, with the latter not only targeting prevention but also enhanced performance (a good response, he said, to coaches who complain that the training detracts from practice time).

As for prevention tactics, Holly Silvers from the Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Research Foundation and one of the reactors to Zernicke’s paper, advocated a training program (available at www.aclprevent.com) that provides a multi-disciplinary approach that addresses the fact that women run differently from men (less upright), land more shallow (their knees typically do not bend as much as men’s) and activate hamstrings more slowly than males. (A presentation on ACL injuries also was provided last year on NCAA.org.)

A two-year study of the prevention program showed a significant decrease in the number of ACLs with those who used the program.

Wednesday’s keynote speakers are Matt Mitten of the Marquette University Law School, who will address legal and ethical considerations related to athletic performance, and Mariah Burton Nelson, the executive director of the American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation and a former basketball student-athlete at Stanford. Burton will present a paper called “The Damage I Have Done to Myself: Physical Intelligence and Lack of Same Among College Athletes.”

The papers from the four keynote speakers at the Colloquium will be published in the spring 2009 edition of the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport.

Wednesday’s Colloquium session also features a juried collection of “free papers” from scholarly researchers. It is the first time the Editorial and Advisory Board has presented such an opportunity, since last year’s program featured only the four keynote speakers and their reactors.