What Competitive Sports Teach Kids About Their Worth — and How to Undo It
Francesca Reicherter's mental health struggles didn't start with a diagnosis or a single traumatic event. They started at five years old, in a competitive cheerleading gym, being weighed on a scale to see who was small enough to be lifted into the air.
"Right off the bat, I was kind of taught that growing is bad," she recalls. "That your body changing is bad." For a five-year-old girl on the cusp of a decade of natural growth, that lesson set the terms for everything that followed — a slow accumulation of "not enoughs" that would define much of her adolescence: not small enough, not pretty enough, not thin enough, not fun enough, not smart enough.
A Pattern That Goes Beyond One Sport
What makes Reicherter's story land isn't that it's rare — it's that it isn't. Co-host Fredd Carroll, a self-described "cheer dad," spent years immersed in the same competitive cheer world through his own children. His son was ranked the number one cheerleader in the United States at one point in high school — and dealt with many of the same pressures Reicherter described, despite assumptions that body image and performance anxiety in cheer are a "girl problem." Staying thin. Staying in shape. The internal comparison of that kid's better than me.
Carroll's daughter, meanwhile, came up through the same program four years behind her brother — and spent three years being introduced not as herself, but as "Anthony's sister," even after becoming a top ranked cheerleader in her own right. Carroll noted that it wasn't until she was 26 that she spoke openly about how much that erasure had actually cost her. "She couldn't be herself," he said. "But the eating disorders come from that."
The Machinery of Comparison
Reicherter describes the cheer world as a place explicitly built around comparison — not as a side effect, but as the operating system. "You are really taught to compare yourself up against everyone else all the way down to your body, to your mindset, your ability to get through very physically demanding practices," she says. The comparison isn't abstract. It's why they can do it and I can't. Why am I more tired than they are after the same routine? What's wrong with me?
That internal monologue — I need to train harder, I need to do more and be more, I can never be good enough — doesn't stay confined to practice. It's the same script that shows up later in body image struggles, in perfectionism, in the belief that rest or limitation is a personal failure rather than a normal human response to physical demand.
Layered on top of the mental toll is the physical one: broken bones, neck braces, black eyes from injuries — and then bullying on top of the injuries themselves. Reicherter describes this compounding as "all-encompassing," happening at exactly the age when kids are trying to figure out who they are and where they belong. The sport asks a developing sense of identity to be built almost entirely on external performance and physical comparison.
Why "It's Just a Sport" Undersells the Stakes
Part of the problem, Carroll points out, is that cheerleading in particular gets dismissed as not a "real" sport — a framing that ends up hiding both the physical brutality of the activity and the psychological weight riding on it. When something isn't taken seriously as a sport, the injuries, the training demands, and the mental toll that come with it don't get taken seriously either. That erasure compounds the isolation kids already feel: not only are they struggling, but the world around them doesn't fully register that there's anything to struggle with.
What Parents and Coaches Can Actually Do Differently
Neither Reicherter nor Carroll frame this as an argument against youth sports. The issue isn't competition itself — it's a culture where a child's worth quietly becomes contingent on performance, ranking, and body size, with no separate space carved out for who they are apart from that. A few shifts stand out from their conversation:
Notice when identity collapses into role. A sibling introduced only in relation to a more prominent athlete, or a kid known only for their ranking, loses room to be anyone else — a dynamic that can take years to name, let alone undo.
Take the mental load as seriously as the physical one. Injuries get treated. The comparison spiral underneath them rarely does.
Watch for silence, especially in boys. Reicherter and Carroll both note that body image and performance anxiety in sports isn't gendered the way people assume — boys carry it too, often with even less permission to say so.
Give kids a vocabulary for what they're feeling before it becomes a crisis. Reicherter's own tools — journaling prompts, workbooks, structured conversations — exist precisely because no one gave her that vocabulary at five, or twelve, or twenty.
The through-line in both Reicherter's and Carroll's stories is the same: kids in high-performance environments need someone actively working against the sport's built-in comparison engine — not because the sport is the enemy, but because without that counterweight, the lessons it teaches about worth can outlast the sport itself by decades.
To learn more about Francesca Reicherter's advocacy work and mental health resources for young athletes, visit francescareicherter.com and inspiringmygeneration.org For more conversations on mental health and recovery, visit yourcrisiscoach.com
