My Own Journalling as a Young Athlete and What It Taught Me About Sport and Life - By Zoë Mallett

When I think back to my time growing up in sport, one of the habits that stands out most is journaling. At the time I did not think of it as anything special or structured. It was just something I naturally fell into doing alongside basketball training and matches as well as athletics competitions.

If I had to break it down properly I would say about 80 percent of what I wrote was about life and the remaining 20 percent was sport. That balance paints a picture of where my focus was at the time, but also how sport shaped the way I thought about everything around me. In reality I was training or playing almost every other day, so sport was a huge part of my life and emotions during that period.

Most of the sport related writing was quite simple. I would reflect on training sessions, matches, moments I was proud of and things that frustrated me. Back then I remember reporting events for the future me but what I was also doing was trying to make sense of my experiences rather than just carrying them around in my head. It would be things like “training was crap because I had a headache” or “lost by loads and they were really rough”. Not exactly deep reflections, but it was a way of letting my feelings out. I then said goodnight to the diary and it was done.

Looking back now, I can see that journaling gave me a place to process emotions that I did not always express out loud. Like many young athletes, I cared deeply about how I performed and I did not always handle losing particularly well. I often replayed moments in my head long after a game had finished. Writing things down helped me just brain dump in a way that made them feel less overwhelming and meant I could move on more quickly.

My writing was about every aspect of life. It was just thoughts about school, friendships or how I was feeling in general. At the time I remember thinking it was for me to read one day although I could never imagine that day. It has helped me understand myself better as a whole person. I can also look back on it now and relate it to what my own kids go through and I realise how similar I am to my son and how he deals with things. There is something quite powerful about putting thoughts onto paper when you are young and then reading them years later and seeing things with fresh perspective.

I remember not being selected for something that I genuinely should have played in. I went home completely frustrated and destroyed my room in anger before eventually sitting down and writing everything out in my journal. Even in that moment of emotion, writing it down helped me process it and move forward rather than staying stuck in it.

From a sports psychology perspective you could say that what I was doing was building self awareness. That is something we now know is closely linked to confidence. When young athletes begin to understand how they respond to different situations, they start to feel more in control of both their performance and their emotions in sport. It was not until I was around 18 or 19 years old that I really started to feel that confidence come from within and eventually was unshakable.

I did not have a structured system back then. There were no prompts or guided questions. I just wrote what I was thinking. In that simple form it had a noticeable impact on how I processed both success and failure.

This whole experience is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in giving young athletes a structured place to reflect. Most of them are already thinking and feeling far more than they say out loud. A journal simply gives that process somewhere to go. Teens spend way too long on their phones and don't write anything down anymore. If this continues no one will have any diaries or journals to look back on which is a sad thought. Finally, as a parent, if your child can put feelings down on paper this can also bring real relief. No matter how hard we try, sometimes you are simply trying to find the right things to say to them after a game and not always knowing how.