How Sports Friendships Can Protect Mental Health |
Sports friendships have the power to create belonging, trust, and emotional safety.
Athletes can feel lonely in plain sight when toughness replaces human connection.
Close teammates and friends often become protective factors for mental health.
I recently caught up with Kevin Love to talk about the power of friendship through sport. Long before he became one of the most visible voices in men’s mental health, basketball gave him a place to express himself. It shaped his identity, gave him structure, and offered a sense of emotional safety. But as Love has made clear through publicly sharing his story, the game of basketball was not enough to save him from the depths of depression and anxiety. What ultimately helped protect him was not just being on a team, but the friendships that sport offered him.
As founder of the Kevin Love Fund, Love’s public conversations have shifted from solely challenging mental health stigma toward active skill-building. His most recent project, The Friend Effect, launched during Mental Health Awareness Month and invites young people to think intentionally about friendship as a mental health skill. That idea is well supported by research: the social aspect of youth sports is central to why young people join, stay, and benefit (Howie et al., 2020).
When Sport Is Home, But You Still Feel Alone
Love has said, “Friendship saved my life. And I mean that literally.”
What has made Love’s story so impactful in the sports world is that it disrupted a common myth about athletes: that success, visibility, and constant contact with other people are enough to protect someone from loneliness. Love describes a much more complicated reality.
He talked with me about “feeling the depths of anxiety and loneliness and not knowing where to turn,” even while living inside the vibrant ecosystems of locker rooms and classrooms. He shared that while sport can give people an outlet for emotional expression, without real connection, it can still feel extremely isolating and lonely.
Being surrounded is not the same thing as “being seen,” as Love........