Today I want to talk about where pressure actually comes from. Not what it does to you in the moment, but the places it builds up long before you ever run out onto the pitch.
Have you ever gone into a game already exhausted, before a ball was even thrown in? Not physically tired. Something heavier than that. You’ve spent the week telling yourself “I just need to have a good session, I need to show them I’m worth starting”, and by Saturday there’s nothing left in the tank.
Most people picture pressure as the free in the last minute, the crowd, the big moment in the big game. And that is pressure. But if that’s the only place you look for it, you miss almost all of it.
Because the pressure that wears players down is rarely the loud kind. It’s the quiet kind, the kind that builds across a week in places nobody else sees. In selection. In training. In the WhatsApp group. In your own head at eleven at night when you should be asleep.
This shows up differently for everyone. Some of it will land for you and some of it won’t, and that’s normal. But almost every player I work with is carrying at least two or three of these at once, usually without naming any of them.
And that’s the part I want to get at. A lot of what you’re carrying isn’t a flaw in you. It’s structural. It comes with the position of being a female athlete in a sport that asks a great deal and gives back very little in the way of resources.
Here is what I see most often.
Selection Week
For a lot of players, the hardest part of the week isn’t the match. It’s the days before it, when you don’t know yet whether you’re starting.
The not-knowing is what does the damage. You might play it cool in front of everyone, but you’re checking your phone for the team announcement at half five on a Tuesday, and you’re refreshing it again at six.
And if you’ve ever been dropped, even once, your brain does not forget it. It starts scanning. Body language at training. Which group the coach put you in for drills. Who got a quiet word afterwards and who walked to the car on their own. None of that scanning is a decision you make. It runs in the background whether you want it to or not.
That’s the bit players underestimate. Scanning costs you something. It’s mental energy spent on threat detection instead of on football, and it’s spent days before the game. So you arrive at the weekend with part of your capacity already gone, and then you wonder why you feel flat in a game you were desperate to play well in.
The Fear of Letting Everyone Down
This is the one I hear more than anything else.
Players will tell me, almost word for word, that they can handle pressure on themselves. They’ll take the free. They’ll take the responsibility. What they cannot handle is the thought of being the reason the team lost.
There’s a reason that weight sits so heavily. Festinger (1954) described what he called Social Comparison Theory: in any group, we work out our own value by measuring ourselves against the people around us. It isn’t vanity or insecurity, it’s just what the human brain does when it’s in a group.
Now put that in a team sport, where the result is shared and everyone’s contribution is visible. That comparison isn’t occasional, it’s constant. You’re not only performing for yourself, you’re performing somewhere your mistakes are felt by fourteen other people who wanted this as badly as you did.
That’s real, and I’m not going to tell you it isn’t. But it does something distorting to your sense of scale. It takes a single misplaced pass and makes it feel, in the moment, like evidence about who you are. It isn’t. It’s a misplaced pass.
Comparison Inside Your Own Squad
Even in a squad where everyone genuinely gets on, comparison never fully switches off.
Who’s fitter. Who’s sharper in the drills. Who scored more in the last challenge match. Who the coach looked at when they talked about leadership. None of it is malicious and most of it isn’t even conscious.
The trouble starts when comparison quietly turns into self-evaluation. “She’s faster than me” becomes “I’m too slow for this team”, and then it becomes “I shouldn’t be here”. That’s three different statements, and only the first one is about football. The other two are about your worth, and your brain slid from one to the other without asking your permission.
And once you’re assessing yourself rather than reading the game, your attention is in the wrong place entirely. You’re not watching the play develop, you’re watching yourself and marking your own performance as it happens.
Mosewich and colleagues (2013) worked with women athletes on exactly this, and found that self-criticism was common, and that learning to respond to yourself with more self-compassion actually improved things. I know how that sounds. Self-compassion is not a word that gets used much in a dressing room. But it isn’t softness, and it isn’t lowering your standards. It’s the difference between “that was a poor ball, sort it out” and “you’re useless, why are you even here”. One of those keeps you in the game.
The Weight of Being Looked To
If you wear the armband, or you’re one of the older players, or you’re just someone the younger ones watch, you’re carrying something extra whether anyone named it or not.
You feel responsible for setting the tone. For staying composed when it’s getting away from you. For being the one who says the right thing at the right moment when the heads start to drop.
That role can be one of the best things about playing. It can also quietly flatten you, because leaders often have nowhere to put their own pressure. You don’t want to be the one wobbling in front of the group, so you say nothing, and it accumulates.
If that’s you, know that going quiet about your own struggle isn’t protecting anyone. It just means you’re carrying the team’s weight and your own at the same time.
The Load You Carry Off the Pitch
Most ladies Gaelic players are not full-time athletes. You have a job, or college, or children, or a long commute, and plenty of you have several of those at once.
Wylleman and Lavallee (2004) describe this as the dual career. Your athletic life doesn’t run on its own, it runs alongside your working life, your studies and your relationships, all developing at the same time and all making demands. When those demands rise together, the thing that gets squeezed is recovery, because recovery is the only part of the week with no one else depending on it.
So you come to training already depleted after a twelve-hour shift or a brutal week of deadlines, and the pressure of the session lands on a system that has less left to give. Your capacity to absorb it genuinely is lower that evening than it would have been on a quiet week.
That is not weakness and it is not a lack of commitment. It’s load. And judging yourself for it is like being annoyed at yourself for being out of breath after a fitness test.
Why Naming It Changes Things
When pressure builds up like this, the instinct is almost always to turn it inward. You should be tougher. You should be more focused. Other players seem to manage, so what’s wrong with you.
But look back at that list. Selection is competitive by design. Comparison is what brains do in groups. The dual career is a structural feature of an amateur sport. Almost none of that is a personal failing, and you can’t fix a structural pressure by being harder on yourself.
What naming it does is change the question you’re asking. It moves you off “what’s wrong with me” and onto “what’s actually realistic, given everything I’m holding right now”. That’s a question you can do something with.
The Most Important Takeaway
Pressure in ladies Gaelic football is not one big moment. It’s an accumulation.
It’s selection week, and comparison, and responsibility, and a life that doesn’t pause just because the championship started. It gathers quietly across the week, and then you bring all of it out onto the pitch with you.
You’re not weak for feeling the weight of that. You’re playing a sport that asks a lot, while living a life that asks a lot.
That’s genuinely hard. And it’s worth saying out loud.
References
- Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140.
- Wylleman, P., & Lavallee, D. (2004). A developmental perspective on transitions faced by athletes. In M. Weiss (Ed.), Developmental sport and exercise psychology: A lifespan perspective.
- Mosewich, A. D., Crocker, P. R. E., Kowalski, K. C., & DeLongis, A. (2013). Applying self-compassion in sport: An intervention with women athletes. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 35(5), 514-524.
- Tamminen, K. A., & Holt, N. L. (2010). A meta-study of qualitative research examining stressor appraisals and coping among adolescents in sport. Journal of Sports Sciences, 28(14), 1563-1580.
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