Part 1: Research Proposal

Your Name: James Shuttleworth

Topic:
I am studying how college athletes have used and can use humor to mitigate the
effects of stress that inherent in collegiate athletes.
Research Questions(s):
1.

How does humor enable athletes to better perform by helping to mitigate the
affects of stress?
1. What are some examples of athletes using humor?
2. What are the psychological connections of humors to stress?

2.

How do some athletes make better use of humor than others to enhance their
experience with sports?
1. How can using humor help athletes to not burn out?

3.

Do some athletes make better use of humor to mitigate the mental pressures of
athletics?
1. In what ways do athletes use humor in their routines and what is the
outcome?
Audience & Significance:
I am studying this topic in order to help collegiate athletes and their coaches
understand humors vast applications and positive effects that can help improve
performance and reduce athletic discontinuance rates otherwise known as burn outs.

Context:

This issue is important and timely because collegiate athletics are a large source
of stress for athletes today that must balance school with the increasing pressures to
perform better and better. When pressure is increased, some athletes lose interest and
discontinue a potentially fruitful athletic career.
Exhibit:
To illustrate my discussion of humor and athletic stress relief at the collegiate
level, I plan to focus on humors general applications to stress and apply it to collegiate
athletics.
Key Sources Found So Far:
MLA citation

Type of source? News article,

scholarly journal article, book,
website, or other?

DeFreese, J. D., and Alan L.

Smith. "Athlete Social Support,
Negative Social Interactions,
And Psychological Health
Across A Competitive Sport
Season." Journal Of Sport &
Exercise Psychology 36.6
(2014): 619-630. Academic
Search Premier. Web. 10 Nov.
2015.

Journal Article

What does the source offer your

project? Background? Statistics?
Theory? Argument?
Counterargument? Example?
This source provides a connection
between stress and burnouts in
athletes. Therefore, this helps to
illustrate the problem.

Mullen, Richard, Andrew Lane, Journal Article

and Sheldon Hanton. "Anxiety
Symptom Interpretation In
High-Anxious, Defensive
High-Anxious, Low-Anxious
And Repressor Sport
Performers."Anxiety, Stress &
Coping 22.1 (2009): 91100. Academic Search Premier.
Web. 10 Nov. 2015.

This source helps to show the types of

and extent of stress that collegiate
athletes experience.

Moran, Carmen, and Lesley

Hughes. "Coping With Stress:

After I have shown that burnouts are a

significant problem in athletes and that

Journal Article

Social Work Students And

Humour." Social Work
Education 25.5 (2006): 501517. Academic Search Premier.
Web. 10 Nov. 2015.
Abel, Millicent H. "Humor,
Stress, And Coping
Strategies." Humor:
International Journal Of
Humor Research 15.4 (2002):
365.Academic Search Premier.
Web. 10 Nov. 2015.

stress is the cause of these burnouts,

this article will show the benefits of
using humor to cope with stress.

Journal Article

This article would give specific

information and examples of how
humor is connected with lower stress
levels.

Part 2: Exploratory Draft

I plan to argue that humor could be used by college athletes to reduce stress and,
therefore, decrease the number of athletes who burnout. I find this topic interesting
because I was an a highly competitive athlete in high school and have a slight
understanding of what it feels like to start to burnout and become apathetic and
disengaged from a sport due to exhaustion and stress. Given this personal experience, I
was able to see how collegiate athletes, who are under severe amounts of stress and
mental debilitation, can be prone to burning out and quitting their respective sports. When
quitting, athletes then lose their scholarships and potentially dropout of school due to lack
of financial resources. After speaking with a graduate student who is on the club water
polo team with me and who was on the Notre Dame swim team during his undergraduate
studies, I confirmed my intuition that burnouts are common in collegiate athletics. With
my research essay, I hope to connect humor as a strategy to cope with stress and mental
pressures with collegiate athletes current situations.
The intended audience for this essay is collegiate athletes and coaches. This
audience will be able to take my research and use it for personal gains in order to reduce
the stresses of athletics. No one can really be hurt by this analysis. Despite the fact that
no one is negatively affected, this is still an argumentative topic because the audience will
need to be convinced to act on using humor to reduce stress. It will need to be a
conscious effort that can only be done by convincing the audience.
My current plan for my essay is to spend the first few pages establishing the
problem and showing the connections between the three topics: humor, stress, and
college athletes. I will start the essay by demonstrating the high stress environment that

exists in collegiate athletics and how it leads to burnouts. Next, I will show the
connection between humor and stress management. Finally, I will make the connection of
humor to stress management in the collegiate athlete settings. The essay will then finish
by calling athletes to act in a way that seeks to use humor to reduce stress.
Thus far, I have found quite a few sources that match with my research questions
well. I have found connections between humor and stress, and between stress and
collegiate athletics. I still need to find more sources or information on how high amounts
of stress and pressure are the cause of student athletes burnouts. From what I have found
thus far, I will probably have to piece together many different sources to show this
burnout causality. The audience will certainly expect scholarly sources that can be given
authority in the specific setting of athletics. The audience will also want to see specific
connections between humor and stress management and how it is important in a athletic
setting. I suspect that some athletes and coaches may disagree with how extensive or
important humor can be in reducing stress. Some of these naysayers may point to the idea
that if the athlete does not have the willpower to push through the sport then they also do
not have the willpower need to succeed at highly competitive levels.
I primarily anticipate running into problems in the research stage of the essay. It
will be difficult to make all of the connections that I need to make to prove my point. In
order to have a successful and argumentative essay, I know that each and every
connection must be strong and that if one is weak my whole essay will not be as
successful. This follows with the idiom that the chain is only as strong as its weakest
links. I believe I may also have some issues when it comes to piecing together my
evidence and in structured fashion. As I have been reading the sources, I keep finding

information that could be input throughout the essay because I have been reading the
sources with a more general research lens rather than multiple lens that each focus on a
specific aspect of the essay. Thus far, I have gained much information but I need to make
sure that I can organize that information in a structured and logical fashion that still
makes all of my connections.