Laughter in sport is helping athletes in more ways than one. Laughter is building teams and making Paralympic athletes unlock a higher performance than before. Laughter pushes the boundaries when it is being used intentionally by coaches.
Using laughter as an intentional tool when coaching might seem odd but a study done by the Department of Social Work, Ball State University in 2024 showed that using humour as part of training was seen to help athletes with lowering stress levels, creating stronger social bonds between team mates and coaches, better engagement, improve attention, and help athletes retain key messages.
Holly Sellwood, a footballer who plays for Abingdon United, who are in the FA Women’s National League Division One South West, said:” You turn up before a match with some stress or nerves and you get into the environment and everybody’s I mean, whether they’re actually relaxed or not, they give the impression that they are and then before you know it, somebody’s got their shorts on backwards and there’s quite a lot of funniness, humour, banter that goes backwards and forwards from the coaches and teammates, which helps you settle in. It just kind of adds to the togetherness of the team.
In the same study by Ball State University it talked about how important the placement of a well timed joke that is intentionally used by coaches. They will use humour in between training sessions to try and avoid fatigue or stress, before a big match or competition to unload pressure.
“Then we have our game that coach created to settle us all in. It’s called item of the week, so we’ll have a category and everybody’s expected to bring an item if that item matches with somebody else on the team. That will cause a fine, so we have a big old fine pot for the end of the season, which we’ll go and do like a get together at the end of the league. It just helps us laugh and relax before the matches.”
Dr. Lawrence W. Judge, who is a kinesiology professor at Ball State University, paralympic and division 1 coach, uses humour intentionally in his training sessions and in competitions. He said: “At the highest levels, humor is strategic. I use it to lower unnecessary tension, keep athletes emotionally steady, maintain perspective during long training cycles, and strengthen connection
within the group. In elite sport, pressure is constant, so a well-timed moment of humor can help an athlete reset without losing focus.
“Humor helps athletes breathe, reset, and stay coachable. Sometimes a short light moment reduces the emotional temperature enough for an athlete to hear the next cue clearly. I have found that humor is especially useful when an athlete is catastrophizing a mistake or carrying tension into the next rep, throw, race, or event. The key is that humor should redirect, not distract.”
When laughter is used as a tool for athletes they undergo a neurotransmission of releases. According to Cleveland Clinic laughter triggers the release of dopamine, serotonin and endorphins making training sessions happier and have good associations connected to them.
The release of dopamine in the body directly links to athletes having a better environment when training and overall mental health. A study done in 2024 by Kinga Humińska-Lisowska mentions how high performing athletes have more motivation, better cognitive function and emotional resilience when dopamine is released. This directly impacts the athletes environment, their training intensity can increase, stress and anxiety decreases and they have a faster recovery time.
When training elite athletes they are part of a more complicated and complex environment which can take a toll on their mental and physical health. Their environment has coaches, teammates, pressure to perform well, expectations for themselves of what others think and media attention. A review done by Barbara Nuetzel in 2025 explored this idea and they highlighted that using humour to keep athletes focused and taking away unnecessary anxiety is really important in moments of high pressure environments like a competition or high intensity training sessions.
Using humour as part of training has been seen to help athletes with resilience and break through boundaries, in a study done in 2026 by Aydın Pekel and other professors, they found that athletes used humour as a coping mechanism to mitigate competitive stress and its negative impact on mental well-being and performance.
Jeremy Campbell, an American paralympic athlete who is a four-time Paralympic gold medalist and made history as first paralympian to throw over 60 meters in the discus event said: “I use humour in stressful situations to kind of just to remove a little bit of the threat like a protective mechanism after a really poor throw and it’s kind of a way to stabilise yourself so that you are not too hard on yourself, instead you just kind of make a joke about it.
“I’m a pretty typical, anxious person in general, and so days that are leading up to the competition, especially if it’s a big competition. The anxiety gets flowing, the body kind of starts to feel a little bit different.
“I don’t think that I can bring my body back to a baseline, and so it’s learning tools mentally, emotionally, how to work with your body when it feels like that, which is really difficult because it changes you neurologically and emotionally. So you can think that you’re executing something because your nerves and anxiety are up, but you’re actually the opposite. Your body’s kind of frozen, so there’s all kinds of different things that I’ve had to learn to work with that.
“Humour makes everything a little bit more manageable at times of high performance, or stressful times, and humour allows for that. Dissatisfaction or uncontrollables and so use humour to move on. You just realise that you can’t control some things, and maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the way the competition is running. My coach Larry has just helped me realise you just got to laugh at some of these things and use humour as a way to stop it affecting you.”
Humour can also help team sports like football, netball and basketball. A study done in 2020 by Dr. Solvejg Wolfers-Pommerenke found that humour helped teams unify and linked directly that team cohesion directly impacted their communication use and trust in one another. Using humour solidified the teams and made them a stronger unit together.
Miss Sellwood said: “When using humour between you and the coaches and teammates and you’ve got quite a lot of trust between them all, it just makes it way more enjoyable. It reduce the stress and the pressure as you’re kind of all on the same page, you’re all together, you’ve all got that cohesion between you, you then share the weight of that pressure with other people.
“The main part of it all is having a laugh with teammates before the match and the coaches get involved obviously. It’s just good vibes, everybody’s happy to be there, it’s very social, but that’s from literally the minute everybody’s there to the minute everybody leaves. It’s always good fun.”
