Imaginary athletes: Creating make-believe teammates, competitors and coaches during play

Yahoo

22-07-2025

The coach, the specialized equipment, the carefully tailored exercise regimen – they're all key to athletic performance. But imagination might be an unexpected asset when it comes to playing sports.
The idea that athletic achievement depends on the mind isn't new. Sport psychologists have known for years that working with an athlete on their mental game – visualizing the skill, kinesthetically feeling the swing – has a positive impact on actual performance. But these mental simulations draw only upon mental imagery – seeing and feeling the physical goals in the mind's eye. Imagination offers a much wider range of possibilities.
What if your game could be helped by an imaginary friend?
In a recent retrospective study of college students, we discovered that imagination comes in handy in athletics in ways that are surprisingly social. The creation of what we termed imaginary athletes – a person or being that a child imagined in the context of athletics – enabled and motivated athletic play, especially for children between the ages of about 6 and 12. Imaginary athletes also provided companionship during athletic play.
Remembering childhood imaginary athletes
The most basic form of an imaginary athlete might be a wall, fence or even tree that makes a good opponent in a pinch. For a child or adolescent practicing a sport alone, a surface that provides a ball return or a steady target for a throw gives opportunities for practice usually requiring other players.
Is it any wonder, then, if the branches of the tree start to resemble a wide receiver's arms, or an invisible goalie emerges in front of the fence? Solitary play might be a lot more fun if a make-believe teammate could provide an assist, or an invisible coach could appear and shout instructions during practice.
The college students in our study reported that such support, even if imaginary, made them play a little longer or try a little harder as kids.
About 41% of our sample of 225 college students reported creating at least one imaginary athlete at some point in middle childhood or early adolescence. Most, but not all, of these beings fell into three categories based on their characteristics.
The first we called placeholders, such as ghost runners. They are typically generic, amorphous, imaginary teammates created by groups of children when not enough real players are available.
The second type functioned as what we named athletic tools. They helped kids focus on their performance and improve their skills, usually by providing a worthy competitor, sometimes based on an admired professional athlete. The skills of athletic tools were often just above those of the child, drawing out the desire to be better, stronger, faster.
Social relationships, our name for the third kind of imaginary athlete, primarily served emotional functions, relieving loneliness and providing the child or adolescent with a sense of belonging, safety or companionship as they engaged in their sport.
Students who remembered imaginary athletes differed from their peers in two ways. First, more men than women reported creating these imaginary beings, possibly owing to the greater investment in and importance of athletics among boys versus girls. Second, people with imaginary athletes scored higher than those without on a current-day measure of predilection for imagination, but they were not more likely to report having created a make-believe friend or animal as a child.
Imagination is a valuable power
Creating an imaginary other might seem like a quirky, perhaps even childish, addition to sports practice. But actually, this behavior is entirely logical. After all, imagination is the core of human thought. Without it, we couldn't conceptualize anything outside of the present moment that wasn't already stored in memory. No thinking about the future, no consideration of multiple outcomes to a decision, no counterfactuals, daydreams, fantasies or plans.
Why wouldn't people apply such a fundamental tool of day-to-day thought in athletic contexts? Participation in sports is common, especially among school-age kids, and many college students in our study described drawing upon their imaginations frequently when playing sports, especially when doing so in their free time.
The creation of imaginary athletes is also unsurprising because it's one of myriad ways that imagination enhances people's social worlds throughout their lives. Above all else, social relationships are what matter most to people, and using imagination in thinking about them is common. For instance, people imagine conversations with others, particularly those close to them, sometimes practicing the delivery of bad news or envisioning the response to a proposal of marriage.
In early childhood, kids create imaginary companions who help them learn about friendship and other's perspectives. And in adolescence, when people focus on developing their autonomy and their own identities, they create parasocial relationships that let them identify with favorite celebrities, characters and media figures. Even in older age, some widows and widowers imagine continued relationships with their deceased spouses. These 'continuing bonds' are efforts to cope with loss through imaginary narratives that are fed by and extrapolate upon years of interactions.
At each point in their developmental trajectory, people might recruit imagination to help them understand, manage, regulate and enjoy the social aspects of life. Imaginary athletes are merely one manifestation of this habit.
Because so many children and adolescents spend a lot of time engaged in sports, athletics can be a major environment for working on the developmental tasks of growing up. As children learn about functioning as part of a group, forming, maintaining and losing friendships, and mastering a range of skills and abilities, imaginary athletes provide teammates, coaches and competitors tailored to the needs of the moment.
Of course, an imaginary athlete is but one tool that children and adolescents might use to address developmental tasks such as mastering skills or negotiating peer relationships. Children who aren't fantasy-prone might create complex training regimens to practice their skills, and they might manage their friendships by talking through problems with others.
But some report that turning inward generated real athletic and social benefits. 'I got confidence out of my [imaginary athletes],' reported one participant. 'If I could imagine beating someone, and [winning], then I felt like I could do anything.'
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Tracy Gleason, Wellesley College and Stephanie Madsen, McDaniel College
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The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.