Lucy Lee, Corliss Bean

Varsity athletes face unique academic, athletic, and psychosocial demands. Research has identified peer mentorship as an important mechanism to support transition, well-being, and development. Peer mentors can help mentees through the academic, athletic, and personal challenges that they experience within the context of varsity athletics. To date, previous research has predominantly focused on mentoring outcomes or formal program evaluations, with limited exploration of how peer mentoring relationships naturally form, function, and are experienced within a varsity athlete environment. Therefore, the purpose of the proposed qualitative research is to explore the experiences of peer mentorship in supporting student-athlete mental health. This study is guided by a constructivist ontological stance and an interpretivist epistemological approach, recognizing that individual meanings of mentorship and mental health are socially constructed through participants’ lived experiences. The researcher’s positionality as a former student-athlete informs reflexive engagement throughout the research process. Twenty participants (10 upper-year athletes [mentors] and 10 lower-year athletes [mentees]) will create timelines outlining their mentorship activities and experiences. Following this, participants will be asked to engage in a semi-structured interview. These interviews will aim to explore their lived experiences of informal mentoring roles, and how these experiences have impacted their mental health and well-being as varsity athletes. This research will help to examine how mentoring relationships emerge, what functions they serve, and what factors facilitate or hinder effective peer support. Such a study will contribute to the limited research on the formation and experiences of peer-to-peer mentoring within varsity athletes.