Previous research has examined factors that predispose collegiate football players to injury (e.g., Petrie, 1993a, 1993b) as well as factors that influence athletes' psychological adjustment to being injured (e.g., Brewer, 1993; Leddy, Lambert, & Ogles, 1994). Despite the reports of the NCAA Injury Surveillance System that the greatest number of football injuries occur during the spring preseason (NCAA, 1997), studies have only examined injury during the regular season. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the antecedents and consequences of injury in collegiate football players during the spring preseason and across the regular competitive season. Specifically, life stress, social support, competitive trait anxiety, athletic identity, coping style, and preinjury mood state was measured to determine their relationship with the occurrence of injury and with postinjury emotional responses in athletes who sustain an injury at some point during either the spring preseason or regular competitive football season. The overall incidence of athletic injuries was low and the athletes suffered more severe injuries than has been typically found in collegiate football samples. Negative life stress was found to be directly related to the occurrence of injury and to postinjury negative emotional response and was moderated by other psychosocial variables in its influence on the occurrence of injury. Positive life stress was unrelated to injury risk or postinjury emotional response. Social support, sport anxiety, coping, and athletic identity were all found to moderate the negative life stress-injury relationship, as did playing status, suggesting that the complex combinations of these variables increase athletes' susceptibility to the impact of negative life stress. The athletes in this study experienced significant negative emotions following injury. After sustaining injuries they experienced levels of anger, depression, and fatigue that were similar to male psychiatric patients. Injury severity and preinjury mood were found to be the best predictors of postinjury emotional response. Of the psychosocial variables, only social support and sport anxiety were found to be predictive of negative emotional responses following injury. Previously identified relationships between postinjury emotional responses and situational and dispositional variables were replicated and extended.
