Dealing with toxic teammates can be one of the most frustrating and mentally draining parts of playing sports. Whether it’s constant negativity, harsh criticism, or a team culture that simply drags you down, toxic environments can quickly chip away at your confidence and enjoyment of the game.
As an athlete, you work hard, you care about improving, and you want to compete at your best. But when the people around you—especially teammates—create tension instead of support, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, isolated, and even question your love for the sport.
The truth is, you may not always have the option to switch teams. And you may not be able to change your teammates’ behavior.
But what you can do is take back control of your mindset and protect your mental game.
In this article, I’m going to share three powerful tips to help you handle toxic teammates so you can stay focused, build confidence, and continue growing as an athlete—no matter who’s around you.
Tip #1: Build Your Confidence From Within Yourself
One of the easiest things to have happen when you deal with toxic teammates is that you start to look to them for approval and for your confidence.
So you’re starting to look to your teammates for whether or not they think you’re doing well.
The way we’re going to counteract that is you working to build your confidence for yourself. This means you are not relying on anybody else—not even your coaches, your parents, and especially not these teammates—to help you feel confident.
The more confident you feel, the more you work on building this confidence for yourself, the more self-assured you’re going to be, the more trust you’ll have in yourself and your game.
So the less these toxic teammates and their negativity and critique is actually going to affect you.
What can you do to build your confidence?
You want to view building confidence in sports as an actionable process.
One of the best ways to build your confidence as an athlete is self-talk.
You want to work on changing the way you’re talking to yourself. Talk to yourself in a more confident, uplifting, and more positive way.
I was talking to an athlete this past week and we were discussing how to deal with negativity from other people. It wasn’t negativity from teammates for him—it was from the other team. He was dealing with a lot of trash talk.
I was talking to him about how when we focus on positive self-talk and encouraging ourselves in these moments, it almost acts as a force field against the negativity coming at us from other people.
So when we’re dealing with toxic teammates, most of the time teammates are being toxic in the form of negativity—whether critiquing you, saying negative things, or talking behind your back. It’s a form of negativity. We want to counteract that with this positive thinking.
So really pay attention to:
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How are you talking to yourself?
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What are your thoughts before games?
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What’s your self-talk during practice or on a daily basis?
Helping you with your self-talk is something I focus on a lot within one-on-one coaching and also the Confident Competitor Academy, which is the online program I have available.
Tip #2: Learn to Evaluate Your Game
Just like when we’re too worried about what coach thinks, when we have toxic teammates, it’s natural for us to start worrying about what they think of us.
Let’s say we have a game and it doesn’t go the way we want. Our teammates criticize us. Maybe they’re saying it’s our fault the team lost or pointing out all the little things we did wrong.
Look, maybe we didn’t have the best game. But that is not a productive way of evaluating a performance.
And if we allow these teammates to get inside our heads, talk down to us, and let their negativity affect us, we won’t be able to actually look at what we need to improve.
Another type of toxic environment is when teammates aren’t negative toward you, but they are just negative in general.
I’ve been on teams like this personally. Everybody was “nice,” but the energy of the team was negative—it was a toxic, negative environment.
When that happens—teammates being negative toward themselves, coaches being negative, teammates saying the team’s just not that good—it might not be about you, but it will still infect you.
That’s why you have to evaluate your game objectively for yourself.
A great way to do this is by incorporating a post-performance evaluation process, where:
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You evaluate some good things you did.
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Think about things you want to work on.
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Identify mistakes and how you’ll work on them this week.
Start putting those lessons into practice so you improve during the week and feel better going into your next game.
You want to counteract negativity with a good evaluation system in place.
Tip #3: Focus on What You Enjoy About Your Sport
This is a powerful one.
If the negativity isn’t directed toward you, but it’s still there—teammates being negative toward themselves, the team, or the sport—it’s important you remind yourself why you want to play the game.
Let’s say you’re dealing with teammates who make fun of people who work really hard. They complain about practice, extra work, or weightlifting. They downplay people who want to do well.
Then, if you have a bad game, they might make a snide comment like, “You work so hard, but you didn’t even play well.”
It can be easy to let that kind of talk affect you and cause you to stop working hard or feel weird about giving effort.
But you have to remind yourself what you enjoy about your sport.
What are you wanting to achieve? What drives you?
You enjoy working hard. You enjoy pushing yourself. You love trying to reach that next level.
Don’t let their complaints about effort affect you. Remind yourself:
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Why you love your sport
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How grateful you are to play
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How much you enjoy giving your best
Final Thoughts
This articel has been about what you can do to manage toxic teammates.
Not to stop them. Not just to tell your coach about them—though that can be done. Not just to switch teams—though that’s a great option if available.
But if you can’t switch teams, you can only do so much to change them. At the end of the day, you have to know what you need to do:
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What you need to focus on
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How you need to change your thinking
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How you need to protect yourself
If you focus on what you can control about the situation, you will be in a powerful position to manage toxic teammates as an athlete.
