Background: Adaption for school life is important for all students. As for athletic students, since they need to cope with schoolwork and extensive training, adaption for school life could be very challenging. Taking this into consideration, the purpose of this study was to explore the factors which may help high school athletic students' adaption of school life. Owing to this, the study explored previous researches and proposed four hypotheses: the first two hypotheses proposed that athletes' positive emotion will have positive impacts on both their interpersonal relationships and adaption of school life; the third hypothesis suggests that athletes' interpersonal relationships will have positive impacts on their adaption of school life and the fourth hypothesis suggested that interpersonal relationships play a mediating role among the positive emotion's effect on adaption of school life.
Methods: A total of 800 structured questionnaires were distributed to eleven high schools with athletic class students for data collection with a valid return rate of 90.6%. Structural equation modelling was used to test the relationship among them.
Results: The result showed that positive emotion (β = 0.72, p < 0.05) and interpersonal relationships (β = 0.34, p < 0.05) had positive impacts on students' adaption of school life with a predictive power of 68%. In addition, positive emotion also affected students' school life adaption through interpersonal relationships.
Conclusion: The study confirmed the positive emotion can have significant influences on student athletes' interpersonal relationships and school life adaption.
Implications: According to our findings, we suggest to encourage and promote athletes' positive emotions so to help them have better interpersonal relationships and school life adaption.
Keywords: adaptation of school life; high school athletic class; interpersonal relationships; positive emotion.