A Letter About Mental Health from A Washed-Up College Athlete
“Mental Health in college athletics needs to be taken more seriously.”
11 words. It only took 11 words to start an uproar of strangers that agreed on one common thought. Over 1.5 million impressions and 80 thousand engagements on Twitter. Thousands of former college athletes, parents and people all over sharing their support and acknowledging the lack of care given to people struggling with mental health disorders.
As a former college athlete at a Power 5 school, I’ll admit that throughout my four years in college I didn’t struggle from your typical mental health issues. However, I witnessed a lot of my teammates and friends struggle from depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders and panic attacks. But for some reason they never knew how to or felt comfortable to ask for help. Instead, we “fixed” our problems with the casual venting session on a Friday night over a bottle or two of wine.
Today, as I look back on my college experience, I’ve come to realized that I indeed was struggling with my mental health. College athletics was molding me into an outgoing, punctual, organized, detail-oriented, high-achieving, people-pleasing young woman with high functioning anxiety disorder. Let me correct myself, my university did not give me an anxiety disorder. What caused it then? Maybe it was the way I was living my everyday life in fear of disappointing the people around me and the fear of asking for help because I believed that I could take care of myself and did not want to seem weak.
Let’s conceptualize this a little: you grew up with the foundation that if you don’t perform on the field you won’t be on the field (which is true). Now you’re 19-years-old moving out on your own, entering a whole new experience with people you don’t know and that don’t know you. You wake up every day at 5:15 a.m., throw on your matching lifting clothes and head to work. At 6 a.m. your workout begins, and you put your body through literal Hell. But just as you start the lift you realize one of your teammates isn’t there. She slept in… again. Now you fear the punishments. After the lift you’re told that tomorrow’s 6 a.m. run is going to be a character builder. What the hell does that means? Now it’s time for class, no shower, grab food and get to the classroom building for College Algebra. You had a test today…. But completely forgot.
You push through and try to remember all you can but the only thing on your mind is the heaviness of your eyes, the smell of you B.O., hoping the cute boy sitting next to you can’t smell it. Test is over, time for the next class. You go to your classes through lunch and then head straight to practice. Grab a quick snack and get on the field at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start time to warm up. Today is just not your day, mistake after mistake because you can’t get your mind off all the homework you have tonight and the lack of time you have to do it. Okay, I’m going to stop here because I think I’ve made my point.
In college sports we call this “the grind.” Now I call it training for the inevitable of Mental Health Disorders. The issue is that this isn’t a secret. You’d have to be absolutely bat-shit-crazy not to believe that athletes are struggling with mental health issues. Nearly 1 in 5 people in America struggle with mental health, so imagine being pushed to your absolute breaking point every day and then expected to pick up all the pieces on your own and do it over and over again. And for fans that are reading this and nodding your head along, it’s your fault too. 19-year-old kids are being sold as entertainment to loyal and loving fans. Loyal and loving, that is until that19-year-old kid makes a mistake on the field or court and costs the team playoffs. A 19-year-old kid playing on national television and in front of thousands of people, chanting and screaming their name. When all that 19-year-old kid can think about is their History-109 exam next week that’s worth half their grade. But when does this end? When you graduate? When you’re no longer property to the University? No, it only gets worse because you no longer have access to the recourses you didn’t know existed or that you didn’t feel comfortable accessing in fear of seeming weak. But you’re not weak, you’re strong and you can figure this out, there’s no reason to worry anyone. Right? Wrong.
Why am I saying this now? Why didn’t I speak up when I was in college about the lack of mental health support? Reason one, hearing about athletes I knew who were silently struggling alone that I so wish felt comfortable to ask for help. Reason two, witnessing my closest friends ask for help and seeing their lives, energy and sports careers completely shift for the positive. Reason three, I finally found a voice. After years of being silenced by the fear of overstepping or being persecuted by superiors for coming off as weak I found a voice to stand up and help fill the cracks that mental illness seems to slip through every day.
The real question is, how do we fill the cracks? The easiest way to explain it… Mental Health in college athletics needs to be taken more seriously. Psychiatrists and sports psychologists are offered to student athletes but in most circumstances, there is only one for an entire athletic department. That is just simply not enough. But I get it, budgets matter, but so do your student athletes. If half of the mandatory nutrition meetings I went to over four years were exchanged for meetings with a sports psychologist, maybe I wouldn’t be spending an arm and a leg on therapy today. I get it, not everyone needs to see a psychologist or therapist. But if the mind and souls of your student athletes were prioritized as highly as their weight and nutritious habits maybe we wouldn’t be talking about this still.
Let me clarify something that’s really important to know… I love my university, I love my coaches, I love my support staff, I love each of the girls that I played with. The one thing I don’t love is how I hid my pain for years, suffering from my mental health and tried to fix it on my own. I don’t love the pain from feeling left on the side of the road by the system I loved being a part of after I no longer was. We call it a transitional period, which is 100% correct, a transition from being unable to feel to being able to feel too much without any support. I’m sure other washed-up college athletes and current athletes can relate to the words above, and I’m sure some can not. But as long as one person can, that’s more than yesterday.
Sincerely,
A Washed-Up College Athlete
My Summer At NIKE
As I sit elbow to elbow with two strangers on my five-hour flight back to Kentucky, I finally have time to reflect on what I actually did this summer. It’s been a summer full of growth, learning, acceptance, new friendships and memories that will last a lifetime. It’s easy to overlook the unique opportunity that I had and its easy to take it all for granted. But now that I’m able to really dissect this accomplishment, I wanted to share my adventures and what I learned. This is going to be a long on — this is my summer at Nike.
It took six months. Six months of resume prep, interviews and planning. After the fourth month had passed and I still hadn’t heard back, I started losing hope. But, in late April I finally got the call, I was going to be working at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon for two months as a Global Employee Communications Intern. I had to be there in June which left me with only two months to plan travel, living and all the logistics — as well as finish school and play post-season softball.
Once season ended I started packing and moved myself across the country to Portland, Oregon. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment downtown with a diver from University of Florida and we instantly hit it off. It’s crazy how the world brings people together and you never know why, but it always seems to make sense in the end.
I was immediately submersed into this dynamic and cultivating work environment. Let me remind you this internship was my first real job. I knew I was qualified but it’s still an intimidating situation when everyone around you is talking about a ROS, EOD deadlines and every other acronym I had to learn. My time at Nike was on a two-month timeline and I had to jump in head first. Isn’t that what taking risks is all about though? Ambiguity is a strange thing. You have no way of knowing what will happen tomorrow, next week or even within the next hour. But how you handle that ambiguity says a lot. Every day at Nike was different, I never knew if I’d be writing a story for the employee website, or sitting in meetings to discuss JDI Day. What I did know was that I was going to be learning more than I ever had before.
So what does a Global Employee Communications Intern do? Great question. During my interviews I asked the same thing and my boss just told me, “everything.” How ambiguous of a word. Everything. Looking back on it now, I really did do everything! My department was the editorial & experiences function of GEC. So we wrote for the employee website — Zero, produced employee experience and events and basically everything that touched NIKE Inc., employees globally. The employees were our consumers. You might think that sounds boring compared to working in footwear, apparel design or strategy, but let me ensure you that there were no days off. GEC holds this company together by its choice of words. You can imagine how intimidating it may be to be the intern that sends out a weekly newsletter to all 30,000 employees on WHQ campus. One time I accidentally capitalized an extra “A” in the subject line and I thought my career was over. That was fun. But in all seriousness, I was involved in amazing opportunities and even got to plan my own campus event. My summer project was the Made to Play Field Day which was the most successful employee event of the summer at Nike. Being able to see my project through and talk with employees about their experiences was one of the highlights of my summer.
This summer wasn’t all work though. My work relationships and memories will last forever, but there were two pivotal aspects of this summer that I can contribute to a life changing two-months. I left Lexington in hopes of finding myself. Yes, that’s super cliché but in all honesty, I needed it. Spiritually, I relied on too many people to fire my faith. FCA and my closest friends in Kentucky have and always will be part of my spiritual backbone. But I needed to expand on my own. I needed to see if I could grow my faith alone and find new communities to share His word with. That was scary at first, but on my first Sunday in Portland I visited a small church that welcomed me with open arms. This church family was made up of what I like to call “the misfits of Portland.” Let me share that I moved to the least religious state in all of America. There are more strip clubs in Portland than churches. So this church of discipleship was just what me and so many Portlandians needed. I was able to grow in faith through the solitude of being 2,000 miles from home and through the gracious people I met along the way.
The people that I met along the way… I don’t think they know how important they were to me and how big of an impact they made. Imagine freshman orientation when you started college — and if you haven’t experienced that let me fill you in — freshman orientation is basically a bunch of socially awkward 18-year-olds that want friends but don’t know exactly how to go about it. Nike Orientation was similar, accept it was a bunch of 21-year-olds who moved to Portland from all over the country to pursue their dreams of working for the biggest athletic company in the world. They were hand picked from the most prestige universities and have the ability to succeed anywhere in life they choose. The friends I made this summer are some of the brightest and most driven people I’ve ever met. We came from all different universities, sports backgrounds and departments. We all brought something different to the table, which means the diversity of ideas and personalities did not lack. This was special because I was able to learn so much more than I could have imagined from each of them. We covered all regions of the country: Florida, Penn State, Vanderbilt, Clemson, Duke, Michigan, North Carolina, Washington, Oregon, Alabama and Stanford. But some how, we all ended up in Portland, Oregon.
Our summer motto was “work hard, play harder.” We worked our tails of 8am-5pm everyday. But we all wanted to have the summer of a lifetime. In just two-months I went white water rafting, hiked, visited the coast, went to Seattle, two minor league baseball games, six professional soccer games, went to Bend, Oregon for the weekend, kayaked through downtown Portland, floated down the Deschutes River, as well as sitting floor for Khalid Mumford and Sons and Chris Janson. I explored downtown Portland like it was in my job description, and I tried all the amazing food it had to offer. Food trucks are an under appreciated virtue in Lexington. But in between all these fun and excited experiences, I made some of the best friends I could have ever imagined. We built our friendships on music and each others presence. My favorite memory of the summer, aside from being floor for Khalid and Mumford, was when me and my closest girlfriends rented a Kia Soul and drove three hours to Bend. The drive took seven hours because we stopped so many times for pictures and to take in the amazing scenery. As we drove through the evergreen forest straight towards Mt. Hood’s snow cap top during sun set, Quinn XCII was playing over the speakers and I know that I will never forget that moment.
Even though I’ll never forget that moment, it’s still just a memory. Two months went by too fast. It feels like just yesterday I was introducing myself to hundreds of new people and trying to remember faces. But that’s how life works. It moves fast and if you don’t take advantage of the small opportunities or if you turn away from the ambiguity, you’ll get left wondering: “what if?”
I gave a lot to Nike this summer… Including half my paycheck. But I took even more away. Things that will last a lifetime: Playlists of songs that remind me of each person I met along the way, experiences that will give me an edge at any career path I choose to follow, the connections and friendships that won’t fade and the knowledge I gained about myself. I stepped out of my comfort zone and entered the ambiguity of the real world. College provided me with a safe space, cornered with four walls and familiar faces. But as soon as I stepped outside those walls, I was greeted with more than I could have imagined.
Before leaving Portland, someone asked me why I was so passionate about Nike. My response: This summer I learned that Nike is so much more than just a sports company. Nike is the young boy who got cut from his high school basketball team and became the best player to ever live. Nike is the young girl from Compton, California, who grew up to win 23 major tennis championships. Nike is the little girl at the end of the bench, waiting for a chance to prove her ability. Nike is you and me. The dreamers. The believers. The achievers. Nike has taught me that through sport, we are able to change the world. Nike showed me my value outside of softball or school and it pushed me in directions I didn’t know existed. Nike is a movement.