Mental Health and Athletes: What Coaches and Sports Can Do

Studies show that nearly 60% of Wisconsinites can look at the list below and say at least one of them is prevalent in their life:

-Emotional Abuse

-Physical Abuse

-Sexual Abuse

-Witness Domestic Violence

-Adult struggling with mental illness

-Adult struggling with AODA (Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse)

-Separation/ divorce

-Parent incarcerated

14% can say that four or more are true.

Add these experiences and traumas to all the uncertainties and pressures of the world today, and more than 50% of high school students report feeling anxious, tense, scared or like something bad was going to happen.

18% reported feeling like suicide was the only solution.

That’s where sports come in.

“Sports opens the doors for so many different things,” says Dr. Brandon Currie, CEO of Stryv 365. “It exposes you to different things that you can learn about yourself and about working with others — from discipline to teamwork to commitment to dealing with adversity. You can’t be an athlete without having some form of adversity that you need to overcome. Players who do great things, prior to them doing those great things, they had to believe they can. You put yourself in situations where you challenge yourself, your back is against the wall, something you haven’t seen before. How do you respond to it? And, I think that carries over into the real world as well.”

Coaches also play a big role in motivating and understanding what their athletes are dealing with.

So, what can coaches do?

1) Learn about adversity and mental health to better understand your kids.

2) Learn techniques that create stress resilience. This will help improve athletic performance, help mental health and increase trust with teammates, as well as with you.

“Sports often require some degree of aggression or escalation,” added Tim Grove, senior consultant at Wellpoint Care Network. “The real question for my mind, is how quickly can you go from that escalated position back to something near baseline? One of the things we worry about quite a bit are kids with a history of adversity, because they’ve been in survival mode all the time, they struggle to get back to baseline. So, what coaches often see is, ‘Man, that incident happened 30 minutes ago, why are you so jacked up about what happened 30 minutes ago? The rest of us have forgotten about it.’ And, when you’ve got that kid who just can’t let it go, he needs to sort of keep going back after it, that’s one of the things we worry about. One more thing about this that is often overlooked: It’s easy to see the hyper-aggressive. It’s easy to see the acting out impulsive. There’s another form of how people cope with overwhelming stress that we call dissociative. That would be seen by a coach when you’re trying to get your athlete’s attention and you have to say their name four or five times and they kind of snap out of that thousand-yard stare. That is a different way to think about athletes who might be struggling just as much as the athlete who maybe went a little overboard.”

The preceding responses were part of a “Resilience in Sports” panel, hosted by Wellpoint Care Network, Stryv 365, and the Milwaukee Bucks.

For pictures from the event, click here.