A Coach’s Perception
By: Emily Considine | tw: suicide
When I started my college coaching career six years ago, I went into it ready to work by one quote. A quote I heard my college strength and conditioning coach use once that really resonated with me, “No one cares how much you know, unless they know how much you care”. I wanted every player I coached to feel like I cared about who they were as a person. If they were struggling in school, helping them with their resources. And if they were struggling on the field, being clear and direct with where I felt they were at, what they did well, and what they needed to work on. I feel extremely lucky in my first coaching job to have been hired by a head coach that had the exact same outlook. Someone who valued the student-athlete as a whole.
Labeled as “Birthday Meetings”, a player comes in once a month on the date of their birthday to talk. A temperature check on lacrosse, school, and most importantly life. A scheduled time a player would come in and just talk. As a player myself, I remember walking up to my coach’s office, trying to focus, trying to get my hands to stop shaking and my voice not cracking even more than what I had to say. Why is that? It brings you back to elementary school when you got pulled out of the classroom, and in the seconds it took you to stand up from your desk and meet whatever person of authority was in the hall, the flight or fight response had already set in. However, if you knew once a month you were already getting called out of the classroom to talk, each month that fight or flight response would be a little less.
With Birthday Meetings players are used to coming into the office, we get to chat about anything they want; roommate troubles, an A on a paper they worked hours on, missing their dog, how excited they are to see their sister at our game next week, the club they just joined and how they want the team to get involved, how their rehab is going for their rolled ankle, the professor that might be giving them a hard time about missing class for our away game next month, how they need to focus on protecting their stick more in transition, commenting on how their shot placement has shown improvement. With the routine of Birthday Meetings down, that “Open Door” policy we talk about seems to be a little less of a foreign concept.
Madison Holleran’s story hit me hard. In January of 2014, I was a junior in college starting to return to play protocol for an ACL, MCL, and meniscus tear I suffered in a season practice the season before. The details of my mental state then are for another article, but what you need to know is that coming back from an injury did not cause my mental health struggles, the accumulation of my past and current experiences, made a grand debut in the spring of 2014. There is no one to blame for this. No one was talking about stress, anxiety, or depression in 2014. I did a lot of self-reflection that summer heading into my senior year, often referring back to articles about Madison. I had this deep gut feeling that continuing to play my senior season would be putting me in a dangerous position. I was fragile, and I knew it. Without talking to anyone, without seeking help, I decided to step away from lacrosse for my senior season.
In my first year of coaching, by what I take as fate, the school had a graduate program in School Counseling and Mental Health. I spoke to my head coach about starting grad school while coaching. I wanted the education to back up the quote I was heading into work every day saying to myself. I started classes to pursue a Masters in Counseling in the Fall of 2016. The amount of knowledge I was gaining to be able to implement into college coaching was exactly what I was looking for. Over the last six years, we have continued to adapt and evolve, we were not perfect coaches; you don’t know what you don’t know. Everything is a learning experience and once we knew better, we did better. Creating an accepting environment, valuing each student-athlete for who they are as a person, listening, understanding, empathizing, managing expectations, and providing them help and guidance on and off the field.
In the Spring of 2017 Victoria Garrick’s TedTalk on mental health was released. Coincidently, Victoria was the cousin of a former college teammate of mine. I immediately texted my teammate and told her to thank Victoria for me, that everything she described was exactly how I felt as a student-athlete and I admired her strength to talk in public about it. Victoria’s TedTalk was so well articulated, she put into words what I could not in 2014. I then sent it to my players to watch, then had an open conversation about how it is okay to have these feelings and take advantage of the resources that will help you. From there we made sure to make our players aware of their resources to counselors, nutritionists, tutors, clubs, and religious affiliates before they even show signs of needing it.
Each time I hear that we have lost a member of the student-athlete community, I get that gut feeling I did as a student-athlete in 2014. I happen to think that those who contemplate or ultimately resort to suicide are the most emotionally intelligent individuals. I think society might not totally have it right, yes athletes are supposed to be tough, strong, problem solvers; but I do not believe that mental toughness is not the only reason we do not say anything. How would we justify those that struggle and were not athletes? These adjectives are not reserved solely for athletes. We need a student athlete's background to know where their mental state is when they arrive at college. We need to understand what started the downfall, what broke them, and the time in between.
We should not generalize the cause, everyone’s experience is unique to them. Now more than ever our society has been conscious of mental health, we have come an extremely long way since I was an athlete in 2014. If there has ever been a respectable time to speak up, it is now. Oftentimes you hear that the individual lost was “so full of life, they touched every person they met”. Maybe they are just trying to convince themselves to feel a different way, turning internal extreme sadness into external outgoing happiness. Maybe we start asking everyone how they are doing, not just the person that seems to be displaying what you view as an emotion that needs to be attended to. In not so many words, maybe everyone needs a Birthday Meeting.
This is where I would like to bring in coaching; “a coach’s role is to facilitate learning, offer advice, and also analyze the individual to identify weakness and strength”. This is one online definition I found that seemed to identify with sport the most, but if you have any experience in coaching you will know this hardly scratches the surface. Up until this point of the article, I have mentioned very little about the act of coaching the sport, which is probably an accurate depiction of how our time as coaches is spent on actual coaching. However, at the end of the day, we are coaches of a sport. It is our job to develop, encourage, correct, push, cheer, level, strategize, rally, etc. Every player's perception is their own reality. I could make the same correction to the same player one day apart, that exact same way. One day it could be perceived as “okay I need to make an adjustment to better my game” and the next day “wow she has it out for me today”. The player’s perception has been altered.
We like to say come to practice and leave everything else off the field, everyone knows that is easier said than done. As coaches, if the player does not express their perception of the day, we are going to coach the way we always do. If they do express they are having a hard day, we can pull back. However, what if we have a game tomorrow, and the information we need to tell you is important and can not wait? How do we make you a better player without the perception of being labeled as anything but trying to make you better at the sport that brought you here? When that student-athlete does express their perception of their day, listen. Ask them what they need, and tell them what you can offer. When helping those struggling, what is needed is to create an environment where they feel comfortable to open up. The challenge comes when you have a full team and each person needs a different type of environment to open up. The problem is not creating these individual environments, the problem is the time it takes to figure it out for each individual.
As coaches, how do we help players define the difference between what is a situation of adversity affecting mental wellness, and what is a situation that is compromising mental health? We can’t, we are relying on the player to tell us. There is a demand for counselors, therapists, and psychologists. We have to start providing it in an accessible way. You have a yearly physical check, why not mental? We ask for a primary care doctor, what about your primary therapist? You have to be physically cleared to play a sport in college, what about mentally? Each athletic department in the country needs a Sports Psychologist, someone who can understand the demand of a student-athlete in terms of on the field performance and overall day-to-day life, as well as the ability to unpack previous experiences prior to their time as a college athlete. Are there enough qualified professionals to fill the demand?
At the end of the day, a coach’s record is the only hard evidence they have to prove they are successful. Coaches think for hours and hours about what will work, who will work, and when it will work. There is value in every single person who helps prepare for game day; a starter, first off the bench, scout team, injured players, managers, and coaches. Without each member of the team working their role, the team cannot be defined as a team. If as a student-athlete you feel that your only value is minutes on the field, you may have identified too deeply your value in your sport, not with the value you have to your teammates and coaches. You should not be identifying your human value by time played on the field or the performance you have during a game, but by the effort you put in every day, how you push yourself and your teammates to improve, how you give and receive feedback, how you better your community, the work you put to your studies. There are so many ways a person is valued.
“It is often that friends who are checking in on everyone else, who need check-ins most themselves”, I can only speak for the staff I am on but, we do a lot of check in’s. As a player, you go home and think about that play you messed up. We go home and think about that play as well, for every member of your team that made a mistake that day. As well as how we can improve our coaching cues, maybe the explanation? Maybe we rushed them through it? Maybe it’s the drill as a whole? Maybe she was having an off day? I hope that the biology test went okay for her. Should I bring up the situation at home? I don’t want to pry, maybe what she shared was all she wanted me to know. Maybe I’ll shoot her a text and just ask if everything’s okay? Wait, no it's 10:00 pm this can wait until I see her tomorrow…can it wait until tomorrow? Now extrapolate this to the roster size of the team.
As mentioned earlier, I am not a fan of generalizing a group of people, there are always exceptions. But for argument's sake, let’s generalize. Coaches on the older end are Baby Boomers and GenX. On the younger end, Millennials and a handful of GenZ. Solely GenZ would be our current student-athletes. Baby Boomers and GenX, generally a group that denied mental health was an issue. Common phrases being “deal with it”, and “you are fine”. No-fault of their own, it is how the Silent Generation parented. Since Millennials grew up with the internet, they started getting comfortable sharing their feelings through AIM, LiveJournal, MySpace, and other behind-the-screen platforms. Millennials opened the door to sharing internal monologue, they know Mental Health awareness is here and not going anywhere. Now the issue is, no one taught Millennials how to handle mental health, they are out there trying to figure it out themselves with Boomers and GenX. At the same time, these three generations are coaching GenZ, GenZ is holding them accountable for a concept they do not know enough about. Who is educating Boomers and GenX? Who is helping millennials? Gen A, will be the mental health connoisseurs if Boomers, GenX, Millennials, and Gen Z work together.
As a coach, wins matter, but we know mental health matters more. The unfortunate truth is there is no stat to prove a team is truly happy. There is no stat to prove anyone is truly happy. If we had evidence of happiness other than an individual’s word, we likely would not be having this conversation. We have actually learned that stats can show a false sense of happiness. Those with tons of friends, great grades, financial wealth, and stellar status have been the description of some we lose to suicide. We often talk about the pressure student-athletes are under, and it is absolutely a fact there is a lot of pressure. It is why student-athletes only make up 32.5% of D1 school’s student body, it is not for everyone. Being a coach is also hard, but no career path you take in life is free of challenges. You are supposed to feel anxious at times, it means you are outside your comfort zone. Being out of a personal comfort zone is how society as a whole has evolved. When the anxiety is no longer coming in waves but is consistent, it is time to ask for help.
Hearing about student-athletes losing their life to suicide brings on so many emotions, reactions, and opinions. Oftentimes we wonder about what the people in these student-athletes lives were not doing, or what they could have done that would have made a difference. What we should ask, what were they doing? What if it was exactly what you would have done? Some may be quick to say whatever they did was not enough…will there ever be enough? We will never stop searching for the answer that will deny us of this tragedy. While we are on the search, ask people about their day, tell them you appreciate them and be hopeful that everyone is doing the best they can with the information they have. If I have one thing to tell myself in 2014, 2013, 2012 and prior, it would be to ask for help. Student-athletes, please ask to help. Losing one will always be one too many, but how many have been saved? For those that have been saved; do not call it luck, call it progress.
