Put the Person First
By: Nicole Gautreau | tw: suicide
Growing up, I was a model student and athlete. I always got good grades, never missed swim practice, and figured out very early on how to balance the two. I also didn’t have much of a choice – my mom was my high school math teacher and my dad was my club swim coach. By the end of senior year, I was ready for a change of pace and didn’t know if swimming in college was going to end up being the right decision, as I felt I might be done with the sport.
My first 6 months of swimming in college were great. It was the perfect combination of working at the sport I loved with the excitement of being away from home for the first time and meeting new people. Until I was hit hard by mono in February. It wasn’t obvious that I was sick at first. When I first started feeling off, I thought it was only because I was exhausted. Which didn’t strike me as strange considering I was working out 20+ hours a week and going to school. Why wouldn’t I be tired? But it quickly turned from going to bed a little earlier into not being able to get past lunchtime without a 3-hour nap.
At a dual meet, we had one weekend I swam terribly. I had always struggled with performing well mid-season with no rest ever since high school. But this meet was especially bad. After my last race that day, one of my coaches pulled me aside and told me I needed to figure out how to improve quickly because this was not what they recruited me for or were paying me a scholarship for.
Within a couple of days, I was so sick I could barely get myself to student health to get the mono test. I ended up going back home for 2 weeks to recover. And it would take more than a month until I was cleared to slowly ease back into swimming again.
Unfortunately, all of this happened with just a few weeks left of our season. This meant that year, I was a spectator to my own team at the conference championship meet. After that, I was not in a good place mentally. I felt like I had missed so much with the team that I was hardly even part of it. Even once I was cleared to swim, I had to ease back into it so slowly that it took a while to be part of regular practices again. I have always been shy, so whenever we were in the dorm café and teammates were talking about the workout or a joke someone had said at practice that day, I just sat there quietly because I didn’t know how to include myself. It got to be so hard feeling excluded from these conversations that I started eating my meals at weird times. I knew if I waited until late at night for dinner then I wouldn’t have to get through a long meal with a group of other people. When I wasn’t in class or at practice, I just stayed in my room.
Those feelings only continued to escalate until I started to consider taking my life. I no longer felt like myself when it came to swimming, school, or anywhere else in my life. I didn’t have the chance to prove that I belonged on the team with a good conference performance. I was struggling to catch back up in my classes in a way I had never dealt with before. And I felt like I wasn’t adding anything to the interactions I was having with my teammates, I was simply just there.
My coaches were always checking in on how my grades were doing that quarter and if I could push myself any harder during workouts. But no one ever asked how I was doing mentally. I don’t blame anyone for overlooking that. At the time no one was really talking about anxiety, depression, or suicide. At the time I did not even have the words to describe what I was feeling and what I needed help with. I just knew I was not ok and it wasn’t getting better. It wouldn’t be until my senior year I even knew we had a sports psychologist in our athletic department. I still could not tell you what mental health resources the school had for all students. I had gone to the same doctor, dentist, and even hair stylist most of my life. I had no idea how or where to look for help on my own.
Thankfully, soon after this, I was able to go home for the summer and return to familiar people and environments. I was able to completely reset and feel like myself again. When I returned to campus the next fall, I was living off-campus with a group of teammates. While 7 girls in an apartment with 2 bathrooms wasn’t always an ideal situation, it allowed me to get to know all of them better, as well as other teammates who would come over to hang out with us. They probably did not realize how much all of that meant to me, but I was able to reintegrate with the whole team in a way I hadn’t been able to the year before.
Looking back on it, I wish I knew then what I know now. Therapy is an amazing tool that can help anyone at any time. Being prescribed medication is nothing to be ashamed of. Even when it feels like no one can relate to you, they can. People want to help you.
Seeing stories of other student-athletes losing their life to suicide hits me hard every time because I know that could have been me if circumstances were just a little different. This topic always gets so much attention when these stories occur – in the news, and on social media. But we need to make a conscious effort to keep that attention going at all times because we clearly have not yet found an answer.
I wish there was a simple solution, but an issue as complex as mental health also has complex solutions. And that means we need to address problems on multiple levels.
For the individual student-athletes, this means supporting their teammates and checking in with each other. It also means checking in with themselves and doing their best to understand their own feelings and trying to recognize when they need help. But none of this can happen without a safe environment that is created by coaches, schools, and the NCAA.
Coaches need to be having these conversations about mental health and all available resources with their athletes early and often. They need to work on creating a team culture that respects and supports any athletes who are struggling so they can feel safe bringing any issues forward. They also need to recognize that everyone needs a break sometimes, even student-athletes. Giving the team a day off workouts in the middle of the season is not going to lose a game or a meet. It might even give everyone a chance to catch their breath and come in the next day even more ready to train harder.
Schools and athletic departments must ensure that these mental health resources are available for every student, whether they are an athlete or not. There also needs to be an increased effort in communication with students regarding what is available and how to access these resources. If a student does not know where they can go before a crisis occurs, they will not know where to go when they get to a point of crisis.
Finally, the NCAA needs to do its part to create and enforce policies across all divisions and schools to ensure that every student-athlete in the country has access to the same resources. This might include requiring mental health training for all coaches, athletic trainers, strength coaches, and other athletic staff. Anyone who works with student-athletes needs to know how to best respond and help if there is someone who trusts them enough to reach out for help. The NCAA needs to create minimum requirements for mental health resources at each school and they also need to support schools in meeting those requirements, whether it be through financial assistance or something else.
We also need to recognize that these things don’t start and end in college. While sports can be incredibly important and formative for children, we still need to let kids be kids. I look back now and see all the vacations I couldn’t go on, days at the beach I had to miss, and invites I had to turn down because I had to swim. Swimming gave me a lot in 15 years – it gave me some of my best friends and a scholarship for college. But it has now been 5 years since I swam laps in a pool. While I learned so many important things that I carry with me today, it also did not help me get into graduate school or get a job. Athletes are people first and will continue to be those people when they are no longer athletes.
Since I graduated, there have been a growing number of high-profile athletes working to shift the conversation around mental health. This is an extremely important step in the right direction. But the stigma remains. We need to continue talking about the hard stuff to remind each other that no one is alone. We all struggle sometimes, and it’s okay to ask for help.
