The Real 1v1 in Sports; My Mental Health Journey as an Athlete

By Hope Adigun | IG: @hopekatherineadigun | TW: self-harm

There are many questions I’ve heard frequently in my life as an athlete. However, there’s always one question that I hear that leaves people confused when it isn’t answered the way they expected. The question? “You must have a lot figured out! I mean, you’re a Division 1 athlete, that’s enough in itself. There are kids that would kill to be in your position.” The answer? Truthfully, I don’t have it all figured out. I wish I did. However, I have a lot more figured out than I did growing up as an athlete.

Growing up, I was a one sport athlete. Being an international competitive gymnast, I learned to have a backbone as an athlete from a young age. I was six when I started, and 13 when I quit. My coaches were both older men. One an air force veteran, and the other a coach of about 15 years before I came through the competition program. With summer training on the level of military personnel training, and the criticism, that in many ways could’ve caused girls my age to quit the sport altogether, I learned how to take it on the chin when I was about eight or nine. Take it on the chin was a loosely held term at that age, as well. Sure, as a little girl, I cried when I didn’t place top three in a competition or had a fall in an event, but it was never done in the presence of my coaches. On top of that, because I was practically spending my life in the gymnastics center, I quickly became desensitized and out of touch with my emotional health. Where nine hours of my week in competition were dedicated to perfecting routines and correcting technical errors such as bent legs and pointed feet, the summer would take it out of me completely, with 12 hours dedicated to learning new skills and conditioning and another three hours used for open gym at the end of my week. 15 hours in the gym at a time at the age of nine pushed me to my max, and I never really understood the importance of taking breaks for myself.  My confidence felt like it was through the roof, and it was because I really never took the time to understand my emotional health in the sport.

After I quit gymnastics, the avoidance of my emotional and mental health as an athlete followed me into other sports. Basketball, track, soccer, and lacrosse were all the sports I turned to after I left gymnastics behind me. I played basketball growing up and returned to the sport when I turned 13, and was a starting guard. I was a sprinter when I ran track, and a captain and midfielder when I played lacrosse. None of the sports touched me like soccer did, and I knew I wanted to stick with it for as long as possible. 

I started my high school career on JV, and was left with an empty promise of a varsity spot my sophomore year. That was a little bit of where I noticed my mental health start to show itself. Everyone hated high school sports tryouts, so when you were told at the beginning of the tryout week that a varsity spot was looking very open for you, when you hit the end of the week and the outcome is different, it feels like your hard work was really just in vain. Right after my first season ended, my grandfather, who was an avid soccer player and watcher, passed away due to health complications. He was someone who I wanted to play for to fulfill his dream of watching his children play his sport, even if I was a grandchild. When the varsity spot was finally given to me my junior year, I was promised to be playing a lot, and how I was going to be an asset for our team. It hurt even more when that promise wasn’t fulfilled, and slowly but surely, my confidence and emotional stability began to unravel from then on. I had a night where I had finally felt I had enough with myself, and my sport as well. I wasn’t ready to just quit soccer, I was ready for my life to be over. One night, in the quietness of my room, I had made a few marks with a razor on my wrist, but out of a fear-filled instinct, however, I stopped myself from going any further, and immediately called my older sister. While the rest of the call might’ve been a blur out of my sadness and inability to compose myself, the one part of the conversation that stuck with me was this: “The plans you have created for yourself in your life seem like they backfire for a reason, Hope. Your plan for your life is so miniscule compared to the one that God has for you. Why would you want to prevent those plans from unfolding if you know they’re greater than you can imagine?” When she told me this, I sat back and let it sink in. Who knew you could be this convicted through a phone call? It made me realize one thing. Religious or not, there is a plan for you. You may not know it or realize it yet, but there truly is beauty in the waiting. When I truly learned what that meant, it was around  the beginning of my senior year. Knowing that every day brings new opportunities, it became my motivation to stay, and my motivation to embrace my struggle and my hurt in my sport, because it is always used for good, even if you don’t see it right away.

I had been working through a few offers that were put on the table for me, and I thought all hope was lost when my top school had informed me that they weren’t offering me a spot to play college soccer. I was crushed, and was positive at that moment that any opportunity I had to play college soccer was going to be denied. Another small division II school had offered me close to a full ride scholarship to play there, and it looked like my opportunity was about to fulfill itself. But after thinking about the fact that this decision had been made in a split second, I wasn’t sure I was going to be happy playing. The light at the end of the tunnel that I had worked so hard to see, yet again started to dim. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t take the offer when it was in front of me, but it just didn’t seem like it was going to work out for me in the long run. Another school that I had visited just two months prior to receiving this offer had been in contact with me for a while, but nothing had been developing. Because it was somewhere that I knew I wanted to go, I held out on the opportunity. It was another instance where I was throwing myself into the unknown, and this time, despite my nerves, I was excited for whatever outcome was going to come for me. When I attended an ID camp just days before the season was due to start, I started to feel like all hope really could’ve been lost. When the coaches asked me to stick around for a conversation after the camp concluded, I told myself to be alright with whatever outcome would result and that was how I went into my meeting with them. My head coach asked me how I felt about my performance that day. I was honest with him about it, and he followed up with this response: “Well, I hope you’re okay with the amount of paperwork you’re going to have to fill out over the next few days, because it will be a lot.” It took me a second to process, but when it hit me, I felt my heart burst. The spot I had continued to work so hard to get was finally mine. It made me grateful that despite all the closed doors, that I didn’t give up, that I continued to look for the open one. I embraced the unknown and the uncomfortable, even when it felt like the comfort zone was where I should’ve stayed.

My message to athletes who may have found themselves in a space where they really wanted to give up is this: the moment where you take your first few steps into the uncomfortable is where you will start to understand yourself so much more. It’s where I learned to celebrate my accomplishments and embrace my failures just as well. When you start to become okay and unbothered with the unknown, you start to release your anxieties of what is known, and what is known to us is what can cause the mind and body to shut down at times. I have the verse Jeremiah 29:11 tattooed on my arm, and it says this: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” It is a reminder for all to know that just like myself, there IS a plan for you. The goal will always be the top of the ladder, but sometimes you miss a step or one falls off and you have to find a way to still get to the next one. The fear of missing the next step is what gets to us. Sometimes, we feel it’s better to just crawl back down the ladder out of the fear of missing that step. What do I know? I know that just like me, you’ll be okay. Sometimes the biggest battle is staying on that ladder, let alone, getting on. If you can get on the ladder, you’re just as capable of taking the steps up. When all is said and done, you will begin to feel more at ease and proud of yourself day by day, whether you take that one single step, or you make it up a few. And I can assure you, when you reach the top of that ladder, you will look back down at the steps you took to get there; from the steps that were loose in the ladder, to the ones that couldn’t have been bolted tighter, and even the ones that had come off of their hinges completely, you will thank your inner self that you never gave up when things seemed to get hard, and that you kept going through it all.