Who’s Going to Save Us

By: Abby Shaffer

Growing up, I played soccer as a goalie from age six to thirteen. At thirteen, I was asked by my friends to try out to be the field hockey goalie. I had no idea what field hockey even was. They put me in this huge padding where I could barely move because it looked like I was drowning in it. The first game I ever played was against a team Mackenzie Allessie played on. For anyone in the field hockey world, they know Mackenzie Allessie is one of the best field hockey players of this generation. She is currently on the Olympic team right now and playing D1 at Penn state. Needless to say, we lost by a lot. I bawled my eyes out after that game because I felt like I let my friends and my team down even though this was the first game I had ever played, and I was playing against a future Olympic player. I was only thirteen and the pressure of the position and the game was already getting to me.

That pressure grew and grew over the years as I decided to pursue a career in field hockey rather than soccer. There have been countless tournaments and countless games that have happened in the past eight years and countless tears were shed. I could make 50 saves in a game, but if my team still lost, or I let a goal in that I thought I shouldn't have, I was destroyed mentally and physically because my job is to save. Save the ball from going in the net. Save my team from losing. Just save the shot. It is a simple concept. I always felt like I failed when I let a goal in. So many thoughts pour through my head when I make a mistake telling me how I just let everyone down, and I am just left feeling like a failure. Slowly, that terrible feeling of failing transferred into everything I did.

One thing about field hockey goalies is that there is a huge stigma around that a lot of goalies are overweight because we don’t “do as much work” like the other players. The girls around me playing field hockey were always very thin and fit. In seventh grade, I weighed 162 pounds. Weight never bothered me before I was on the team. I never thought about how I looked, but it was middle school. People’s bodies started changing, and I began feeling more and more insecure, so I started eating less and less. I would get salads and only eat the three strips of chicken on the top and throw the rest away. I worked out 2-3 times a day while starving myself. With that regimen, I lost 30 pounds in one month. Unfortunately, my relationship with food has not fully recovered since then. I work out consistently, and I would like to say it is only because I want to stay in shape for the season but that’s just a lie. I did this “game” a lot during my sophomore year of college when we weren’t playing field hockey at all due to COVID. Every morning I would weigh myself and if I was over 130 pounds, I wouldn’t eat that day. I justified this process because it was only if I surpassed that number that I would starve myself. It was justifiable because I just wanted to maintain a goal weight. A healthy weight.

I developed a lot of bad habits that I unfortunately do believe stemmed from field hockey. Now, I am not saying that field hockey is the cause of my depression and anxiety. Not the case at all. Does the sport sometimes help and do I enjoy it? Of course. But I am not going to sit here and lie that it has not caused me a lot of emotional turmoil. I slowly started to lose interest in life beginning in eighth grade. I wasn’t really living for a while, I was more managing and surviving. I stayed in my room constantly in the dark and just slept or simply laid there. Part of me felt selfish for this. I had a good life. I had loving parents and family, good friends, I had a sport I was good at, so why was I feeling so empty? I remember the first time I told my mom I wasn’t okay. It was preseason freshman year of high school. I just got done with practice and she picked me up, and immediately knew something was off. I didn’t really say much that car ride until we got home, and I laid on the couch, and she asked what was wrong. It was the first time I admitted I wasn’t okay, and unfortunately it wasn’t the last. I tried medicine, therapy, inpatient, and I never fully felt happy. It’s hard. It’s sad to admit, but it is true. I haven’t felt fully happy in a long time. Even now, as a senior in college, I could find myself in a room full of people at a party or at a bar and still feel alone. I remember one night sophomore year I was at a party, and I felt so alone that I texted the suicide hotline. I was playing pong, laughing, acting completely normal while inside I was struggling so much.

Part of me thought I was feeling like this because field hockey wasn’t going on at this time and I just wasn’t very busy. But I knew that wasn’t true. Every semester I had field hockey my issues worsened. Freshman year, my family witnessed me have an emotional breakdown when I was pulled and lost my starting position. Now, I was a freshman starting as a goalie. That’s impressive in and of itself. But I felt so much pressure because I was a freshman. After that game, I bawled my eyes out to my family, screamed, punched things, and just had a full-blown panic attack. I failed. I made a mistake, and that mistake I felt defined me as a person. I felt like a failure. I felt worthless. This feeling worsened and worsened, and I began punishing myself. Whether that be not eating, putting a knife to my wrists, misusing alcohol, or over exercising. It reached points where I wished I would never wake up. It reached points where I deliberately tried to not wake up.

A lot of people who do not participate in collegiate athletics don’t understand it. They think we are lucky. That we are getting paid to play a sport. But that isn’t luck. That was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Collegiate sports are not fun and games, it is a business. A business where your worth is determined by a set of numbers; your stats, the amount of money you received from a scholarship, the number of minutes you play, and the number of games you win. A lot of people who do not participate in collegiate athletics also think, “Well-then just quit. It is your choice to play. Just quit.” It is hard to quit a sport you worked so hard to get to where you are at. I’ve been playing this sport for eight years. Eight years of practices, games, training sessions, and tournaments. I was a champion. One of the best goalies in my area. One of the best goalies of my age group. That was a defining characteristic of me and to just throw that away? What am I left with? What makes me special? My sport makes me special and without it I feel so ordinary. So worthless.

Despite recent events and the tragic passing of many student athletes, it made me feel less alone. I didn’t feel like an outcast, but then it got me thinking, “who’s going to save us?” Who’s going to stand up and defend us? Seeing the conversation about student athlete mental health being brought up more is great. But it’s not enough. We need to prevent what has been occurring lately from happening again. We need to save ourselves. There is no sport, no game, no practice worth losing a life.