Dear coaches…

Dear coaches,

One of your athletes is struggling right now. It could be on the field, it could be off. Whatever his/her issue is, I’m begging you to take it seriously. We all understand your job is to win games. But it isn’t the most important thing a coach needs to do. A coach needs to prepare his/her athletes for life after sports. You need to realize we play a child’s game. We play because we love the sport, and the reality is a lot of coaches are making it tough to enjoy the game. We understand we need to be tough to play our sport. We understand we need to have the mental capacity to overcome adversity. We understand were held to a high standard and we make the decision to take on those challenges. But we also understand we have a stigma in sports where people think we shouldn’t deal with real life issues. But somedays we just don’t have it. Sometimes we need an off day, maybe even two. Sometimes we need to lie down all day and take a five hour nap. Sometimes we need to not practice and have a team dinner and forget about what were surrounded with all day. How many times as a coach have you sat down and asked yourself how many of your players are okay? Have you ever thought about meeting with your players 1 on 1 to check up on them? Or do you just look at the stats and see who is “okay” based on their performance, because the better we play the better we feel right? Just remember statistics don’t define us.  We get it, coaches have a hard  job and juggle things all day from all different aspects of their universities and sacrifice time away from friends and family. We don’t take the time and effort and dedication for granted by you coaches. But we miss things to. We miss the weddings, the birthdays, and the family holidays, all to play a child’s game. We do that because we love the sport and we love to play. We play because of the joy it brings us. But if every day we practice in an environment that’s full of people being afraid to fail and full of doubt how do you expect us to perform? Why do you think so many players transfer? There are so many athletes that don’t like their position because they’re unhappy with life, not because of their playing situation. Why would I stay at a school I’m miserable at? I’d rather lose a few more games a year and have the best time of my life in college than winning five more games and being miserable all year. At the end of the day it’s a game. It’ll all be over for us sooner or later, so when we play all we ask if for an environment where were happy to show up every day and love the people were surrounded by. We just want it to be safe for us to come up to you and tell you were having a bad day without it affecting our playing time or thinking were “soft.” This isn’t meant to come at coaches and tell you how to run your program. But from one college athlete to the next, we all ask that we can play in an environment where we can be vulnerable and let you know how were actually feeling. We want to get help without you thinking were not mentally tough enough to play our sport. All we ask is that we can communicate with how we feel and not have to put on a mask every day to show that were just “fine.”