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Thanks to everyone who joined in our call last night to discuss mental health and sports. We had a new caller join us who had some great insight to the situation and added a lot of value to our discussion.
We discovered that everyone on the call had a negative experience with athletics at some point in their life, whether it was as an athlete, a parent of an athlete or both.
We briefly discussed the story of current Dallas Cowboys defensive end Randy Gregory who, in a recent article for ESPN.com, stated that the first time he remembers feeling the mental pressure starting.
It was in a locker room after his first wrestling match at eight-years-old, which he won. Gregory’s dad noticed his son having severe panic and anxiety. The anxiety was brought on solely by the younger Gregory but over the years, as his success grew, so did the mental health issues.
All the participants on the call last night had one thing in common and that was coaches who yell, put undue pressure on players or abuse them verbally and sometimes physically.
As someone who coached ice hockey for many years, I did everything in my power to make sure the kids had a great experience each season. It didn’t matter if it was nine-year-olds playing recreational ice hockey or my high school varsity players.
Building up our young athletes, and that includes those in high school and college, is what’s needed. Coaching in a way that teaches the skill you want your players to learn in an environment where they’re comfortable is a skill every coach in every sport at every level needs to learn.
When it came down to it, we concluded that fear, intimidation and other negative tactics are what leaves the mental scars that we take with us into adult life. For some, those scars are deep and take years to heal, if they ever do. For others it’s not as bad, but really, is “not as bad” what we want for our future generations or do we want to give them the best experience they can have?
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Photo credit: Photo courtesy Unsplash
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