News Articles That Inspire Us

Lori Ewing, Osaka's withdrawal raises important questions on media and mental health, athletes say, Canadian Press, June 3, 2021.

Osaka joined other high-profile athletes such as former Toronto Raptor DeMar DeRozan and swimmer Michael Phelps in pushing the once-taboo topic of mental health in sports into the spotlight. Her withdrawal also prompted questions about the role of the media.

"If an athlete has an ankle sprain, and you're saying, 'Hey jump up and down on it 10 times,' the athlete should say, 'No, that's not healthy for me, this could be more damaging for me.' And so, if an athlete says, 'I just don't think this is OK for me [to speak to media] right now, can I give it some time?' I think we need to listen to that," said Karen MacNeill, a performance consultant and mental health counsellor for Canada's Olympic teams.

"It's hard enough for an athlete to speak up and show any vulnerability or weakness. There's that sense of stoicism . . . about enduring difficulty without issue or complaint. It's 'suck it up, just forge on.' And so when athletes are saying [no], we need to listen."

Osaka's vulnerability was met with an outpouring of support. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to recording artists Pink and Dionne Warwick to actress and producer Viola Davis to numerous fellow athletes applauded her decision.

MacNeill said Canada is one of just two countries in the world — the United Kingdom is the other — that has a national mental health working group and strategy for high performance sport.

One of the messages, she said, is that a mentally healthy athlete is more likely to be a high-performing athlete.

"And so I think it's not just being an athlete, it's not just mental health, it all goes hand-in-hand. A proactive, preventive approach, having a mental health strategy, just like athletes have physical and technical development [strategies], it's got to be part of the same system.”

Christine Yu, Running’s Cultural Reckoning Is Long Overdue, Outside Magazine, May 27, 2021.

[Mary] Cain’s story was pivotal. It helped reframe what many young female athletes feel is a personal shortcoming—that they aren’t cut out to run competitively—as a systemic and cultural problem instead. And it spurred a wider reckoning in the sport. Soon after the Times video was published, other athletes of all levels began to acknowledge living through similar experiences. Many came forward with their own stories on social media. They recounted situations in which body shaming, weigh-ins, bullying, and overtraining were normalized behind the scenes—practices that can be a pervasive part of the sport’s culture and often fall into a gray area where what’s acceptable is not always clear.

There’s an expectation that colleges and universities have their students’ best interests in mind, but many of the runners interviewed for this story felt that their schools neglected those responsibilities. “When you’re a student-athlete, it’s a contract,” says Yuki Hebner, a 2017 Wesleyan graduate who coordinated her team’s effort. “I will give you all that I have for the seasons I run under you. In return, you’re going to have my back, and you’re going to make sure that I don’t come out of this physically or emotionally tattered.” Hebner developed a femoral stress fracture and an eating disorder while in college.

Hebner, from Wesleyan, sees the dismissal of athlete concerns as a failure on all levels. Part of the problem is there aren’t always clear lines for reporting or protections for athletes, let alone a system of accountability. Athletes may not be educated on what kind of behavior is unacceptable, especially for emotional abuse, when it can be hard to pinpoint a specific offense. Student-athletes are left to protect themselves and those around them.

Thea Ramsey, who ran for the University of Arizona … “When coaches are able to quietly fade into the night, there’s no accountability,” she says. “The college athletics system isn’t set up to protect individual athletes like us. It would be so different if coaches prioritized the well-being and success of women.”“When coaches are able to quietly fade into the night, there’s no accountability,” she says. “The college athletics system isn’t set up to protect individual athletes like us. It would be so different if coaches prioritized the well-being and success of women.”

And as more athletes come forward with their stories, there’s increased support and validation for them, allowing others to share and grapple with their own experiences. [Hannah] Whetzel says that since the University of Arizona team went public with the story, other athletes from different schools—and across various sports—have reached out to her privately to share similar experiences. Social media has created an alternate venue for athletes to air their complaints when the official channels don’t work.

There’s no easy fix for these systemic issues. But athletes today, particularly younger ones, are standing up for themselves and demanding fair treatment. And they shouldn’t carry the full burden of changing the underlying culture and holding their coaches and institutions accountable. The way Cain sees it, there needs to be real reform on the coaching side. “You have to look at it not from the athlete-as-a-product perspective,” she says. “There has to be more to it. When you have coaches really think about an athlete’s longevity, their personhood as a whole, that’s where you’re going to see breakthroughs and opportunities.”

Neil Davidson, Sevens women say they were let down by Rugby Canada’s bullying/harassment policy, Toronto Star, April 28, 2021.

[T]he women say their complaint “explained the psychological abuse, harassment and/or bullying these athletes feel they were subjected to in the centralized training environment.”

We know firsthand how hard it is to speak out and how hard it is to ask for change. Athletes should never have to experience heightened anxiety, depression, racism, eating disorders, low self-worth or mental illness as part of participating in sport at any level.

We intend to be part of the discussion going forward to ensure that positive changes are implemented within our sport. We have been assured by Rugby Canada that the independent assessment will start immediately and we look forward to working with them.

Alexander Wolff, Is the era of abusive college coaches finally coming to an end?, Sports Illustrated, September 2015.

Today's athletes can't—and won't—take abusive coaches anymore. And it doesn't work: Study after study shows the benefits of a more positive approach.

The problem is particularly acute in women’s basketball. former Terriers guard Katie Poppe. Only 39% of women’s basketball players strongly agreed that “my head coach can be trusted. 41% of athletes had “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function” and 52% had “felt overwhelming anxiety,” with the figures for women jumping to 45% and 59%, respectively. depression to be more than twice as common among active athletes than those who had finished their college careers.

A collegeage athlete can be highly susceptible to the influence of coaches, parents and peers, and may not have fully developed what she calls “resilient emotional regulation,” so abuse may leave a deeper scar on a young adult than an older one.

Laura Kane, Universities failing to protect athletes from abusive coaches, students say, National Post, Nov 24, 2019.

Their fight is part of a movement to end so-called 'old-school' coaching techniques that experts say are abusive

John O’Sullivan, Why is Abusive Coaching Tolerated in Sports?, Changing the Game Project, August 15, 2018.

Every day, across the globe, young athletes of all ages are subjected to emotional, mental, verbal, and sometimes physical abuse by coaches. I know this because not only do we read the stories, but we get heartbreaking, personal emails from distraught parents at wit’s end.

Victoria Garrick, Athletes and Mental Health: The Hidden Opponent, TEDxUSC.

Why did it take me so long to acknowledge and accept my [mental] illness? I realized the culture that we live in as athletes does not make it easy for us to honour this

The culture of athletics preaches where there’s a will there’s a way, the best don’t rest until you puke, faint or die.

Mental illness is associated with weakness. To appear weak is the last thing an athlete wants.

A physical injury is treated more serious than a psychological illness and that needs to change.

Jennifer L. Etnier, Your Kids’ Coach Is Probably Doing It Wrong, NY Times, March 11, 2020.

Inexperienced coaches often focus on winning rather than learning and development. I have seen my sons’ coach make the players run wind sprints after losing their second game during a three-game weekend tournament and walk off without a single word of encouragement after a loss.

The great paradox here is that you don’t win by focusing on winning — that becomes possible only if you are competitive. And to be competitive, athletes must improve their skills, learn to play under pressure, persist against adversity and be mentally and physically prepared to perform at their best.

A 2014 review published in The International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching summarized studies showing that children who drop out of sports often report that their coaches are controlling and autocratic.

Canadian Press, Canada goalkeeper Labbe candid about her depression, August 5, 2017.

Now, she's upfront about her battle, not just to help others, but to help herself.

"Sometimes people react like, 'Are you sure you're depressed? I don't think you're depressed, I think you're just sad, or maybe you're just having a bad day,'" she said. "Because we don't talk about it."

Mary Cain, I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike, NY Times, Nov. 7, 2019.

Mary Cain’s male coaches were convinced she had to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner.” Then her body started breaking down.

Juliet Macur, Olympic Gymnast Recalls Emotional Abuse ‘So Twisted That I Thought It Couldn’t Be Real’, NY Times, May 1, 2020.

For the longest time, Laurie Hernandez, an Olympic champion gymnast, thought she was crazy for thinking that her coach had emotionally abused her.

When that coach screamed at her for the tiniest of mistakes or lapses in focus, calling her weak, lazy or messed up in the head, with an obscenity for emphasis, Hernandez rationalized that all top coaches pushed their young gymnasts that way. When she stood frozen and bawling at the gym, her heart racing as she struggled to breathe, scared to do anything that would elicit her coach’s wrath, Hernandez — an adolescent at the time — assumed she just couldn’t handle the pressure.

“I thought I deserved all of it,” Hernandez, 19, said in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, the first time she has spoken publicly about the abuse she says ignited eating disorders and depression that she continues to battle.

“The toughest part about it was that there were no bruises or marks to show that it was real,” she said. “It was all just so twisted that I thought it couldn’t be real.”

Emotional and verbal abuse is rampant in the sport, many gymnasts said then, with athletes so afraid of their coaches that they rarely speak out about any mistreatment.

Early on, Hernandez sought help from her mother, who contacted the coach. The next day, Haney showed up at the gym in a rage, telling Laurie Hernandez, “So, your mother called me.” Then, Hernandez said, Haney punished the entire team by assigning extra conditioning work.

Eventually, Hernandez stopped telling her family about anything that happened at the gym, fending for herself instead.

Struggling with her weight and pubescent body changes, Hernandez ended up binge-eating and purging. When she lost weight, Haney would praise her and Hernandez felt encouraged that the vomiting had worked.

“Any compliment was like holy water,” Hernandez said. “It went from one day walking on eggshells with her to her saying the next day that ‘we’re in this together.’ She really knew how to mess with your head.”

She coped with her sadness by overeating and still has “a ginormous fear of doing something wrong, perfectionism to the extreme.”

Jackie MacMullan, Kevin Love: Coronavirus pandemic another reminder of importance of mental wellness, ESPN, May 22, 2020.

In August 2018, Love sat down with ESPN to publicly address his mental health struggles. He revealed a detailed account of a panic attack he'd had in the middle of a game against the Atlanta Hawks the previous November, when his heart began racing so fast, he felt it was going to pop out of his chest. Struggling to breathe, Love stuck his hand down this throat in hopes of dislodging whatever was blocking his airway. There was nothing there. His panic attack left him splayed on the floor of the locker room, believing he was about to die.

Since then, Love's life has been transformed. He has assumed the mantle as the face of mental health awareness, not just for the NBA but across numerous sports, educational and cultural platforms. He created the Kevin Love Fund, an organization committed to normalizing the conversation about mental health.

Gretchen Kerr, Erin Willson, and Ashley Stirling, Prevalence of Maltreatment Among Current and Former National Team Athletes, April 30th, 2019.

41% Trained while injured/exhausted

35% Were put down/embarrassed/humiliated

35% Were intentionally ignored

31% Were criticized as a person

22% Engaged in eating disorders

52% Didn’t tell anyone

33% Sought help

13% Submitted a formal complaint

9% Felt supported

NCAA, GOALS Study of the Student-Athlete Experience Initial Summary of Findings, January 2016.

College campuses have generally seen an increase in the number of students experiencing mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

The 2015 GOALS data highlights similar concerns among student- athletes, with about 30 percent self-reporting that they have been intractably overwhelmed during the past month (increases noted across each division versus the 2010 GOALS study).

One-third of student-athletes noted struggling to find energy for other tasks because of the physical demands of their sport. Nearly one-quarter reported being exhausted from the mental demands of their sport.

Although many student-athletes say they would feel comfortable talking to coaches about mental health issues, such comfort is much lower among women.

Alexi Pappas, I Achieved My Wildest Dreams. Then Depression Hit, NY Times, Dec. 7, 2020.

I’d spent my life training for the Olympics, but I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

Alexi Pappas, who lives in Los Angeles, argues that we should view mental health and physical health as equally important and as treatable as a torn ACL. She would know. She’s a record-setting runner who raced at the 2016 Olympics in Rio but came crashing down after she experienced clinical depression soon after.

While she had been trained to pay close attention to her body, she was ill equipped when it came to handling psychological wounds. Imagine if sports — and society — designated the same amount of resources toward mental health screening and treatment as they do to physical well being and viewed a healthy body and mind as equally important to success?

Simon Denyer, Athletes in Japan suffer widespread abuse, Human Rights Watch says. Washington Post, July 20, 2020.

Together, the allegations raise questions about the pressures heaped on young people in the intensely competitive world of elite sports and whether governments and sports federations are doing enough to address the problem.

The government and sports organizations have also attempted in recent years to address the problem of abuse in sports. This has generally been in the form of nonbinding suggestions with no clear mechanisms to ensure compliance.

Jori Epstein and Daniel Libit, Texas Tech women's basketball players describe toxic culture: 'Fear, anxiety and depression’, USA TODAY Sports, Aug. 5, 2020

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic gold- medalist swimmer and civil rights attorney who founded Champion Women to advocate for athletes, emphasized the importance of administrative accountability in athletics. “Not every coach is abusive,” Hogshead-Makar told USA TODAY Sports. “But every abusive person who wants that inherently abusive relationship wants to get into sports, because administrators are not holding them to account. “We need to get abusive coaches out of coaching. Period. End of story.”

Laura Kane, Rowing Canada, University of Victoria investigate celebrated coach for harassment, abuse, Canadian Press, November 17, 2019.

Williams focuses on athletes he sees value in while ostracizing others, say three members of the Cornell University team coached by him in 2017-2018. Julia Reimer says she caught a cold but felt pressured to show up to practice at Cornell. She developed a severe respiratory infection and for months used an inhaler, which she had never used before. “Because of that toxic environment he created and the segregation, I felt like I was lower-class,” Reimer adds. Reimer and another teammate, Sheehan Gotsch, say it’s normal to sometimes train on land but the size of Williams’s land squad, and his reasoning for putting certain people there, were unusual. Gotsch says the coach began to ignore her after he saw her perform poorly once while she was injured and his treatment caused her to suffer frequent panic attacks. Sophia Clark notes she became the fittest she’d ever been while Williams was coach. But she ended the year so miserable she remembers swearing, “I will never touch an oar again.”

The Virago Project

We are a network of current and former female athletes who are dedicated to helping you navigate the physical and emotional highs and lows of a life in sport.

Our mission is to help female athletes balance sport with life. We do this by educating, inspiring, and connecting with sportswomen in our community.

CBC Sports, Player's Own Voice podcast: External success, internal struggle with Brittany MacLean, September 1, 2020

For Brittany MacLean, Canadian national women's record holder in the 400-, 800-, and 1,500-metre freestyle swim, a bronze medal in Rio was a serious eye opener. Objectively, she knew it was a huge achievement. But inside? The normally exuberant young woman felt mostly disappointed and depressed about the experience.

Christine Rankin, Canadian rugby 7s great Jen Kish opens up about her battle with mental illness, September 11, 2020

Jen Kish, former captain of Canada's rugby sevens team, is sharing her diagnosis of bipolar disorder so that others know they aren't alone in their battles. "I just want to let people know that I struggle too," she said. "You can still be successful with whatever you have ... get the support you need or surround yourself with people who can give you the courage to reach out.”

For years, Kish said, those in her life – including sports professionals – neglected to acknowledge her struggle with mood changes. Instead they blamed exterior factors, saying she was just stressed, lacked coping skills, or needed to sleep or eat. There's nothing worse, she said, than being told "you're fine" and nothing changing.

Michael McClymont, Prescott dealt with anxiety, depression after brother's suicide, The Score, September 2020.

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott got help this offseason after experiencing anxiety and depression in the wake of his older brother Jace's death and the coronavirus pandemic.

TYT Sports, Viewers Call For Skip Bayless To Be Fired After Making These Comments, September 11, 2020.

I don’t have sympathy for him going public with ‘I got depressed’. He’s the quarterback of America’s team.

Steve Berkowitz, Josh Peter and Daniel Libit, Texas Tech Red Raiders softball coach steps down after review of program, September 23, 2020.

Six weeks after a USA TODAY Sports investigation led to the firing of Texas Tech’s women’s basketball coach amid allegations of player abuse, the school’s softball coach resigned Tuesday night amid similar circumstances. Texas Tech had said in a statement that it was conducting an internal review “to assess the overall culture and student-athlete well-being within the program.”

Allegations of mental abuse date to shortly after Texas Tech hired Gregory in June 2014, according to Cassie McClure, a pitcher on the team’s roster when Gregory was hired. She said Gregory isolated McClure from the team after McClure suffered a concussion and told players not to contact her. McClure said she grew so depressed she had suicidal thoughts and transferred to Nebraska.

CBC News, Canada Artistic Swimming closes Montreal training centre amid investigation into abuse and harassment, October 1, 2020.

"We can't continue to operate in an environment where athletes don't feel safe, where coaches do not feel they can work without being accused of being hostile, harassing, abusive."

Kevin Mitchell, 'I was just lost': Coco Gauff says rapid rise and hype led to depression, The Guardian, April 16, 2020.

“I’ve always wondered how better or worse my life would be without tennis,” she says. “I found myself too busy comparing myself to others. Most of my friends go to normal high school. I felt like they always seemed so happy being ‘normal’. For a while I thought I wanted that but then I realised that, just like social media, everyone isn’t as happy as what you see in their posts.”

As the wins mounted and she rose to 49th in the world rankings – the youngest player in the WTA top 100 – Gauff observed: “My results were still OK, so this didn’t have much to do with tennis. I just wasn’t happy playing anyway. It is challenging to do school alone while you can’t socialise with other students.”

TSN, TSN Original: Disorder, November 2020.

The pressure to succeed in sport can be overwhelming. Glory may follow success but the pursuit can also manifest serious and lasting damage in athletes. An eating disorder can be responsible for that harm. While 1 - 5% of the general population develop an eating disorder, the prevalence in some elite sports is over 30%. The TSN Original feature, Disorder, examines eating disorders in sports through the lens of athletes who have experienced the struggle firsthand.

Derek Van Diest, Canadian national team goalkeeper Erin McLeod launches mindfulness project, Vancouver Sun, Oct 20, 2020.

“I think it’s important for young people to enjoy the process a bit more and be in the present moment a bit more, which helps not just on the field but in life.”