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After a series of athlete suicides shook college athletics, leaders of Sycamore Girls Softball decided it needed to do something to help its players.
Board member Nate Johnson went to president Erica Snodgrass with an idea of a clinic to help players on the program’s traveling teams, the Sycamore Sycos, deal with mental health issues.
With the help of Emily Dienst, manager of outpatient therapy services at Northwestern Medicine Behavioral Health and financial support from the DeKalb County Mental Health Board, the Sports Mind and Body Clinic becomes a reality Monday.
“We wanted to know what is it we can do,” Snodgrass said. “There’s got to be something we can do, even at the younger age level. Our girls are hopefully going to become collegiate athletes, maybe not D-I athletes. ... We hope to turn these young women into students, hopefully student-athletes.”
There have been at least five suicides among NCAA athletes since March, and at least three of those were female athletes. Snodgrass said the death of James Madison softball player Lauren Bernett – a day after she was named the Colonial Athletic Association player of the week – really shook the sport, Snodgrass said.
After hearing about Bernett’s death, Johnson went to Snodgrass with the idea and reached out to Northwestern Medicine in hopes of putting on a clinic.
“In order to do our part, we were going to put something together to help our athletes with the tough summer coming up,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of stress, lot of pressure, lot of stuff going on. We wanted to give them skills and coping mechanisms to help them deal with those high-pressure situations that are coming up.”
There will be a pair of clinics for all the teams in the Sycos travel program. They also oversee the city’s rec league softball as well. The first for the younger teams is Monday at the Sycamore Rec Center, with the older teams going June 20.
Dienst said the clinics will focus on different dimensions of health to help the whole athlete.
“How can we focus on your mental health? Your social health? Your physical health? Your intellectual health?” Dienst said. “We’re hoping to incorporate guided imagery so someone can feel more focused, more balanced, more centered both on and off the field.”
Dienst said the clinics will focus on neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and adapt, and in this case how to cope with strong emotions, or how to learn to adjust to how they cope.
“What our brains are right now doesn’t necessarily mean doesn’t what it has to be forever,” Dienst said. “We don’t have to feel and think the same way forever. ... What can we change about the way we think or feel to be well in the future?”
Dienst called the clinics something of a pilot program and hopes they’ll be able to expand beyond just the Sycamore travel team. She has reached out to the DeKalb County Mental Health Board about it as well.
“They are very strongly advocating for this type of pilot program to see how this goes and maybe where we go from here to make sure we connect with our community,” Dienst said. “As therapists ... part of our work is being proactive and reaching out to the community to see how many people we can reach out to with these different strategies.”