School had always been straightforward: collect a specific set of numbers and letters, and receive your desired grade. That was not confusing; that was reassuring. Now, she felt as if she’d been dropped onto a course of unknown length without signs or mile markers.
Toward the end of the semester, one of Maddy’s high school friends, Justine Moran, drove down to Philly. The two had grown up together. Justine didn’t play sports, and because of that, their relationship did not rely on soccer or running as the common thread. When together, the two often gravitated to discussing other topics, which is what they did that day in Philly. Over Greek food, Maddy told Justine how stressed she felt about school.
“I get tests back, and the teacher says, ‘Don’t worry about this number,’” Madison told her friend. “I have no idea how I’m doing. I think I’m failing.” Justine did her best to reassure Madison that everything was fine, that she was going to be fine. After all, hadn’t Madison always performed well, even when things became difficult? Why would this time be any different? “I just feel like I’m trying so hard and nothing is working,” Maddy said.
Justine could sense her friend’s unease. “In high school, she had the perfect—well, everything,” Justine said. “She always stood out. But now, she wasn’t fully seeing her success, or all of her work paying off. She didn’t stand out there as much as she did at home. She was just another person, and it felt like that was scaring her.”
Maddy often expected the worst. To her, the prospect of failing out of Penn did not feel like hyperbole; it felt like the probable outcome. How could she believe otherwise, when she had no concrete evidence to the contrary? Everything had been flipped on its head, had become abstract. She was finishing behind a hundred other runners and was told that was good. She knew only half the answers on an art history test and was told not to panic.
Freshman year of college, especially for those playing a sport, is like walking through an obstacle course wearing a blindfold. No context exists for how hard the workouts will be, how long they will last, what each class will be like, what events are fun, what should be avoided. There is no yin-yang, either; no understanding that one week might feel grueling, unmanageable, but just hang on, because the following week will be light and easy. For someone who struggles with the unknown, freshman year of college can feel like walking a path lined with land mines—heart racing, disaster around every corner.
Now add another variable: mental health.
Mind, Body, Spirit
In the early 2000s, I played college basketball at the University of Colorado. A month into my freshman year at CU, I began to dread practice. This is not an exaggeration; I once swallowed an entire bottle of iron pills in the hopes that I would become violently ill so I could be excused from that afternoon’s session. Apparently, I believed that spending hours hunched over a toilet was more pleasant than being on the court. Every single day was the equivalent of me holding a thermometer next to a lightbulb, desperately trying to convince someone, anyone, not to make me go. I found myself focusing on whatever small aches and pains I had. A bruise on my shin was likely shin splints, a sore knee tendinitis. And if I complained persuasively enough, perhaps our trainer would tell me I needed to take a few days off.
The hours before practice became a mental battle far more torturous than whatever I was hoping to avoid on the court. Anxiety dimmed my every waking moment. (And often my sleeping ones, too.) Every minute was one minute closer to the next practice, even if it was just one minute removed from the last. I convinced myself I hated basketball. Then this thought would send me spiraling: Who was I if not an athlete? I didn’t know. My identity was as a basketball player. The initial fatigue was, at a base level, physical: difficult morning workouts, increased weights in the gym. But previously, physical strain had always been manageable. I’d always had a comfortable emotional foundation. My feet were planted. A workout was challenging, but it existed within my routine: I went home to my bed, in my room, with my family. Once the foundation shifted, and once my support system became a group of people less warm and caring than my parents, every physical act seemed more difficult.
After about three weeks of this, I walked into the office of Kristen Payne, our athletic trainer, sat in the chair opposite her desk, and started crying. I was lucky. We had developed a close relationship from my first day on campus; I trusted her. As I sat crying in her office, she defended me, dismissing each coach who came into the training room looking for me, wondering why I wasn’t yet on the court.
“She’s not practicing today,” Kristen said.
“But why not? Is she hurt?”
“She’s just not practicing today. End of story.”
That day, she connected me with a counselor, one not affiliated with the school. And once a week for about a month, I drove the few miles to his house outside of Boulder, to talk to him and try to unravel what was happening.
I was embarrassed about having to see someone. I told no one I was doing this. I felt weak. The saving grace was that I was spared the discomfort—unfortunately, that’s how it would have felt to me then—of walking across campus and into the building that housed counseling services. Everything I did, except for attending classes, was within the silo of the athletic department: lift, practice, study, train, eat—even worship. This was my safe space, my comfort zone. And guess what? There was no counseling center, no psychologist’s office, within the athletic department building. The clear message: needing a psychologist is abnormal.
How could an athlete with a mental health issue not feel like an outsider when she was literally forced out of the athletic department and pointed toward a building far away from campus and the athletic bubble? But regardless of distance, therapy helped me; things gradually started to feel better. And within a month or two, I could step onto the court without panicking.
My sister, Ryan, ran cross-country and track at Dartmouth during the same years I played at CU. She was often hurt during college, and in the fall of her senior year, her times plummeted. She just could not get her body to do what her heart and mind asked of it. After one meet—it might have been after Heptagonals, the same race after which Maddy collapsed—my parents found her by herself, crying. Nothing they said could make it better.