During high school after I made my decision to bail on Lehigh soccer and commit to Penn track, I was 100 percent sure it was the best decision I have ever made since my track times were peaking and I reached more success than I had ever thought was possible,” she wrote. “After running the 1200 leg at Penn Relays I could not wait to compete for Penn. Then how did I end up here right now, wanting to leave the team and not competitively run anymore? How did I end up wanting to quit the team almost a month into school? How did I end up being as overall unhappy as I have been for the past four months? Before coming to Penn I was confident, focused, motivated, silly and mainly just a happy girl…
On Monday morning, Madison finished the letter. She printed out a copy, then sent a text to Ingrid and another of her friends at Penn, Alex:
1/13/14 10:32 AM
Maddy: Just finished the letter to my coach. I’ll update you guys when I get out of the meeting.
Alex: Good luck!!
1/13/14 10:17 AM
Maddy: Meeting with my coach in 40 mins. HELLLPPPPP scared
Gabb: Good luck
As Stacy and Mackenzie arrived in Philly, they stopped at Starbucks and got Maddy her favorite, a vanilla latte, then drove to her dorm room, collected her, and the three of them went to the grocery store.
Although Mackenzie was confused about how Maddy could dislike college so much, she wasn’t particularly worried. Mack had played a lot of sports while growing up and now also in high school, and she had wanted to quit before, so she could relate to how Maddy was feeling about running. She had been surprised at how distant and sad her sister had seemed over break. She remembered one night when the three sisters had been in Maddy’s room, sitting on the bed, and that when Ashley left the room, tears started pouring down Madison’s face.
“I’m not happy,” she said, then kept repeating the same question: “How can I be happy? How… how?”
Mackenzie kept offering solutions: stop running, join a club, join a sorority, play soccer, go out more. “It’s gonna change,” Mack said. “It’s gonna get better.”
Now here they were in Philly, about to make the first of those changes. At the store they stocked up on healthy snacks for the fridge in Maddy’s dorm room. They bought her baby carrots and hummus and organic peanut butter. There wasn’t much time before the meeting with Dolan, so they quickly dropped off the groceries and all three went to the track offices. Maddy had her letter with her—two single-spaced pages—and she planned on reading the letter aloud to Coach Dolan.
Both terrified and thrilled by the statement she was holding, Maddy felt confident that the ideas she had expressed in the letter were urgent enough that Coach Dolan would understand why she had to make this change. Still, she needed to make absolutely clear to him, both in how she presented the letter and how she expressed her feelings, that no other choice existed. The meeting would change everything. She would no longer be the star athlete who could clear every hurdle, push through every obstacle. She would become Madison Holleran, student, normal in all the ways she had never been normal. The cost of this change would be high, but she had already run it by her friends and family, and although her identity seemed to be shifting dramatically, almost everyone had appeared to understand. And anyway, the truth was, the cost of staying inside her current identity—Madison Holleran, Ivy League runner—was steeper.
Maddy, Stacy, and Mackenzie walked into the athletic offices. While they waited in the lobby, Maddy showed the pages of the letter to her mom and sister, detailing the gist of what she wanted to say: she was unhappy; she needed to quit. When Coach Dolan appeared, waving them into a conference room, Maddy turned to her sister and said, “Can you stay here?”
“Oh, okay, yeah,” Mack said. As her mom and sister went into the room, Mack found a chair. She pulled out her iPhone and began looking at prom dresses. The dance was still months away, but Mack had already started looking at options, and she would want her sister’s input.
Mack wished she could be inside the conference room, mostly because she wanted to know specifically what Maddy’s letter said. Nevertheless, she thought she understood what would happen behind the closed door: her sister would quit track. She knew that’s what her sister wanted, and her sister had always been good at getting what she wanted.
Stacy remembers the conference room and its center table feeling big, but the three of them sat together in a corner. The coach wasn’t sure what this meeting might hold, but over the years he’d had hundreds of similar meetings, listening as so many young athletes worked through the pressures of the college transition. Dolan led off the conversation by saying he didn’t think Maddy was struggling as much as other athletes he had coached, and he thought she and Penn were a perfect match. From his vantage point, she had made one of the smoother transitions he had witnessed: She was in the team’s top five on the cross-country course, she worked out great, she did well in school. In person, she seemed to be smiling, happy. And he hadn’t heard differently from anyone—neither teammates nor coaches. “We saw this successful, well-liked person,” Dolan said later. “It was fun to watch her excel and be excited.”
The idea of burdening others, of dragging down her family and her teammates, appalled Maddy. The wilderness of her internal life, the constant waves threatening to overwhelm her, was her terrain—and hers alone—to navigate. In fact, the letter in her hands was more self-revelatory than she was used to being. But the change she hoped to spark was drastic, and she knew it required exposing more of herself than might be comfortable.
The three of them exchanged pleasantries. They spoke of winter break and holiday celebrations and rest, and how Maddy was feeling (the blood tests, which she and the coaches had e-mailed about in December, showed nothing alarming). Dolan shared with Maddy how well she had done first semester, how impressed with her he had been. None of this was particularly relevant to Maddy, but it was to Stacy, who hoped her daughter could hear the praise and reassurance, the validation. Couldn’t she see? Her panic about first semester was a monster of her creation; she had given this monster life, and she could kill it, too.
Dolan circled back to the point of the meeting: how Maddy was feeling after first semester.
“I actually wrote a letter that I want to read,” Maddy said, pulling out the two pages. “I wanted to make sure I said everything clearly.”