She took a deep breath, then began: “Although this has been extremely difficult to put into words, I’m going to do my best to explain my first semester at Penn and where it’s led me…”
Tears began spilling from Maddy’s eyes, rolling down her cheeks. Stacy began crying, too, for very little in this world is more painful than seeing your child in pain. “I felt so bad for her,” Stacy said. “I had never really seen her so distressed.” Maddy continued reading the letter to her coach:
“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. But over the past couple months I’ve felt lost. And this feeling has accumulated and built up into so much more, and that’s why I decided that something has to change. For as long as I can remember sports have defined me, but now I think it’s time for another path. Now I think it’s time to define myself. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to compete for Penn and be a part of Penn track, but right now, I’m really not ready to compete. I don’t know what is the right choice for me here at Penn, how to be ‘happy’ again, but I know something needs to change. And if I could pinpoint one aspect of my life leading to where I am now, it would probably be track. Trust me I would LOVE to run for you. I would love to run at Heps, at Penn Relays. I would love to run a 4:40 mile. That was my goal coming into college. But everything seemed to be thrown at me so quickly that I feel like I’ve dug myself so deep and at this point, right now there isn’t any coming back. While I feel as if leaving the team would be a huge disappointment to you, my high school coach, my parents, my team and maybe even to myself, I’ve thought long and hard about this and feel that I just need to take the semester off to figure out what I really want in life and who I really am. As I said sports have always defined me, but here it hasn’t brought me happiness. And it’s time to define myself. All I need is a new beginning here and I think this semester will give me a chance to start over.
“Coach Martin gave me a book to read over break and it made me want to run even less, but I read some of it. One part particularly stuck out to me:
On the third day his outlook would begin to darken. For one thing, he was getting very, very tired. No particular day wore him out, but the accumulation of steady mileage began to take its toll. He never quite recovered fully between workouts and soon found himself walking around in a more-or-less constant state of fatigue-depression, a phase Denton called ‘breaking down.’ The new runner would find it more tedious than he could bear… at that point most of them would drift away. They would search within themselves somewhere along a dusty ten-mile trail or during the bad part of a really gut-churning 440 on the track, and find some key element missing. Sheepishly they would begin to miss workouts, then stop showing up altogether. They would convince themselves: there must be another way, there HAS to be. The attrition rate was nearly 100 percent.
“I hope you understand. I’m sorry to put you in this position and I don’t expect you to be pleased to hear this, but the only thing I really want is a break. Maybe taking this semester off will make me realize I want to be on the team again and compete next year, but as of right now I strongly believe that isn’t the right choice for me.”
Maddy exhaled. She had said it—all of it. She put away the letter.
Often, quitting is a mistake. So much is learned through perseverance. Nearly every college coach has been in this situation: sitting across from a student-athlete who no longer wants to compete. Occasionally this is precisely what that young person needs. But more often, if student-athletes push through the discomfort of the first year, they grow stronger, and later, those thoughts of quitting come to seem like the notions of someone else entirely. They end up being thankful to the coach who saw a different path, one that kept them steadily directed toward their goals. How does a coach know which athletes to let walk away and which ones to fight for? They don’t; they can’t. Not for sure, anyway. They just do their best. “As a coach and a person who works with young people, the most important work we do is supporting people during that transition and to help them adjust to a new place, a new team, new academics,” Dolan said. “It’s always been important to me.”
That morning inside the conference room, Dolan offered Maddy a different path, one that Stacy assumed her daughter couldn’t see, or hadn’t considered. Maybe her future on the team didn’t have to be black or white. Perhaps they could take it slowly and she could call the shots, deciding over the next few weeks when and how she wanted to train. He had heard her: she needed a break, absolutely. But perhaps they could build that break into the larger structure of track, so she didn’t have to quit entirely. In an effort to empower Maddy and restore her ownership of her athletic future, he turned over all decision making to her. “He said, ‘If you’re not happy with Coach Martin training you, I’ll train you,’” said Stacy. “‘If you’re unhappy where you’re living, I’ll help you move.’ He said she could stay on the track team and just train and not compete, or she could even pick the events she wanted to run. He was just so sweet and accommodating.” But Maddy may not have felt empowered; she may only have felt the walls of the cage taking a new shape around her.
After offering all these new options, Coach Dolan placed the decision in Maddy’s hands. Stacy, too, thought these new options might help soothe Maddy without stripping her of her athletic identity. Dolan even offered an additional olive branch: taking it easy for the next few days, and then meeting again at the end of the week. Added Stacy: “He said, ‘If you want to quit track, that’s your decision, but obviously I would love for you to stay.’”
The two adults looked at Maddy.
Was there another choice? Was there a way to form the words “I can’t keep running” and then, even harder, make those words come out of her mouth? She couldn’t imagine it, so she said the only thing she could picture herself saying: “Okay, I’ll try.”
They say quitting is easy, and sometimes it is. Other times it’s not. Other times it’s the hardest thing of all—impossible, really. “You see someone young and talented and successful as Maddy was, and you care for her, and you’re seeing this bright future,” Dolan recalled. “And you can’t fathom that she felt differently about things than anything we can see.”
Because still, there on the horizon, looms another truth: depression and anxiety are not cured in a moment, with a single decision, though sometimes it can feel as if they might be. Even if Maddy had followed through on her decision to quit, other hard decisions would have followed. No matter how assiduously she had laid the groundwork for leaving, she hadn’t yet experienced what that would be like.