Blue Dragon Student-Athletes Have Resources Available on Campus

By Kaleb Moore
Staff writer
IG: @kalebmoore05

In sports, availability is the best type of ability. If a player is always readily available, the team will perform at a higher level. When an athlete is struggling with mental health issues, availability becomes even more crucial.

Mental health can be taboo. It isn’t something many people like to talk about with their peers. It can be difficult for people to express their problems to people without receiving judgement, pity, or any other unwanted reaction. That logic applies even more to athletes.

Athlete life is mentally driven. The focus is always on improvement or the next game, so some athletes can get lost in the weeds of hard work and forget to hone their own mental happiness.

The stigma around talking about mental health is brutal, so many athletes will go through their careers without looking into a solution. However, help is readily available to all who seek it. All it takes is for one to speak out.

Erin Ellis, the academic advisor at Hutchinson Community College for most athletes, is a helpful resource for the athletes. When an athlete approaches her expressing a mental issue, she will help the student immediately.

“Some student-athletes will come to me and want to talk through whatever is going on right then,” Ellis said. “I will talk with them but also give suggestions for what they can do moving forward like scheduling an appointment with one of our counselors”.

Sticking on that point, HutchCC has a useful and accessible resource for students struggling with mental health issues – the counselors. Any student, athlete or not, has access to free consultation at the Student Success Center.

Just like in high school, the counselors are there to hear you speak and offer their sage advice on what to do moving forward. This is crucial for people to utilize, as having a person to listen to your problems is the easiest way to move past issues and get on track to resolution.

A former high school athlete at HutchCC, who preferred to remain anonymous, said “If I had someone to talk to when I was going through hard times, I might have pursued playing collegiate sports. Instead, I got into my own head and decided to quit”.

There has been a movement attempting to dismantle the stigma against athletes speaking out about mental health struggles. The ground that has been made marginally increases every single day. The abundance of resources available is assuredly a reason for that.

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