How three Minnesota colleges are prioritizing athlete mental health

With the fall sports season just around the corner, college and university athletics officials will be tasked with monitoring an increasingly important aspect of the student-athlete experience: mental health.

The longstanding and accepted pressure that athletes have felt to set aside feelings of depression and anxiety has given way to a more holistic approach to student-athlete health. One of the more notable examples in Minnesota was the leave of absence granted last season to University of Minnesota basketball player Braeden Carrington, who took some time off to reboot and later rejoined the team.

MinnPost checked in with three Twin Cities schools — the University of St. Thomas, Augsburg University and Macalester College — to see how their athletic departments are tackling mental health struggles among their student-athletes.

Strategies vary from school to school but include mental health checklists for athletes, the use of sports psychologists and required training in harm reduction.

Augsburg University

Missy Strauch has been working as an athletic trainer at Augsburg University for 25 years, primarily working with the football and men’s hockey programs. The Minneapolis school competes at the NCAA Division III level. 

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The most common mental health issue she sees is performance anxiety. While many factors can contribute to that dilemma, the most common one is injuries. While recovery obviously focuses on the physical aspect of returning to play, the part that tends to go unseen is mental, said Strauch, the school’s director of sports medicine.

“Mostly, we see [athletes] are anxious about their return to play after any injury,” she said. “‘Am I going to get back to where I was? Am I going to reinjure? Is it worth it?’ That just messes with their head so much because they know the pain that they’re going to go through, and how long it took them to recover.”

Another factor is the expectation to perform at a high level, whether that expectation comes from the athletes themselves or from other people, such as family members. 

“You want to talk to somebody about how you can talk to your parents, how you can talk to your coach, because your dad’s in your face about your performance all the time, your mom is disappointed that you’re not playing anymore, etc.,” Strauch said.

These problems can build up over time and affect the athlete’s schoolwork, relationships, self- confidence and more. 

Augsburg doesn’t have the funds to hire a sports performance coach, Strauch said. Despite this, she said the school still finds ways to be effective in its support, such as bringing in physical therapists, being equipped with a mental health checklist and informing athletes of other resources online. 

Macalester College

At Macalester College, another NCAA Division III school, Paula Natvig, the assistant athletic director for student well-being, said high expectations — for academics and athletics — can cause mental health struggles down the road.

Macalester students “are used to achieving what we call straight letter grades, As and everything,” she said. “They were also probably some of the best athletes in their [high] school, so all of them are coming here and expected to be the best of the best. We see that performance anxiety, stress, depression, those kinds of things.”

Natvig has worked at Macalester for 21 years. She, along with other athletics personnel, emphasize mental health “every single day, as much as we can” to the coaches. They bring in sports psychologists of different genders and ethnicities for those athletes to meet with a preferred identity. 

Macalester has students from all 50 states, as well as countries such as China, Germany, India and Mexico. Some of them, mainly those from other countries, can’t afford to go home for holidays.

“Some of our international students come to [Macalester] their first year and don’t go home until after they graduate because they can’t afford to fly home,” Natvig said. “We have ‘host families’ that kind of adopt [the international athletes], bring them in for breaks and stuff like that. We’ll also hold get-togethers just in athletics for people who aren’t going home.”

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University of St. Thomas 

Jemal Griffin has been serving as the deputy athletic director for student-athlete services at the University of St. Thomas for six years. He believes there are still lingering effects from the isolation created by the COVID pandemic on student-athletes.

“For a lot of student-athletes, and general students at large, [the pandemic] was a major developmental stage,” said Griffin. “For this group of students, in terms of what they were able to do at high school and their developmental and growth, just normal social interaction. And so some anxiety, coping skills and depression comes with that.”

Along with the isolation came an increased use of technology and social media. With mental health struggles and social media thought to be correlated, Griffin said the school works with student-athletes to help them better navigate their social media use.

“The challenging thing about social media is that 18-to-22-year-olds rely on it for their moods, for their confirmations that they’re doing a good job, that they’ll always be privy to what people say,” Griffin said. “It’s hard as it is. You can see that gratification from those external people who most of the time don’t even know you. I think it definitely factors in [mental health] and it’s something that they’re highly impacted by.”

The university, which competes at the NCAA Division I level, is taking strategic action toward giving student-athletes greater resources for mental health. Griffin and staff have implemented a development plan that sees a director, a liaison and three mental health specialists regularly visiting particular teams. 

The main priority of this plan is to not only get the most out of their student-athletes now, but for “the next 50, 60 years of their lives.”

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