Dear Coaches & Professionals,
On behalf of the leadership team for The Hidden Opponent’s (THO) Coaches and Professionals (C&P) Program, we are proud to be able to produce this program and serve as a support system for all athletic staff, coaches, and mental health professionals. The Hidden Opponent was founded by Victoria Garrick Browne after delivering her 2017 TED Talk titled, “Mental Health in Athletes: The Hidden Opponent”. Our non-profit focuses on three main initiatives in order to support the mental health of student-athletes across the globe: advocate, educate, and support.
In 2020, THO launched the Campus Captains (CC) program, which serves as an ambassador program where students on various high school, NCAA, and NAIA campuses across the country serve as ambassadors for student-athlete mental health. Since launching, the program has boasted over 900 CC participants both nationally and internationally. The CC program has seen much success and growth over the past four years, which brought a few of our team members to ask another important question: what about the staff behind the athletes?
In Fall of 2022, THO launched Coaches & Professionals program, which has produced monthly panels on a variety of mental health related topics for the past year and a half.
As the C&P program continues to grow, we would love to hear what you would like the future of the C&P program to look like! Click here for an anonymous survey to tell us more about what you’re interested in learning!
Here’s a message from the C&P program leadership team:
I’ve been involved with THO in various positions since 2020. I’ve served as a Campus Captain, a Head Campus Captain, and a founder and president of the Ursinus College chapter. So, when I was approached by Mary and Anna in the summer of 2021 about a project they had been working on involving coach and athletic staff outreach, I was eager to take on a new perspective that I hadn’t worked with yet.
Coaches, athletic staff, and mental health professionals are the backbone to student athlete mental health, and a majority of the time, that is difficult to see as a student athlete. My first season with the C&P program was my last as a track and field athlete, and now that we’re in our second season of the program, I have had the chance to see the program from this new perspective. THO’s mission focuses on advocacy, education, and support in ending the stigma surrounding mental health in athletics; this includes the athlete, but also every single coach, trainer, psychologist, and athletic professional that supports them along their journey. Coaches and professionals can only help if they are given the appropriate tools to help themselves, their peers, and their athletes. Our hope for this program is that coaches and professionals will engage in our monthly panels and workshops to build their toolkits and learn how to support and advocate for the mental health of themselves, their athletic staff, and their athletes.
The C&P program is something that is incredibly important to me, as helping to create the first panel for the program was my senior capstone project! Not only did the C&P program allow me to graduate from college, but it gave me the opportunity to advocate for an initiative I feel is incredibly underrepresented in the athletics community, which is supporting coaches & professionals with their own mental health, and providing them with resources to help support their athletes!
I am not a mental health professional, but I am an advocate, which is a distinction I hope to help many coaches & professionals realize for themselves through our program.
As a former basketball player, and youth coach, I understand that coaches are often not equipped to deal with the situations surrounding mental health that are presented to them. Even with a degree in Communications and the self proclaimed title of “mental health advocate”, I have often found myself in situations where I struggled to communicate openly and honestly about mental health, whether it be my own mental health or addressing the mental health concerns I have for those around me.
Through this program, we hope to show coaches that, just like athletes, that they are not alone in their struggles! There is a huge community of individuals that are here to support each other, and feel that same uncertainty when it comes to these conversations. THO aims to destigmatize mental health within the athletics community as a whole, and the C&P program provides resources to coaches and support staff on not only how to support their athletes, but how to support themselves and their own well-being as well. Educating ourselves on mental health and how to best support each other is a work-in-progress for us all, and we aim to make that educational journey a little easier through the C&P program!
