Maryland Terrapins head coach Mike Locksley waits to take the field before the game against the Auburn Tigers at Nissan Stadium. She is an outspoken advocate for athlete mental health following the 2017 death of her son, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder CTE.

Mental health in youth sports is just as important as physical health

Maryland head football coach Mike Locksley has become an outspoken advocate for athlete mental health following the 2017 death of his son, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and postmortem of CTE. This is Part 2 of a two-part series on mental health in youth sports, recognizing the warning signs and how to help. Read Part 1 here.

Mike Locksley coached college football in Illinois and New Mexico from 2005 to 2011. His son, Meiko, was a high school star in both states.

Meiko signed to play in Youngstown County, Ohio, where he began to change.

He stopped going to class and started having unusual behavior problems. As he moved from school to school, he lost weight, began to have blurred vision and seemed to lack the ability to understand conversations. He also suffered a concussion while playing in New Mexico, not his first head injury in many years of playing football.

Locksley remembers being embarrassed by her son’s behavior.

“He’s dealing with schizophrenia,” the Maryland head football coach recalled. “He calls people who used to be friends of mine and they talk about these weird, weird conversations and they don’t know anything because he doesn’t have a cast or braces. [like with physical ailments].”

It took a lot of study and reflection for his thinking to change – which he now advocates and uses with his teams.

“After a while I got tired of regretting it and said, ‘What’s so different about ACL?’ My approach was to attack it. It makes it cool. To make it easy. ”

When Locksley spoke in May at the Project Play Summit in Baltimore, she was asked to help the audience understand why mental health advocacy is important to her.

“It started with failure,” he said. “I had a son, Meiko Anthony Locksley, who was a Division I football player. … He dealt with the problems of mental health before he was killed.”

Meiko was shot and killed near Columbia, Maryland in 2017 when she was a student at Towson and her father was coaching in Alabama. He was posthumously diagnosed with CTE.

“You know, mental health didn’t affect me, and now it was really personal to me because I saw a son who was a football player when he was 21 he struggled to discern fiction from reality.”

“And it just happened, almost like that for me,” he said, snapping his fingers.

Then, Locklsey spoke about the look. The one he saw in his son’s eyes but didn’t know it at the time.

“That’s where you can see the human spirit,” Locksley said. I said to myself, ‘I’ve had a lot of footballers in my 34 years that I’ve seen that look, but I didn’t. take care.’ The tragedy of losing my son, which may have been due to his mental health issues, has driven me to care for the 18 to 22 year olds I have had the opportunity to raise in from boys to men.”

The crowd, which was full of coaches and trainers, applauded. And he did so again when Locksley said Maryland passed a bill requiring the state Department of Education to train public school coaches to recognize the signs of mental illness.

Eight states require mental health training for high school coaches, according to a recent University of Connecticut study. Another initiative, the Million Coaches Challenge, brought together organizations to train coaches in youth development, including mental health.

Meiko’s death taught Locksley to coach with greater awareness of the mental health of his players. He hopes coaches at all levels follow his lead.

Treat the injury and emotional state of the player

How are things going for you?

Tell me what’s going on.

are you ok

These are the questions we can ask our athletes if something doesn’t seem right. Be proactive, even if you don’t suspect anything.

If he is recovering from an injury, ask him, “How are you feeling after treatment today?”

Clayton Young, an Olympic champion who participated in a National Athletic Trainers’ Association panel on mental health last summer, says an athlete’s tone of voice and response to injury can give you more information about his emotional state.

Also:Olympic gold medalist swimmer uses her story, and mental health issues, to help keep girls playing sports

Young recovered from knee surgery to finish ninth out of over 70 in the men’s marathon at the Paris Olympics. As he recovers, Young remembers the simple act of a late-night text from his athletic trainer who asked about him when he felt threatened.

It made him feel like someone really cared about him.

“Running is not only my job and my way to take care of my family and my livelihood, but it’s also my passion, my identity,” said Young. “It’s my drug, you could say. And when all of this is taken away from you as an athlete, it can be very difficult. ”

And if it’s a major injury, like an ACL tear, it can take nine to 12 months to return to action — if they return at all, said Marci Goolsby, the WNBA’s director of medicine. of sports.

“They lose their social networks in a lot of ways when they don’t play,” said Goolsby, who also coaches his daughter’s middle school basketball team. “And it’s higher in some sports than others, like lacrosse, and women’s soccer, where we see a lot of these injuries, and it can have a dramatic effect.”

If you are hurt, it may help to continue to exercise and do recreational activities with your colleagues.

Coach Steve: Five tips for a full recovery from an ACL tear

While training, Young found having a training buddy who is also recovering from an injury can lift the spirits. For him, it was Olympian and two-time NCAA track and field champion Conner Mantz.

Young said: “We started to build this relationship but we also encouraged each other. “We share a lot of challenges and training together. We relate in many areas of our lives. He is a person who understands me well. And I think everyone should have Conner Mantz in their life, whether it’s running or in the office or at work or with family.

Talk about it. Find hope.

When new players and coaches join the Maryland football program, Locksley does an exercise he calls “the three H’s.” At the end of the exercise, everyone shares a moment of great joy, hardship and heroism.

“That way, we can identify them,” Locksley said. And we have an open door policy when it comes to mental health. It’s true for us in our program. We talk about it a lot.”

Sitting next to Locksley on stage at the Project Play Conference, Mayrena Hernandez, assistant professor of athletic training at Sam Houston State University in Texas, spoke about the importance of children feeling comfortable.

Hernandez conducted a study with athletic trainers and youth from low socioeconomic backgrounds. He found coaches recognized emotional symptoms if they were good listeners and understood mental health issues.

For example, Cross country runners were injured in training, but why? Athletic trainers were able to see that their equipment was inadequate. They were wearing the same torn shoes.

“Or they noticed that, oh, this child, he rides the bus instead of having a new car like all his classmates,” he said. It’s amazing that some of those kids are able to hide those things so they can be like their peers. So the athletic trainer is able to get data and collect that data to find, ‘OK, is this athlete going through some of these social disparities compared to their peers?'”

Only about 37% of US high schools have access to a full-time athletic trainer, Hernandez said. One project in Los Angeles, Team Heal, is a hospital community program that helps find athletic trainers in schools.

An athletic trainer is another resource for the athlete and their family. One more person to watch the scene.

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