How Sport Can Help Athletes Cope with Community Trauma

 

Unfortunately, the world of sport is not without risk: Even the most highly monitored athletes can fall victim to illness and injury. When Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field, eventually recovering consciousness days later in the ICU, we saw the power of a sporting community coming together. But we also saw a need to be better prepared for situations like this, especially for younger athletes.

Here, TrueSport Experts Kevin Chapman, PhD, clinical psychologist and founder of The Kentucky Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, and Nadia Kyba, MSW, the President of Now What Facilitation, share a few important ways that coaches, athletic directors, and school administrators can help athletes navigate traumatic times and become better prepared for moments like these.

Understand what athletes face

Hamlin’s traumatic cardiac event had the nation focused on what caused his heart to stop, and what his road to recovery looks like. But there are traumatic injuries in sport happening constantly, and at every level of sport. According to the CDC, high school athletes account for an estimated two million injuries, 500,000 doctor visits, and 30,000 hospitalizations annually. Student-athletes are also under a tremendous amount of stress, which can be hard to acknowledge as a coach or administrator. As adults, we tend to forget that students have high levels of stress because we often look back at our teen years as feeling worry-free relative to the challenges we face as adults. But acknowledging that students are feeling stress even without a specific tragedy or trauma can help you better understand and guide your team through good and bad times.

Communicate as a team

“It’s so important for coaches to not push away tragedy and instead, talk about it openly,” says Chapman. “I think that it’s really important for coaches to explicitly set time aside to have in-depth conversations with their team about the tragedy, the transient nature of life, the importance of relationships, that kind of thing.” This doesn’t mean waiting for a tragedy to befall your own team: Coaches can look at a situation like Hamlin’s and use that to start the conversation. It’s likely that many students, especially the serious athletes, are looking at Hamlin’s cardiac arrest and feeling stress or anxiety about how something similar could happen to them—or are fans of Hamlin’s and are concerned about his welfare. “Having these conversations as a team acknowledges that when life happens, we as a team are going to come together as opposed to pushing things away and ignoring them,” Chapman adds. “When we can talk about these things, we all heal in healthy ways.”