When Molly Mitman sought therapy to manage the stress that came with being a student-athlete before coming to college, she said there was always the stigma of seeking professional help as “not being a normal thing” lurking in the background.
“There was always kind of that stigma of, ‘Oh, you're in therapy? That's kind of weird,’” said Mitman, who is a senior social and behavioral science major and an outfielder for the Seton Hall women’s softball team.
However, that did not stop her from realizing she should be “talking about it” and normalizing conversations about mental health and therapy.
“I just made it a goal to start telling people, ‘Hey, instead of going to an appointment, I'm actually going to therapy,’ to kind of normalize it a little bit,” Mitman said. “And with teammates, they always stop for a second and actually think like, ‘Oh, hey, she's actually going to therapy, like she's not crazy; it actually might be a helpful thing.’”
Despite the topic of mental health being an important one, there is still a stigma behind it, especially in the world of college sports.
Here at Seton Hall University, this topic is not ignored. The student-based organization “The Hidden Opponent at Seton Hall” was established on campus in 2021. This club is Seton Hall’s chapter of the national nonprofit organization called The Hidden Opponent, which advocates for mental health awareness among student-athletes. It was founded in 2019 by Victoria Browne, a former Division I athlete from the University of Southern California (USC) who played on USC’s women's volleyball team from 2015 to 2019.
The club on campus shares the same mission as the national organization, which is “to advocate, educate, [to] support [and] to face the hidden opponent in sports.”
When you look at student-athletes, you might think they are living the college dream: athletic scholarships, NIL compensation, getting to register for classes before everyone else, and media exposure. It all sounds fantastic. However, this dream has its ups and downs.
Kevin Cary, a junior finance and management major, and freestyle swimmer for SHU’s men's swimming and diving team, said there are “constant ebbs and flows” during the season for student-athletes, in which there would be times when athletes feel good in a season and times where they feel not-so-good.
For Cary, he said that he “didn’t have a very good conference play” during his sophomore year when his team went to the Big East.
“Being able to respond and not react to that was one of the hardest moments of my life," he said, "and it's because I'm so passionate about the sport."
However, he said he tries to maintain a positive mindset during the days when he doesn’t feel at his best.
“There are some days where I'm going to walk in and I'm not going to be 100%, but hey, if I'm 60% that day, I'm going to give 100% of that 60%,” Cary said. “It's that positive mindset that we always talk about in our meetings for The Hidden Opponent, like being able to keep moving and know it's gonna be alright.”
Even though student-athletes like Mitman and Cary recognize that it’s okay to not feel at your best and it’s okay to seek help, not everyone sees mental health as a normalized topic to discuss, especially in college sports, because of the stigmas behind it.
Mitman, who is the president of The Hidden Opponent at SHU, said she joined the club during her freshman year and took over during her sophomore year after one of her teammates transferred schools. She said that one of the ways the club raises awareness is by the SHU swim and dive teams wearing green caps instead of Pirate blue for mental health advocacy. She added that she is currently working on getting T-shirts for the softball team as well.
Another way the club raises awareness is by hosting tabling events during games where they hand out stickers, green bracelets, green ribbon pins, infographics, and pamphlets.
“Our main goal with the awareness games is to break the stigma around mental health and to share different resources, like CAPS or Sports Psych on campus,” Mitman said.
According to Mitman, Sports Psych is similar to Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) but “more geared towards athletics,” and it is a resource for athletes who may have a mental health issue related to their sport.
“If they’re just having a really bad time performing in any way, for example, they could go to our trainers and they'll set them up with one of the two doctors that they have and work with them in ways specifically geared towards their sport,” she said. “But if you’re having more general mental health issues, they’ll guide you towards CAPS.”
Cary, who is the vice president of The Hidden Opponent at SHU, said that the club meetings are like a “check-in” for student-athletes to take a second and see if “everything is alright.”
“I started to get involved in the spring of my freshman year and it was a lot easier because I was out of season by that point,” Cary said, “And once I started to see when we would go to meetings, it wasn't just like, ‘Oh, how can we fundraise and how can we raise awareness?’—it was a check-in ‘Oh, how is everybody doing?’” because it's really hard to realize how fast life goes and how much we go through.”
There are also online resources on The Hidden Opponent website for people to learn about mental health as well as find the support they might need. These resources range from books, articles, and podcasts, and the topics include self-care, men’s mental health, depression, and women’s empowerment to name a few.
The club had a Student-Athlete Mental Health Week from Oct. 7 to Oct. 11. During that week, the club sponsored a “Chalk Around Campus” event where students wrote positive messages around campus. The goal was to get “not just student-athletes involved, but (students) on campus as well,” said Nicole Gaudenzi, the faculty advisor of The Hidden Opponent at SHU and associate athletics director for Student-Athlete Development.
Gaudenzi added that the club would sometimes partner with other campus organizations like Dare to Care and Active Minds, who also have the “same message of bringing awareness to mental health, normalizing the topic, and decreasing the stigma that exists around it,” to help create more awareness and advocacy for the topic.
“It's easier when you're able to come together and create a partnership with all these different people, resources, and organizations on campus,” Gaudenzi said.
By addressing and destigmatizing the topic of mental health, more people can be educated and aware of the mental health issues that most, if not all, student-athletes go through, such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and even post-traumatic stress disorder.
A noteworthy example of someone who struggled with mental health as a college athlete is Seton Hall alum and current head coach for the UConn men’s basketball team, Daniel Hurley, who was a point guard for SHU’s men’s basketball team from 1991 to 1996.
In an NJ.com article from 2023, Hurley spoke about his mental health struggles as a student-athlete and how he did not feel as though he was good enough at the time in comparison to his older brother Bobby Hurley, who won back-to-back NCAA championships at Duke University and later became the No. 7 overall pick in the 1993 NBA draft
“I was just struggling mentally and emotionally with the struggles I was having on the court, and I put myself into a very bad mental place over the fact that my career wasn’t playing out the way I hoped it would,” Hurley said in the article.
Although Hurley is just one example of student-athlete mental health being addressed publicly, many other student-athletes facing similar mental battles are fighting them alone.
According to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), approximately 25% of male and 30% of female student-athletes report having anxiety, and around “35% of elite athletes suffer from disordered eating, burnout, depression and/or anxiety.” It also states that only 10% of all college athletes with mental health conditions seek medical attention or professional help.
Additionally, in a study conducted by the NCAA in the fall of 2021, around 69% of women and 63% of men out of the 9,800 student-athletes who were surveyed said they knew where to find mental health services on their campuses. However, approximately 48% of the women and 46% of the men said they would feel comfortable seeking help.
The Hidden Opponent at SHU aims to continue expanding their advocacy efforts by recruiting more members and hosting more speakers, as they have done in the past.
Mitman said she plans to recruit more members by reaching out to more club sports on campus.
“Our goal is to reach out to more club sports, as we only really have two people that are involved in club sports within our chapter,” Mitman said. “I want to make it more known that it's not just varsity athletes involved —anybody who has been involved in sports can join.”
Between now and May, Guadenzi said she hopes to have suicide awareness and prevention training for members of the club.
“I think it would be huge to get a suicide awareness and prevention training under everyone's belt for the members,” Gaudenzi said. “There's a training that the campus does for anyone who is an R.A. [to identify] signs when someone might be in distress, and I would love for The Hidden Opponent to go through that training as well.”
Cary said his goal is to have a speaker from the sports media industry to “connect with [students] on a personal level” and help them be “prepared for the real world.”
“It took a minute for me to transition into college and be able to adjust to everything, so to be able to have a speaker to come in and talk to us about the struggles, and being able to come down to Earth with us with those issues, is something that I think would be fantastic for the athletic department,” Cary said.
With these resources that The Hidden Opponent offers student-athletes and its advocacy for mental health awareness, student-athletes need to know that they are not alone in their struggles and that their sport is not what defines them as people.
For Cary, he said that although he loves his sport, he is “not [his] sport directly.”
“Yes, we’re athletes, but we're way beyond that—we are people before we are athletes,” he said. “For example, I may be a swimmer, but I'm technically a person who swims.”
Cary added a quote that resonated with him from Lydia Jacoby, an American swimmer who won a gold medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for the 100-meter breaststroke.
After Jacoby did not make the Olympic team for the 2024 Paris Olympics, she said: “The biggest thing for me lately is (remembering) that being a swimmer is something I do. It’s not something I am.”
Rachel Suazo is the Editor-in-Chief of The Setonian. She can be reached at rachel.suazo@student.shu.edu.
