Alright. It's right at the top of the hour and
my name is Jennifer Luna. I'm the director of the DiNitto Career Center at the Steve Hicks School of
Social Work and today, we're so happy to present this week's Impact Hour, which will be
social workers in sports empowering and activating athletes into action. Our speakers today
are Suzanne Potts, who is, in addition to being adjunct faculty at the the Steve Hicks School of
Social Work, she is also the national director of Athletes for Hope, a
nd she'll be telling you a
little bit more about that great association, and has been involved in the school for many years
now in different roles. So, we're thrilled to have Suzanne join us. And we also have Dr. Emmett Gill,
who is the chief visionary officer for Athletes and Advocates for Social Justice in Sports. He
is also the founder of the National... I'm sorry... the Alliance for Social Workers in Sports, which
is the first organization that was created for social workers who are int
erested in working in
sports or with athletes all the way from public school, elementary school, to professional. I'm so
pleased to have both Dr. Gill and Professor Potts here today. I expect to see you both on the cover
of Sports Illustrated magazine at any time now, and I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you. Wow,
that is an introduction, definitely. I'm not sure about being on the cover but lovely to think of that.
That's awesome. So good to see everybody today, and Emmett, do we wan
t to do quick introductions
just for you and I or...? Yeah, yeah that sounds good. "Alright." Go ahead, lead the way. Okay, so hi everyone. I'm Suzanne
Potts and I am, as Jennifer so kindly mentioned, I have been an adjunct assistant professor at UT
Austin for... this is my 10th year, so I consider myself a longhorn even though I graduated from San
Diego State University and I'm an Aztec at heart. I also now bleed orange and... burnt orange! Excuse
me. So I've loved my time at UT and have l
oved being in the School of Social Work. My primary classes
are the capstone course for the graduate students and I teach the information systems and
communication class in this... the fall, so I'm really pleased to be here. I also teach a course
at GW University for their sports philanthropy certificate around program design, so if you
haven't picked up already, I am a complete dork and I like data and charts and graphs and things like
that, so working with nonprofits to help them tell the
ir story or to use data more effectively, and
storytelling is something I'm really passionate about, and so I'll talk a little bit later about
my work with Athletes for Hope, but basically have been connected to the school for at least
10 years and with Athletes for Hope for six years. Emmett, why don't I pass over to you and
then I'll talk about Athletes for Hope. Yeah, no, thank you, and Jennifer,
thank you for putting this together, Sara. Suzanne, it's always a pleasure to work with you.
I
know that... I think maybe 10 years ago, I started looking at issues with sports philanthropy
and I'm just so happy, you know, that your own work, the work of Kathy Babiak at the University of
Michigan, you know, you've just done tremendous work in terms of that space. My name's Emmett Gill.
I am also an adjunct at the University of Texas at Austin. I think this semester I'm teaching a
social justice course, do tell, and I'm also the former clinical professor at UT, as well
as a former d
irector of student athlete wellness and personal development in our athletic
department, and just really excited about the work. You know, as Jennifer alluded to, I started, you
know, trying to spread the gospel, so to speak, about social workers in sports about five years ago with
the Alliance of Social Workers in Sports. We're now about 225 or so members strong. We've got
social workers working in college athletics and pro athletics. We actually just... a social worker
was just hired as a
director of mental health for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and
so, you know, it's just incredible to me to see this work happening, and now, I started
another non-profit, Athletes and Advocates for Social Justice and Sports, where we are helping
athletes deal and cope with issues in college sports, as well as help professional athletes
mobilize their efforts. And so, really excited about the work and I'm even more excited about
the opportunity to speak with all of you today. Aw
esome. Yes, and I would add I'm a proud Alliance
of Social Workers and Sports member because when I stepped into this, which I'll talk about,
I wanted to find out more about how I could get education or CEUs or kind of tie the work that
I was doing in my day job to this greater good of knowledge, and I found Emmett at UT and was
so pleased to link with him a couple years ago, so it's a unique aspect of social work and I
think it's a growing aspect, to Emmett's credit and the work that he's
done, the Alliance of
Social Workers, we have this growing group now of professionals, both clinical and more macro-focused
social workers, that are working in sports careers all over the globe, and so, when we talk more
about this, I'm very excited because I feel like Emmett is a pioneer for all of this, and I think
all of you now, just by having an interest in learning more about it, it's really going to take
off. There's need everywhere for our people, so I came into this early on as a pr
ogram
officer. I worked for Lance Armstrong and the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and so I had previously
been working in grant management and taking my kind of macro hat and social work to grant
management, and so when I came here to Austin, I was hired as their community program officer and
that's when I first put the pieces together of sports philanthropy and what it means to use your
sport for good. And so Lance and a group of other athletes, Muhammad Ali, Mia Hamm, Andre Agassi, Jackie
Joyner-Kersee, Jeff Gordon, Alonzo Mourning, Ward Dunn. We have a huge group of founders at Athletes for
Hope, but they started our organization 14 years ago to help connect athletes to philanthropy and
causes that they're passionate about, so that's how I first learned about Athletes for Hope. And I
started working with them six years ago as a consultant, really as a measurement evaluation
person, so again, taking those social work skills and helping them think through measuring their
impa
ct, that was what my job was. I don't think they initially thought, "oh, we need a social worker on
this," right? And so now, I think that they know about social workers. We've had a couple of fabulous
social work interns. I think sports philanthropy is getting clued into the awesome skill set that
social workers have and the breadth and depth of abilities to support athletes and all these
different things that we're going to talk about, so that's how I got to be here with Athletes
for Hope
. I'm now their national director and I work across the university programs
connecting athletes to philanthropy, and I still do all their measurement
evaluation because I like charts and graphs. So Emmett, do you want to talk for a little
bit about what you're working on now or is there anything else that
we didn't cover in your intro? Yeah... I mean... well just for everyone, I think
that, you know, and we already sort of chopped it up before everybody came on, and you know, it's sort
of
like, you know, how do you get in this space, right? You know, that's what everybody
wants to know. how do you get in this space? Because, you know, on the one hand, you know, social workers are sort
of that blue collar mental health professional, right? We're not sports psychologists,
we're not the counseling or clinical in it, you know, we're not that. You don't have those sexy
titles. We're a blue collar, and often our salary sort of indicates that. Nonetheless, how do you do
that, right
, when you have this glamour of college and professional sports. I mean, for
example, UT, you know, one of the most prolific athletic departments in the country, has been for
some time. How do you get in that space or how do you get in that professional space
where you've got the, you know, the Lebron James and the Steph Currys and the Lance Armstrongs
and the work done and all of these individuals. And so, you know, I'll really just go back into...
to sort of the beginning with me, you kno
w, just in terms of realizing the skillset that you have,
right? You've got to... you've got an incredible skillset in social work, if you look at the breadth of
classes that you take, Suzanne Potts is a great example of that, you can get into sports through
research and evaluation, which is a class I used to teach and a lot of people hate, but the reality is,
you could do that now. You can get in sports via, you know, looking at social policy, and then we
have our fundamental, our foundati
on courses, and I always have to give a thanks out to Jennifer
who helped me pass my LMSW exam. So you've got fundamental, you've got your human behavior courses,
and you've got your loss in grief, and you've got your psychotherapy, you got your narrative therapy,
you got your play therapy, you've got all those things. But then with that, how do you merge it with
,you know, sports? And I think a lot of it has to be you got to be a great salesperson or you got to
be a halfway decent salesper
son, in terms of what you bring. Like, you know, I say it to people all the
time: if you're just getting into this because you want to rub elbows with athletes, you're in the wrong
business. It's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen because one: you've got to have
an extra gear. Like, if you've got five gears in your car, you need six, if you've got six, you need
seven, because one: you've got to sell yourself, and two: you've got to have something to sell. Like,
if you can't
visualize what you can bring to that organization, then how are they going to visualize?
"Yeah." Right? And so, I'm walking into... and you know, truth be told, I was at the University of
Texas at San Antonio when I got a call from then athletic director, Mike Perrin, who just
said, "you know, I heard about your work. You know, this guy, Dean Zoz, keeps, you know, blowing up
my phone, like maybe you got something to offer somebody?" Yeah sure, let's talk about it. But I
understood that ther
e was an intersection between social work and sports. You've got kids who have
trauma, you've got kids who have interactions with the criminal justice system, you've got athletes
who are homeless, you've got kids who are a part of the foster care system. That's everything
that a social worker does and that we know. And no disrespect to any of our, you know,
psychologists out there, but, you know, we deal with the person in the environment and usually, you know,
the psychologists deal with t
he person, the mind, and sports performance, and so we have
a lot to offer. And fast forward today ,you know, when you look at the plethora of issues
that are out there in terms of social justice, I may be pretty naïve, but I don't know too
many departments besides social work that teach social justice, and that really fundamentally
say this is what it is, these are the steps, this is how we achieve it. You know the micro,
the meso, the macro levels. I don't know. And I'm not saying that it
doesn't happen, but
I'm saying we've been invested in that space, and so just to close this little... this
this little monologue, you've got to have a vision. It's not that I want to be in it, it's why, right?
It's not your what, it's your why. And if you're able to figure out that why and figure out maybe
one or two niches, with regard to what you want to do, then you're in a powerful space. For me, I can't
really figure out what it is that I want to do. I do a little bit of direct practi
ce,
you know, I do groups with teams, I do have individual athletes, I do some social justice
work, but now I'm also working on an app, you know, because I'm like, you know, I like to
work with everybody, but I can't, so how can I? Right? I can design an app so everybody
can use it. You've got to have a vision for this, and I think that that's what's most
important if you want to get in this space. That's a really good point, Emmett. You mentioned
a lot of things that I was thinking about
too, about skillsets for social work is your nimble,
right? You're interested in learning more, that growth mindset and coming from a strength
based approach to all this is really important. I know for me, I was a former soccer player, so
I played four years of college soccer, but at the club level, because 100 years ago, that's how
they let us play soccer. It was a club league. But through that opportunity, I became our club
captain, our team captain. I participated on campus service oppor
tunities, I did fundraising as a part
of that, and I think ultimately, you know, ended up in social work because I liked working with the
community and being somewhat of an organizer. And so for me, the sport aspect of it was probably one
of the least reasons that drew me to this work. Like I said, I know athletes across all levels
now: Professional athletes, Olympic athletes, Paralympians. I work predominantly with student
athletes at various colleges all across the U.S., but honestly, som
etimes they ask sport... they talk
about sports stuff. I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about, about your sport, but let's
talk about your mental health or let's talk about your advocacy efforts. How are things going
for you within your community, right? Those are things I like talking to them about and are
what drivers for me, so using my active listening skills or my community organizing skills,
communication, right, trying to figure out how to communicate most effectively. An
d then, on
the more macro side is, you know, working out systems and support, if it's research. We did
a whole research project with Nike around trauma-informed physical activity sessions,
right? And so, trying to figure out how we could work with athletes to go help kids in communities,
that is a trauma-informed approach. So that was cool to me. That was something that had
not happened at our work, and just bringing in that trauma-informed language into our daily space
was fascinating and
challenging. So, I do think, to Emmett's point, like you have to be a bit of
a driver and also a listener, and figure out where you can plug in your skillset as a social
worker. Yeah, but it's also that creativity that Suzanne mentioned. I mean how many of us think
about trauma-informed care and how it relates to sports or exercise, right? I mean, you know, I
think about the story of Deandre Hopkins, who saw his father go to jail, saw various men whom
his mom dated afterwards, watched as h
is mom had acid thrown on her by a jealous woman, and
all of this happened before he went to college. And was there a social worker or a psychologist
who could build rapport with Deandre Hopkins to help him work through this? I don't know. But
the reality that... what Suzanne mentions in terms of, you know, trauma-informed care, just speaks to the
creativity that you have, right? I've got this skillset, I've identified this need. How can I create...
creatively create a space and a niche for
myself? And you know, to Suzanne's point, you know, one
of the things that I found is like, you know, a lot of the athletes that I talk to don't want to
talk about sports, right? They want somebody to talk to them about someone else. "Yeah." Or something
else, which has been very intriguing to me. So, you know, it just goes back to, you know,
you acquire... you acquire the skills. It's what you got, it's what you will do with
it, and so if we think about today, right... so, you know, some
of the issues that we're thinking
about today with our athletes, of course, is social justice. Like how, on a fundamental level, can
athletes pursue social justice? And that's easy for us to say, right? It's easy for us to say, "go pursue
social justice," you know, "and risk your endorsements, risk your fan base, risk relationships
with other folks who may have different ideas or political affiliations or backgrounds."
That's easier for us to say, right? So how do we get athletes involved
in that in a way that works for
them? Another issue right now, you know look at the example of Appalachian State, right? Their football
team hasn't played in two weeks. They're going to play a game this Saturday. I wonder how many kids
are going to suffer season and ending injuries, and so you think about, you know, our loss and grief
training and how we can apply that to injured athletes, right, or you know, you go back to
the trauma piece again or right now, just dealing with identity dev
elopment, right? I mean, we do that
all the time, but right now, we've got kids who are not going to play this semester. They probably
won't play this semester, next semester, and they're really not sure what's going to happen in
terms of college sports, because now we're cutting teams, we're cutting schedules,
we're cutting budgets, and so the one part I said is that you have to have the skillset, right?
Second part, you've got to be that salesperson. But the other part is that you have to
know
about athletics, whether it's college sports, high school sports, or pro sports, in terms
of the fundamental issues, and how they work. And there's some people that I'm seeing on the line right now, like Aaron McAdams, who knows, you know,
about women's basketball and the inner workings of that. So you can come with these great ideas,
but, you know, do you understand the inner workings of that particular system? And it goes back
to social work, right, and sports, and college sports, t
heir micro... their macro
systems, their meso systems, their micro systems, you know. These things exist, and so it's really... it's
a really fascinating exercise, you know. That's the thing that makes me really passionate
about this, because, you know, what we do and what we learn in our practice is just, you know, is
represented so well. When we talk about the different sports levels, and, you know, again, before
I stop one of my long monologues, you know, the pro sports, you know, and I'
ve had the
pleasure of doing work in the NFL, in the NBA for for a short time, and college sports. I've worked
in college sports from the University of Maryland, Rutgers, UTSA, University of Texas, and various
teams. Now, it's awesome, it's incredible, right? There's nothing. Like, I still got Longhorn gear,
right, but at the end of the day, you know, my advice to some of our participants is don't sleep on
the high school, the junior high, and youth sports. That's where a lot of the money i
s, you know.
That's a lot, and I say a lot of the money because that's where a lot of the resources are,
right? It's nothing, right now, for a club team to bring in a social worker. It's nothing for a
title one school to bring in a social worker to work with athletes, right? There's nothing
for a youth sports program to come in, so don't set your sights on those levels. The
other... the youth and the high school sports have opportunities as well. Yeah, we were just talking
about that! I'm
so glad you brought that up, and just the the levels of youth sports
development and then how it's evolved over time, and just all the different pockets of funding and
resources. I think, again, just looking at the job board and the Alliance of Social Workers has grown
exponentially, so not just that collegiate level or pro and Olympic level, but also those younger
levels as well. It's kind of startling to be honest. I know there's some questions that came in that
people had and so I wanted
to make sure we got to those and then remind folks there are... there's the
chat feature if you want to ask a couple questions. We are more than happy to take questions. I
did also put the Athletes for Hope website up there, and then we'll throw the Alliance, and
Emmett, put up whatever you want to put up in your chat as well. So the first question I see
here that came in... oops, I just lost it... was "how does one exactly incorporate design
thinking into sports and social work?" How does
one incorporate design
thinking into sports and social work? That's a great question. Do you want me
to stab at it or how... do you want to go first? No, I've been talking too much. Go ahead. No,
it's okay. I just... I had to take a moment. I was like, "design thinking." So, I don't know much, I guess,
about design thinking, but I think about innovation and like, problem solving, and so I think maybe
that's what the question's about. So to, you know, to what Emmett was talking about and I
think what
I face in my daily job, and again, working with pro Olympic, Paralympic, or student athletes, is you have
to be a bit innovative in some of our approaches. Especially during the pandemic, we've all had to
kind of change our approaches. Previously, we did a lot of work, one-on-one, with athletes because
if you send mass emails, they don't read our emails, and so we found texting or connecting
via WhatsApp to be the best approach. However, that personal connection can sometimes
be
cumbersome, right? Well we started with 12 or 13 founders, we have now 7,500 athletes we're
trying to connect with, so we've been trying to be innovative in our approach to engaging
with them via social media or using like I said, WhatsApp or other kind of features to
just communicate our basic problems. We also do a lot of our communication via SMS texting or
just individual texting, so we've changed the way we operate from doing in-person workshops and
meeting people face-to-face, obviou
sly, to doing everything virtual or offering trainings and
things like that that are in a more virtual space. So that's one of the things that I thought of, but
our athletes are so diverse, they're so... we work with 25 different sports across every different
level and so we have to be responsive as a non-profit, and I think that's the key to it. I
don't know if that answers your question, but Emmett, do you want to talk to that at all? "I'm still
trying to figure out what design means, so
if that person..." The design thinking. Yeah! I was like, "okay". And if
someone's here, that asked the question, wants to add to that, but I think design thinking to me is just
that, you know, being innovative in our approach. And we always say as a non-profit at Athletes for
Hope, that we are cause neutral or cause gnostic, which I think is a made-up word that my CEO made
up, but it basically means that we're about what our athletes are about, and so we're not about
autism or veterans or
homelessness, we are about the 7,500 different charities that our athletes
are about. And so sometimes for us, that... we get lost, right? The Athletes for Hope mission is about
connecting and educating athletes to causes, and so that has inspired us to be a little
more innovative in our approach as well. Yeah. I'll defer to you on that
question, but... "Okay, great!" If the person's online, then that's a very good question, but we should learn more about what you mean by design. But I'll ta
ke the next question. "Okay." Do you want
me to read it or do you want to read it? Yes, please. I'll moderate, okay. So... okay, so, so many
athletes struggling with anxiety or related disorders, such as OCD, are told that
they have to be this way in order to be good, so they keep quiet and they don't seek help.
How can athletes support and create a safe space for other athletes to talk more about
their mental health struggles in an open space? Cali, did you submit that question? No, it's a
great question, and it's tough right because, you know, we have, sort of, our athletes
running this race, this daily race. What do they call it? The [unintelligible] wheel or the thing that
the gerbil runs around, and it's tough because, you know, on the one hand, you know, as a former
college athlete, I know that some of those things are necessary. But on the other hand, sometimes
I think about the point of dementia in return. I ran into a college athlete in an airport from a couple years
ago, and he was basketball
player and he played for Mark Turgeon at the University of Maryland, and he said that
one of the primary reasons that he went, if not the reason that he went decided to go to Maryland
as opposed to any other school that he could have gone to was because Mark Turgeon only had two hour
practices. At two hours, the practices were done. I've been in one college basketball
practice that lasted a work day, an eight hour day, and so, you know, we create these athletes w
ho
are, you know, if they don't have some type of OCD diagnosis or tendencies, then we create this
obsession, this compulsion, this disorder with them and and to the question, you know, I really think that that issue, that challenge, would be best addressed
in group work. I really do. I think in college athletics, we've got to move towards more
group work, right? Because right now, if things are still the same at UT, for example,
you know, we've got two mental health practitioners at UT. We
've probably got six consultants and we
probably got, you know, over 500 athletes, you know, which means that basically, you're talking about
a caseload of a couple of hundred, you know, per person. And so I really think that group work is
important because one of the things that I found in group work is one: athletes enjoy that time
with each other, especially if it's across sports. Two: they sort of realize I'm not the only person
that's feeling that with this way and I'm not the only per
son who wants to get off of this
24 hour cycle of sports, you know. I am trying to find some normalcy in my life and so I think the
fact that they enjoy each other's company and that they really have a space where they can talk about
similarities, you know, around the anxiety or the OCD, that tendencies or actual disorders that are... that exist, that is a great thing for them. But here's the other part, and, you know, for
those of us who are working in the industry know this, we've got to t
alk to coaches about it. Really.
Now let me tell you something: if you want to work in this field and you're not willing to, you know,
stick your chest out or raise your voice in front of a coach, then, you know, it might not be the best
place for you. "Mm-hmm." You know, because when we talk about the roles of a social worker, one of them is
advocate and one of them is broker, and if you're not ready to be an advocate or a broker for the
athletes that you work with, then it might be a chal
lenge. Now, I'm not saying you're going to walk
up and challenge coaches every week, because a guy like Ryan knows you'll end up, you know, you'll end
up on Indeed looking for a new job, right? You do have to have a certain set of
soft skills where you're able to say, you know what? Either you're able to teach kids
how to advocate for themselves or you're able to say to a coach, you know, "look Coach, this...
we got to do something because what's going on is really not working." And so just
to sum
up quickly, group work, I think, is important. I think really... I think using COVID, right, as
a platform to talk about, you know what, really, we can do athletics in a different way. "Mhm." COVID has
proven that. So that's just the thing. The group work, the COVID, and then the ability to at least speak
with coaches. "Yup." Advocate for your athletes, if not train coaches, because here's what I say to
coaches, in closing, you know, again here's what I say to coaches: "I'm not goin
g to sit up here
and talk to you about depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders. I'm not going to talk to you
about it because guess what? You've got somebody in your immediate family who's experienced one of
these things. You already know what it looks like, and this... the same way that it looks
with your family member, your loved one, is the same way that it looks with that kid. And that kid is
somebody's son or daughter, so there's really no difference here." And I don't say it like t
hat, you
know, but the reality is that when we talk about things like the OCD, the bipolar disorder, the cannabis disorders, you know, they come to the point in time where group work and
and advocacy become especially important. Yup, that's a great example. I put a link in the
chat from something we put together because we... I was telling Emmett and Jennifer earlier that
we did a campaign last year for mental health month for our athletes, and we just thought
we'll just put some content ou
t on our website, and we ended up having, over the course of the whole
year, our highest engagement and share rate was via our mental health blog. And so, we were
like, huh, this is interesting. We started getting more feedback from folks, so this year we created
a more robust campaign around the entire month of May and have created some partnerships that
were strategic for all of our levels of athletes, and so we created some resources that were
there... oh did the link not work? I'm sorry
. I can send it out afterwards, but we basically
created some like, locker-room chats and things. I worked with some folks at the alliance on
the clinical side to create some tools and just opportunities for athletes to have that
conversation, either from the coach or from athlete to athlete. We also offered some free
mental health sessions with one of our Alliance of Social Workers, Anita Daniels, who came on and did
some sessions with us. So, just trying to normalize it to reduce the stig
ma to say, "hey, this is
something we're interested in as an organization." That was a big deal for us. We are not a mental
health organization. However, we were hearing over and over again that our athletes wanted to have
these kinds of conversations, and so if it were participating in the clinical session, if it were
sharing the resources with their teammates, or even just hey, here's some graphics about mental health,
feel free to share them, as kind of a passive way to include them and
normalize it. Those
are all things that we did as an organization and that was pretty awesome to see, so. I'll just add: ESPN did a nice piece on mental health in pro sports and they actually- "Yes."- featured
an athlete with OCD. Oh good. That's awesome. Oh and I see your score cards coming out. That's
going to be fantastic. Yeah, we're really... we've worked really hard, you know, on this
piece and yeah, we're really excited about it. It's been a long time. Okay, I just saw the chat again.
So, great. The other
question here is: "I'm an LCSW interested in moving into the sports social work industry.
Would love to hear more about where to start and how to increase specific skill sets needed for
those roles." That's a great question. I'm going to pass that to you sir, as someone who's not an LCSW.
What would you recommend, Emmett? Yeah, I'm still on the path. I've been on it for...seems like forever! "I know right?"
I started and then I stopped and then I... oh gosh. It's been a
... anyway. I mean, I'll just speak from
a college sports space and then you can sort of apply that, right? So first, I think that one of the
things that's important is that you understand the demography of the athletic department or a sports
team. And by the demography, how is it set up? Like, for example, and I'll use a UT example, you know,
because I think, you know, we've got one of the best programs in the country, but there're what? Five...
four or five MSWs who work in academic suppo
rt in UT athletics, right? So that's not mental health.
It's academic support. We've got MSWs over there, you know, a couple of graduates from our
school. So, you got to understand that right now in college athletics, you've got academic
support, you've got student athlete development, and then you've got mental health. "That's true." For a LCSW or a
LMSW, you got three spaces in college athletics, at least, that you could work in. Right? And so
then, "understand the demography" means that,
you know, sort of you're in mental health, you
are under sports medicine if you are in student athlete development, or you are in academic
support services, you are under student services. And these things become relevant because... they
are relevant because it's the way you'll write a cover letter. "Mhm." Like if I'm going to write a
cover letter to somebody in sports medicine, it's going to be different than how I write it
for someone in academic support. So you've got to be able to under
stand sort of the demography
of that, and you know, it could be something as... it's not simple, but looking at, you know, Google "UNC
athletic department directory" and just start to look at it and understand how it's set up. Very
few athletic departments are going to show you an organizational chart, like where people fall,
you know. Athletic director, external, internal, and then it goes from there. So understanding
that, or if you want to be in pro sports, you know, most of the folks in
pro
sports, you're going to be in player development, player personnel, but you know... that, you
know, the NBA has mandated clinicians for teams part-time, the NFL has mandated clinicians for
teams full-time, we know that Major League Baseball has probably been the best, you know. Major League
Baseball actually has a disabled list that you can be put on the disabled list based on the
mental health issue, and that's been for the past 39 years or so. Right? So, just sort of understanding,
and then Major League Baseball, you know, it's not a mental health professional as much as it is a
mental performance coach, so just understanding some of the language. It's like, you know, those
Philadelphia 76ers, they had an opportunity that was open for a performance coach, and somebody
reached out to me and I said, "yeah. Apply for it. Who cares?" You know, and here's the other thing:
who cares what they ask for? You tell them that you can do this and some more. "Exactly." It was
like
the job was for a sports performance person. I said, "look. This is what you need to do. You
need to tell them before they can perform on the court, they got to be right off the court,
and you can help them off the court." You know, so sometimes, you're going to see jobs that seem
like, ehh... that's not quite... the title sounds like what I want to do, but the job description doesn't
sound anything like what I'm capable of doing. Write the damn cover letter anyway. Like what do
you have to
lose? Yeah, you know, you might come across, and I was saying to the person, you
might come across a person like Doc Rivers, who's now the coach at the Philadelphia 76ers
and used to be in the LA Clippers and very few people know this, but Doc Rivers, and unfortunately it
didn't work out for him as well, but Doc Rivers had three mental health professionals on his staff with the Clippers. Three, including D Brown, the former slam dunk champion. So the
other thing that I'll say and then I'll s
top, you know, again one of my long monologues, I try
and be conscious of not talking so much but I get so excited about it. I truly get excited about...
Monica, you know how excited I get about this. It's like I can't contain myself, but, you know,
D Brown, you know, Doc Rivers, you know, actually hired a former slam dunk champion, D Brown, and his
title was something like Director of Mental Health and Performance, you know. So my other thing is that...
What I was going to say is that you'
ve really got to know, sort of, the history too, right? So, you got
to know, you know, who's the athletic director or who's the owner. You have... the networking and
the way that you make connections and hit pressure points in athletics is no different
than you would do in the business world. "Yup." And so you've really got to sort of pay
attention to who the players are and how the organization is... I mean every NBA, every entire
NBA organization with every staffer is online. "Yup." So I'
m not... so you can find other information
and see how things are set up. Yeah, those are great examples Emmett, and I totally agree with you on, at
least on the collegiate level, the structure of how things operate, and like job titles, or like
where you could get in as a social worker, an LCSW... is very confusing. I think it's purposely confusing.
NCAA has so many rules and regulations as well, so I know this is being recorded. Sorry NCAA,
but there's just... there's a lot to it, right?
And so, knowing kind of who's already working that space
or just connecting with people, I think, is great advice. I also really like your advice about just... only time I've ever had a title of like "social worker" has been when I was a clinical
social worker at a children's hospital in San Diego, so you have to kind of look for those job titles,
like Emmett said, "performance coach" or finding ways to bring your skill set into the room and having
the confidence to say, "oh yeah, I can do t
hat." And I think we're seeing more and more teams, especially
the pro and Olympic level, that are willing to, you know, take that step and acknowledge that
they might need that kind of level of person in the role, so love that you're thinking
like that and advocating for your skill sets. I would also say if you're in LCSW and you're
looking to hone your skills, volunteer or offer to get connected, or if there's a way that you can
provide support. I know I asked when we did our mental healt
h sessions if anyone would just
volunteer to do it because we're a non-profit, and Anita Daniels, our Alliance of Social Workers
clinical social worker said, "I'll do it!" So she'd sit for free. She did a couple sessions with our pro
athletes just out of the goodness of her heart, and that was really appreciated. She just came on
and talked them through how they were feeling. It was right in the middle of the pandemic and so
anxiety levels were high, and I think that was really helpful for
the six or seven pro athletes
that we had jump on. Are there any other questions? I know we're at 1:39 and we've got to get going
soon, but are there any other questions? And then we have one last question that came in. I want to
open it up, if you want to unmute or put it in the chat. I have a question. "Yes." So I'm from Alabama,
of course, I'm sure you can tell by the accent because it's probably stronger than yours, but so,
like growing up I definitely... I lost both of my parents and s
o like, I know what it's like to
not really have a support system, and I was wondering like, what kind of opportunities there
are to like advocate for say, kind of like the Kobe situation where like, both of them passed away
and like they had to push through and stuff. Like obviously, that was probably hard for the
team. Is there like situations where you can advocate for them or like
help them get through that? Are you talking as a team then,
or working with the entire team? Yeah? Possibl
y, or like individuals that were closer
to them, or like relationship wise, like closer to Kobe or like, and say that happens a lot and people
pass away, so even if it's like outside of, I guess the sporting aspect. Yeah, I mean, what
we've seen, and I can't speak to all of this, but what we've seen at Athletes for Hope is a lot
of our athletes that have had that kind of trauma or childhood experience or even if it's, you
know, adulthood. I mean Warrick Dunn lost his mother when he was youn
g, and that became a driving
force for him with his Warrick Dunn Charities and he's one of our founders. I worked with a group for
our mental health campaign called Hilinsky's Hope, and the Hilinsky family lost their son Tyler
to suicide. He was a football player, and so they created an entire foundation in his name and
now do a ton of work to support college athletes, kind of campus by campus. And so
I've seen pockets of that where like, athletes, perhaps individually or within their
team
, do something to raise awareness and provide support that way. I don't always advocate for
athletes to start their own foundations, only because there's so many wonderful organizations
already out there. We tend to encourage athletes to work with NAMI or work with, you know, the
Alzheimer's Association or those organizations that are out there, because it's a lot to run
a non-profit organization, and so that is one thing that we've done as an organization, is just help them figure out where
they can plug in their time,
talent, and energy for that particular cause. "Yeah. Yeah, no." AC that was a great question because
it takes us down another road, and that's like, no, a couple others, right? So first, in pro sports,
you will find that there are organizations for wives. There's a NBA wives organization, there's
a, probably NFL wives organization, and so you have those, and those wives usually look at issues that
impact the whole family, you know, so those are one of the things
. Right now, we're seeing an uprising
in college sports, so right now, there's a group called Parents 24/7 or 24/7 Parents, which includes
over 2,000 parents who are parents of football, NCAA football players, and so, you know, what I would
do is just be on the lookout for allied groups that are related to athletes. I'm sure Major League
Baseball, they probably have, you know, a group that centers around wives and families as well
because, you know, the thing about it is that sports is hard
on families, as well. And you know, Kobe, you
know, tragic, you know, situation. I can't remember the young man who's continued to be in the news.
He was the baseball player who had the plane crash. You know, there's a baseball player who who had the overdose from the Angels, you know, just a couple years ago he was in the news. So
I would look out for those allied organizations, you know, they're definitely around.
You know, and the other thing is this, you know, I think that, you know, an
d I wish that I had
more time, right? I really do, but god didn't make the 24 hours in the day and seven days
in the week and 365 days of the year, you know. But the reality is is that what prohibits
us from dropping a letter to Vanessa Bryant? You know, the thing that I want to say to you is
that, you know, some of the stuff that you have to do in this field is not guaranteed. Like if you're
expecting, if you're going to wait around, you know, if you send something off and you just wait, y
ou
have to do some things that are non-traditional, and if you're really passionate about it, you
really care about it, and you really know your your subject matter, like you know that you're the, you know the word I'm talking about, you're the bomb in your area, you know, what prohibits you from sending a letter, you know, every now and then just to say, you know,
what this is, who I am, that's what I'm thinking, or you know, I'm sorry for your loss, or you know, what
about this idea? It mi
ght not... they might get it and you may never sort of hear back or see any benefit from that, but like we as social workers know about process, right? And going
through processes and sometimes those processes don't have an endpoint, and
sometimes they don't have, you know, a little piece of bubble gum that
comes out after you put a quarter in there, but it's gonna help you. You've gotta, I'm gonna
say like Eric Thomas, the motivational speaker, if you want to be a social worker in
sports,
you got to have a little dog in you. You got to really want to go after it, because
ain't nobody walking... there are people here who are competing for these jobs like nobody's business,
and so, you know, sometimes it takes AC, sometimes it... Hey, drop a letter to Vanessa. Who knows what might
happen? You know, who knows what might happen? Yeah, I agree. I think that's one of the beauties of social
work and why I feel so passionately about this. I didn't get into social work and sports beca
use
I'm great at sports or anything. I don't even know much about sports! It's because I'm really good at
program design and evaluation, and I'm really good at the communication side of things, and so
I came into it. You know, I work at Lance Armstrong Foundation. I wasn't... I didn't know anything about
cancer advocacy, but I knew, again, about the process of managing grant managements, and organizing
communities, and connecting in a macro level, and so that skillset you can transfer into
sports.
And having that confidence in my skillset and being able to tell them, "yes, I'm a social worker
and here's, you know, one, two, three, four, and five, what I can bring to the organization to help us
define our impact, to help us to communicate more effectively, to help us tell our story. That's what I had to do in this space, so yeah. So anyways, I feel there's so many examples of this
and there's so many organizations that need this kind of help, and it's a... definitely a growing
field
for all of you. I'm gonna drop this one last thing because I don't want to share... I ain't gonna tell y'all all of my secrets. But if I were some of y'all, I would go think about taking the licensing exam to become an NBA agent, if I wanted to work in the NBA. "Hmm... interesting." Let me see. I'm a... I'm certified
to be a NBA agent and I'm a social worker because, you know, again, one of the great motivational
speaker Eric Thomas talks about, you know, how a lot of our athletes, they
've got it together,
but they end up in the newspaper because they got character issues, or they got trauma issues, or
they got disorders that they haven't dealt with. Be creative. Be creative. You need
the LMSW, you need the LCSW, but you know, how are you going to arm yourself in a different way to get the attention of the people you want to? I think you made such a good point about,
like, being creative with it. And I remember, and of course, I'm going to say the word OCD again,
I remembe
r with athletes and OCD thinking, like, there is something to this, right? And when I was
at Rice and competing and like seeing all these distance runners and swimmers struggling with
similar things that I was and talking about it, but then often just being told like, "nope.
That's just how you have to be to function well," and like, "you don't need to do research on
that." Like, I was told that time and time again. And so I still did some of the research and found
these connections, and th
en like it's so cool. At that time I was like what in the world am I doing?
I'm way in over my... or in way over my head, but now looking back, it's paid off and now, like,
it's given me that confidence to say, "okay, like, if you want this, advocate for it and try
to make it happen." And so, I just think that's such good advice, and I'm definitely
gonna look up that motivational speaker. Yeah. "That's good. That's good." Good example. Thank you.
Comments