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UB Head Football Coach Lance Leipold (speaking) and Athletic Director Mark Alnutt
The Buffalo News
How college athletic programs are tackling mental health amid Covid-19
Rachel Lenzi
Aug 24, 2020
Hours after the Mid-American Conference announced it had postponed fall
sports, one of the first text messages Lance Leipold said he received
was from Brian Bratta, the University at Buffalo’s associate athletic
director for sports medicine and wellness services.
Bratta’s primary concern was the mental state of UB’s football program,
as many players learned of the MAC’s Aug. 8 decision not through
coaches, campus administrators or conference leaders, but through the
swift nature of social media.
“We’re alerting our counseling services on campus,” said Leipold, UB’s
football coach. “Finding out something on Twitter is not the way you
want to find out what’s happening, hours in. Where our players are, we
spend a lot of time on the mental part of it, that’s probably where our
next days will be. We’ll probably focus on that.”
UB’s athletes already had been coping with the long-reaching and
continuing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which had cut their spring
practices, had hampered their interactions with classmates and
teammates, and had isolated many of them from family members and
friends.
Athletes who participate in fall sports at UB, Canisius, Niagara and
St. Bonaventure now must learn to live without competitive college
sports. Mental health is paramount at a time when 18- to 22-year-olds
have to deal with grief, a sudden loss and an unknown future and have
to answer questions about their own identities that are often tied to
playing their sport.
“A lot of these athletes have been competing since a very early
age,” said Chris Siuta, the clinical director of SportsMind Counseling
in Orchard Park and the director of counseling and health and wellness
at Hilbert College. “This is the first time they’ve gone without a
sport, and there is a sense of loss. I’m finding grief issues, a sense
of hopelessness. When will sports return? Will it even be in the spring?
“Depression is up. Anxiety is up. People are completely out of their
normal habits. It’s up to not only trainers and coaches, but
administrators, mental health counselors and sports psychologists not
just to teach athletes, but to guide them with the right processes and
procedures to make sure they’re staying on track and keeping themselves
ready.”
Providing the tools
When several Football Bowl Subdivision conferences announced in the
span of a week that they would not field fall sports, it suddenly
displaced thousands of athletes across the country from their routines.
After UB football players had returned for nearly seven weeks of
conditioning, the Aug. 7 start to preseason practices was delayed, as
the MAC had not announced a decision. A day later, the season was
postponed.
In the MAC alone, more than 2,500 athletes who play fall sports are impacted by the postponement.
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