The following article was first published on https://www.good.is in February 2017 by Victoria Garrick. This was Victoria’s first time opening up about her body-image struggles. She went on to deliver a Ted Talk titled “Athletes and Mental Health: The Hidden Opponent” in June 2017, and founded The Hidden Opponent organization and platform in October 2019. With…
Q&A with Micah Cooper, Oklahoma State Running Back
Our President, Ben Ruvo, caught up with Micah Cooper to talk about mental health on and off the football field. Explain to us your athletic career growing up until today. How did you get to where you are as a college athlete? I grew up in Los Angeles, California. I spent the first 14 years…
Conformity Crushes Creativity
Conformity starts as early as a child can walk and often, never ends through adulthood. When the majority of people are doing something, most people feel pressure to do the same. The fear of being an outlier is scary. Thus, fear drives our conformity. Conformity occurs every day in school, as school is a place…
Kevin Love Wins ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award: A Huge Step For Mental Health Advocacy
Kevin Love, star power forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers, has already won an NBA Championship, among numerous other titles since being drafted in 2008. On Sunday, June 21st, 2020, Love will add to his trophy collection by taking home the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN’s the ESPY Awards (short for Excellence in Sports Performance…
The Editor’s Reading List: Books By Black Male Athletes
The following book titles have been compiled from http://www.barnesandnoble.com by our editor. The photos and synopsis of each book also comes from Barnes & Noble. If purchasing from this list, please consider using Barnes & Noble or another independent book store! These retailers give fair compensation to authors and publishing companies, which keeps the publishing…
The Editor’s Reading List: Books By Black Female Athletes
The following book titles have been compiled from www.barnesandnoble.com by our editor. The photos and synopsis of each book also comes from Barnes & Noble. If purchasing from this list, please consider using Barnes & Noble or another independent book store! These retailers give fair compensation to authors and publishing companies, which keeps the publishing industry in…
Olivia Jarvis: Finding My Voice as an African American Athlete
My name is Olivia and I was born and raised in Utah. I was adopted by two white parents and I’m a recently retired college athlete. I grew up in an area where there weren’t many kids who looked like me. When I was a little girl being signed up for my first dance class…
Rayshawn Johnson: “Growing up black is difficult enough.”
My name is Rayshawn Johnson, I’m from Willingboro, New Jersey, and I run track for Saint Peter’s University. My mental health journey started my junior year of high school. In the middle of the summer, I found out that we had to move and for the rest of that summer, my family was in between…
A Template Letter To Demand Change for Black Student-Athletes
The following content was originally crafted as an email by Camille Parker, a black student-athlete at California State University Monterey Bay. Parker is a rising senior on the women’s basketball team at CSUMB and worked on this document with other black student-athletes and alumni from the women’s track and women’s basketball teams. Other contributors include…
Beginning to Understand Racial Trauma & Black Mental Health
2020 has been a year of tragedies. A year of mayhem. A year of trauma. Comedian and The Daily Show host Trevor Noah recently spoke on coronavirus, Ahmaud Arbery, Amy Cooper, and George Floyd. He called these incidents “dominoes” –with each one tipping after the other to lead us to our current state of race protests and rioting across America and the world at large. Though this may feel like it all came to a head in the last week, egregious incidents of racial injustice are nothing new.
