Editor’s Note: This story is free to all. If you or a loved one have contemplated suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. For more information on the Valparaiso University Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, click here.

Natalie Graf is stressed.

The Valparaiso senior is balancing a double major in Chemistry and Biology while finishing up her work in Christ College, Valpo’s honors college. On top of that, Graf is weighing her future plans in the wake of passing the Dental Admissions Test earlier this semester, an exam that is required for those wishing to enroll in dental school.

Any student with Graf’s workload would be feeling pressure, but that isn’t where her anxiety has been coming from in recent weeks. Graf is a starting defender on the Valparaiso soccer team and the Beacons have a bullseye on their back.

Picked to win the Missouri Valley Conference at the outset of the season, Graf and her teammates struggled through a nonconference slate that saw the team go six matches without a victory, including a four-match losing streak in which the Beacons were outscored 9-1.

“Being a defender is very high stress because it’s our job to not let the other team score,” Graf said. “If a team is high pressing you, that can be really hard to deal with as a backline. It’s stressful. I know lately I’ve been dealing with stress over the results of the games and everything. We’re picked to finish first and our nonconference didn’t necessarily go the way we wanted it to. I’ve been really nervous about that.”

Hard. Stressful. Nervous.

Words that older generations of athletes tried to block from their vocabulary. Society told them not to show weakness. Society told them to never let the opposition see them sweat. Society told them to win at all cost, whatever the cost.

Society is finally beginning to evolve. Slowly.

Graf is the President of the Valparaiso University Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and she is hoping to break the stigma that mental health struggles need to be fought in the dark. Graf isn’t the first Valparaiso athlete to come forward saying “it’s ok to not be ok,” but she’s one of the first to do so with such a visible platform.

Graf addressed all of Valparaiso’s student-athletes last spring with a passionate speech at the ARC Awards, an annual year-end awards ceremony. She’s continued that message with SAAC this year, helping to form a Mental Health Committee that features officers Easton Seib (Softball), Bella Ravotto (Volleyball) and Sam Warren (Volleyball). The group will be hosting a mental health awareness event at Friday’s volleyball match at the Athletics-Recreation Center against Murray State.

“(Mental health) has been pretty prevalent in the media lately, especially with the rise in suicide cases among student-athletes,” Graf said. “There has always been conversation with my friends and me, with my parents, about mental health and trying to make sure you’re in a good headspace to play. The conversations I’ve had with people here at Valpo just brought about the idea that there might be a need for something like (the Mental Health Committee).”

Friday’s mental health awareness event at the volleyball match is the culmination of Valparaiso University’s Wellness Week, a series of events that have been aimed at raising awareness and providing resources for students and student-athletes. The school has continued to develop resources and strategies around the topic of mental health, recently redesigning the Campus Recreation & Well-Being department and moving the office of Natalie Muskin-Press, the assistant director for prevention and wellness education, into the Valparaiso Student Rec Center. Muskin-Press hosts, among plenty of other opportunities, Wellness Walk-Ins, an open door opportunity for anyone needing help.

“This has been a recalibration of what students wanted and needed out of my area,” Muskin-Press said. “We’re seeing this on other campuses as well. Taking Wellness and Well-Being outside of the realm of the (Valparaiso University) Counseling Center is another way to destigmatize it. My office is really accessible and I think that helps students who are maybe reluctant to step into counseling, don’t know if they need counseling or just have a couple of questions. It creates a bit of a bridge place for students.”

Muskin-Press has been touched by students like Graf who have been outspoken and passionate about the need for mental health discussions. Topics such as anxiety and identity have been on the forefront of SAAC’s movement. In the last two weeks there have been signs posted all around the ARC of student-athletes confronting their identity away from the arena.

“If the students don’t advocate for it, and normalize the discussions in their own groups, it’s going to be hard for either the administration to respond to it or realize the need to respond to it or for the stigma to break down,” Muskin-Press said. “I can go in all I want and say ‘you guys need to take care of your mental health, you need to do X, you need to do Y,’ but hearing it from each other is always going to be more impactful. We know, in college students in particular, that peer-to-peer is always going to be more of a persuasive argument than someone coming in. Our role as (administrators) is to make sure that we’re making it clear that they’re not going to be punished if they speak out about their mental health, or if they make choices based on their mental health. They’re going to be supported.”

Staying grounded

With all that Graf has on her plate, staying grounded in the moment while also keeping an eye on the bigger picture has been a focus. One missed play doesn’t cost a game. One loss doesn’t derail a season. Staying level-headed is the goal.

“There’s the quote that the game is 90 percent mental and 10 percent skill,” Graf said. “That’s very true. If you’re not in the correct mind space, you’re not going to perform very well. You’re not going to be able to support your teammates in the way that you need or they way they need to be supported. We try to ground our thoughts and worry about things that are controllable. It helps us attack our game as opposed to worrying about what the other team is doing.”

Graf doesn’t go at this alone. She has her teammates, her coaching staff and her support system. Perhaps most importantly, she, with the rest of her teammates, has Derrek.

Derrek Falor was a former soccer coach at Cleveland State and DePaul before he left the coaching profession to become a Certified Consultant of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. Through his company, Thrive: Excellence in Sport Performance, Falor works with teams and organizations all over the country. He began working with Valpo’s soccer program three years ago and he’s just started working with the Valparaiso women’s basketball team this season.

“Derrek is a mental performance coach that I’ve known for a long time,” Valparaiso soccer coach John Marovich said. “He works with our players in terms of calming their mind, creating a postgame debrief with what went well, what didn’t go well and dealing with self-reflection. He creates pre-practice and pregame goals and rehearsals. He’s done it for the players and he’s done it for me.”

Falor begins each season creating a list of nine touchpoints for the team to address. He’ll work with the team at large as well as different positional groups that have specific goals to address, both on the field and off the field. It’s that marriage of the two identities, athlete and however else the person identifies, that is the lifeblood of the mental performance coaching.

“I feel really strongly that in no realm of performance - and it doesn’t matter if you’re an athlete, you’re in the performing arts, you’re in business - in no realm of performance is that person ever going to be the best version of themselves if they are constantly narrowly defined as just that one thing,” Falor said. “We spend a lot of time talking about identity and talking about finding inner strength.”

Just as the stigma surrounding the discussion of mental health slowly gets broken down in society, Marovich has seen an evolution of how the topic gets addressed among his team. The importance of the discussions is what led Marovich to bring Falor on board several years ago.

“What we’re addressing is the stress and how to deal with the stress that comes from competition, that comes from trying to be at your best,” Marovich said. “If a player has a great performance, ok, great, but if they have a bad performance, that doesn’t define who they are as a person. That’s Derrek’s space. If he recognizes the signs of depression, serious anxiety issues, he’ll (recommend to see) a clinical person. What we’re addressing is what we can address and try to help identify. We want to give them the tools. The outside life bleeds into the athletic life and the athletic life bleeds into the real life and how do they manage all of those things coming at them?”

Part of that management for Graf is simply having the conversation. Having conversations with Marovich. Having conversations with Falor. Having conversations with Muskin-Press. Having conversations with her teammates. With her classmates. With her fellow student-athletes.

“The Mental Health Committee has really started to get conversation going surrounding mental health so people don’t feel like they have to hide their mental health struggles,” Graf said. “I think it’s fair to say that every student, but also every student-athlete, goes through a dark and difficult period. You go through a lot of changes in college and it can be really stressful. Our movement with the posters around the ARC is really kind of to start the conversation around it all. We have peer-led support groups with the posters. There are lot of times that athletes get super, super caught up in their identity as just an athlete. There are times, especially in the thick of games and the thick of practices, that you can get so narrowed in on just your identity as an athlete that you forget the other aspects of yourself. Other people forget to treat you like you have other qualities. It’s good to remind yourself and remind other people that there are other parts of you.”

“Eventually the game isn’t going to be such a big part of our lives anymore,” Graf added. “We need to make sure we develop and recognize those other parts. Personally speaking, I get super narrowed in, especially when I’m not playing well, on my athlete identity, and I forget to remember all the other awesome things I have going on in my life. There are plenty of others who can probably attest to that, especially when things aren’t going well in their sport. We tend to hyper focus on the negative and forget about the other things we can be grateful for, the other great opportunities we have in school and the great support system we have around us.”

During the course of conducting interviews for this story, Valparaiso’s SAAC chapter entered into an agreement with Dam Worth It Co., a non-profit organization that is designed to end “the stigma around mental health by creating peer-led mental health awareness campaigns on college campuses across the United States.” Dam Worth It was started by a pair of former student-athletes at Oregon State after they both lost teammates to suicide.

While writing this story late on Wednesday evening, Valparaiso senior offensive lineman Danny Files shared important words on mental health.

(Photos provided by Natalie Graf)

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