WHAT I READ THIS WEEK
Who Can an Athlete Actually Talk To?
Something I got amazing at during my basketball career was figuring shit out without having much information. Just kind of organizing the insane amounts of chaos all around me and being ready to play basketball. And for the most part…I managed.
But figuring out who I could trust when something went wrong was an entirely different situation.
I read three studies this week that had me obsessing about that…especially with some of the situations we've been dealing with at OverseasX. The interesting part was how much the researchers focused on the people surrounding athletes and what makes somebody comfortable enough to ask for help.
The first study came out of Australia on October 26 and involved eight retired Olympic and Paralympic athletes who participated in a structured peer support program. They met over six weeks and later spoke with researchers about their experiences.
What’s crazy is that simply putting former athletes together wasn't necessarily it...the participants described the importance of having someone who understood their experiences while maintaining enough distance from their former organizations to speak openly.
Now, that's a small study involving only eight people, so I'm fucking not suggesting we've discovered the perfect solution to athlete transition…but it made a lot of sense to me.
As an overseas basketball player your coach controls your playing time, your general manager is responsible for your paycheck, your agent is working on your next contract, and your teammates are trying to keep their own jobs.
I'm not suggesting those people don't care about you, but when you're struggling with something, who do you talk to without worrying about how that conversation might affect your career?
The second study, published in Japan on October 18, looked at mental health education delivered by retired athletes to competitive badminton and volleyball players.
The researchers found that participants improved their understanding of mental health and reported feeling psychologically safer after the session. Those improvements were still present two months later.
However, the researchers didn't find clear evidence that the athletes became more likely to seek professional help…which is insane when you look at the facts. They had more knowledge, felt more comfortable discussing these issues, and still didn't show a clear improvement in their willingness to actually reach out.
The study was small, and it didn't establish why that happened. But my interpretation is that knowing help exists and feeling comfortable using it can be two very different things. Especially in professional sports, where admitting you're struggling can feel like you're giving somebody another reason to replace you.
The third study came out of Switzerland and involved 21 parents of young elite athletes moving toward senior competition. These parents described dealing with financial pressure, confusing organizations, emotional stress, and uncertainty about how they were supposed to support their kids.
I thought about all the American families watching their sons and daughters chase professional basketball careers overseas. How many of those parents understand international contracts, agents, foreign leagues, or what happens when a team stops paying their kid?
Shit, I was the one playing professionally, and there were plenty of times I didn't fucking understand what was happening.
Now imagine being a parent trying to help from thousands of miles away.
These studies involved different sports, different countries, and relatively small groups of people and don't establish that every athlete experiences these problems, and don't prove that any particular support program will solve them.
But reading them together made me think about something we're trying to build with OverseasX.
We can bring in financial professionals, attorneys, mental health specialists, former players, and people who understand the international basketball business. And I want every one of those resources available to athletes.
But we also have to think about how athletes are supposed to feel comfortable using them.
Who answers when somebody reaches out? Can they speak openly? Is their information protected? Does the person they're talking to understand the business they're involved in? And if that person can't help, do they know somebody who can?
Those are questions I think deserve a shit ton of attention.
I've spent enough years around this business to know that plenty of athletes are dealing with things nobody around them knows about. Sometimes they're afraid to speak up, sometimes they don't know who to ask, and sometimes they've already asked somebody who made the situation worse.
I want OverseasX to become a place where athletes have people they can trust, whether they're preparing for their first professional contract, sitting alone in an apartment halfway around the world, or trying to figure out life after basketball.
And I want the former players who have been through this shit to be part of helping the next group navigate it.
Because having somebody tell you help is available sounds great.
Knowing exactly who you can call when everything starts going wrong is a hell of a lot more useful.
If you're interested in digging into the research, here are the three studies I referenced. I encourage you to read them and come to your own conclusions.
1. Shared Understanding in Transition: Retired Athletes' Experiences of a Structured Peer Support Programme
2. Mental Health Education and Help Seeking Among Competitive Athletes
3. Parents' Experiences Supporting Elite Athletes Through Career Transitions