The Student-Athlete Wellness Team: the people taking care of our teams
Student-athletes are busy people. Attending practices and games, going to school and keeping up a social life is a lot for one person. The staff at Utah State University understands the busy lives their student-athletes lead and want to do what they can to take care of their health and wellness.
USU has a few different resources for student-athletes to help them remain healthy and stable.
One of these resources is the Student-Athlete Wellness Team, a group of different professionals at USU that meet every two weeks to talk about the wellness of student-athletes and what can be done for them.
Monique Frazier, a psychologist for Counseling and Psychological Services and a member of SAWT, acts as the liaison between CAPS and USU athletics.
“The athletics department created this team to have a multi-disciplinary group of people at USU to really help student-athletes maximize their wellness, whether it be physical, mental or academic wellness,” Frazier said.
Sitting on the team alongside members of the athletics department are dieticians, clinical psychologists, academic staff, a USU legal representative and a member from USU’s behavioral intervention team. One member is Mike Twohig, a professor and clinical psychologist at USU.
“I’ll tell you some of the things that I’m really impressed by is that every level of athletics is involved in the team, all the way up to the athletic director,” Twohig said.
SAWT supports student-athletes in a variety of ways. A significant service of SAWT is talking about individual student-athletes and discussing how best the team can help them in certain situations. If a student-athlete is having mental health issues, they can sign a release giving permission to the team to talk about their experience.
But there hasn’t always been this kind of personal mental health support at USU.
Tim Keady with USU Extension explained that 20 years ago, there weren’t nearly as many resources to help support the mental health of student-athletes at USU.
“There weren’t that many people here on campus to assist people,” Keady said. “Now there’s really a designated group that wants to help those athletes, and there’s a separate place for them to go.”
Care for student-athletes has come a long way and continues to progress as stigmas about mental health slowly break down. USU prioritizes keeping all students healthy, both physically and mentally, and SAWT is an important part of that focus.
And while the goal of SAWT is to help students to be healthy while being successful athletes, Mike Williams, the head of sports medicine at USU and a member of SAWT, cares most about the students themselves. Twohig respects Williams’ focus on the students.
“I know athletics wants to succeed, but he gets that, and that’s important,” Twohig said, “but he really understands student health comes first.”