Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck stunned the sports world when he unexpectedly retired from the NFL last month. In an emotional press conference at Lucas Oil Stadium, the 29-year-old recounted how his numerous injuries—torn cartilage in multiple ribs, a partially torn abdomen, at least one concussion, a lacerated kidney, a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder, and a nagging calf/ankle issue—led to a mental fatigue that ultimately forced him to walk away seven years after he was the first overall pick of the 2012 draft.
Injuries are mentally exhausting, and even healthy athletes can find themselves drained because of the high-pressure situations in which they perform. While the call for improvements to how leagues and teams manage mental health has grown louder in recent years, there can still be a stigma about seeking help or change. So much so that Ben Utecht, a Colts tight end who retired in 2008 due to concussion-related complications, described Luck’s decision as an act of bravery.
“There’s a lot of courage in what he did,” Utecht said at Accelerating Change, SportTechie’s recent event in Chicago that was co-hosted with the NFL Players Association. “He was injured for four years straight, that can be debilitating for an athlete. It changes the way you play, it changes how hard you prepare, and that alone can open you up for more injury.”
Brian Kopp, the CEO of Phoenix Sports Partners, runs a sports technology venture capital firm that has invested in Vizual Edge, a vision tracking, training and assessment tool that helps athletes cope with vision impairments in fast-moving ecosystems, such as ice hockey. He echoed the same sentiment about Luck’s retirement.
“It’s not just the physical challenges you go through but the mental challenges,” Kopp said at Accelerating Change. “This is a guy whose entire life and entire persona has been about playing football and being on the field. When you take that away, that’s a really hard thing. So my reaction, honestly, was that it was amazingly courageous that he did that, to have that level of awareness. A lot of people get to the point where they don’t realize it until it’s too late.”
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With more athletes speaking out about brain injuries and mental wellness, the NFL and the players’ association have started offering counseling services and wearables/wellness trackers that can inject data into the conversation about mental illnesses and fatigue. The NFLPA even covers counseling services to help players as they’re transitioning out of the NFL. Utech said teams and leagues are now “taking mental health much more seriously and providing the staffing” necessary to support athletes struggling from depression or other mental illnesses.
“We’ve come an awful long way since I retired in 2009. To be completely honest with you, there wasn’t really any talk about concussions, about mental health, about the long-term effects of playing in a contact sport,” he said. “There was never any application in the NCAA when I was playing, didn’t have any staffing that was able to support anything of that nature. But what has come out of the last 10 years has been some significant change in that regard. Just going back to my alma mater now, they have a whole leadership development program that’s supplying multiple sports psychologists to all of the different athletics at the University of Minnesota. Out of what was such a negative thing has come some very important enhancements.”
The next major hurdle is expanding that mindset throughout the sports world and convincing coaches, teams, athletic departments and leagues about the importance of having experts on staff who are dedicated to helping athletes cope with the mental weight of their profession. Kopp says he tries to simplify mental health issues by showing how athletes can benefit by having access to help.
“What I find is when you talk to coaches about brain training, or cognitive training, it’s like, ‘Ah, I don’t know what that means.’ Some of it is a lack of understanding, some of it is a stigma,” Kopp said. “But you don’t talk cognitively. You say: How do you hit a baseball? How do you see a football when you’re trying to make a catch? We use an example as an outfielder in baseball. Your first jump on a fly ball only starts with you seeing the ball. You could have the greatest skills in the world but you aren’t going to have a great first jump unless you can see the ball come off the bat.”
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Companies such as Vizual Edge have attempted to simplify training by getting to the core of what could be causing problems. Vizual Edge has digitized and revamped the traditional eye exam that has been used for decades. It focuses not on static imagery, such as a big or small letters, but on how an athlete processes objects in space as they’re moving closer or farther away, which Kopp said is a better measurement of how an athlete’s brain processes information.
“It’s not about making your vision better, it’s about better training how your eyes are processing things,” he said.
As an example, he pointed to Adam Greenberg, a Chicago Cubs outfielder who was hit in the back of the head during his first at-bat in the majors in 2005 and struggled for years with insomnia and depression because of the concussion. “He came across Vizual Edge five years later and said it changed his life because he was having trouble processing things in space, which had nothing to do with whether or not he could see something in a static vision,” said Kopp. “By correcting that, he could sleep again and communicate with people.”
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Utecht also attributes much of his recovery to technology. He participated in a 100-hour intensive program with the brain-training company LearningRx, which had him attend 90-minute sessions four days a week with a trainer. A neuropsych evaluation given before he started and after he graduated from the program showed that his memory dramatically improved from below the 20th percentile to the 90th.
“I retired because I was having some pretty significant long-term memory issues and also working-memory issues, which basically means that whatever I’m hearing and learning, within five minutes I was struggling to hold on to it,” he says. “My wife said I became a Post-it note person; everything in the house had a Post-it note. And that put a lot of emotional strain on me because I had a hard time dealing with the chaotic environments that we can be in when we’re in the corporate world or family settings. For me as a dad, as a husband, and as someone who is trying to redefine his life, to not function at a high level cognitively was a huge stress and it triggered behavioral changes.”
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After engaging with LearningRX, he noticed “tremendous change.”
“Not only in my ability to function as a speaker, as an entrepreneur and someone in the corporate world, but my patience level, my ability to be in a house with all sorts of different stimulants happening at one time, and not lose my temper, was remarkable,” he said. “I really believe that there are opportunities for us in the future to do some radical things through software, through technology, where we can really capture—whether it’s visualization or focusing on the different cognitive pillars we all use everyday, and strengthen those abilities to make us function at a higher level.”
Despite recent improvements in sports, Kopp and Utecht said there’s still much more to be done. The next phase in this discussion might be establishing a baseline of metrics that can be used as a guideline when analyzing mental health.
“Every year at colleges you have a physical and you go through all these physical tests to make sure we know where you are,” Kopp said. “Then later on, if there’s an issue we can measure how you’ve changed and get you back to where you used to be. On the mental side, there is no baseline. We have a lot of physical measurements. We need baselines around the mental measurements; the mental side needs to be more proactive.”
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