JULIE KLIEGMAN – AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK “MIND GAME: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MENTAL HEALTH PLAYBOOK OF ELITE ATHLETES” – EPISODE 916

Website – https://juliekliegman.com/index.html

Email – jmkliegman@gmail.com

Twitter – @jmkliegman

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Julie Kliegman is the author of Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes.  Her work has appeared in outlets including Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The Ringer, BuzzFeed News, Vulture, The Verge, and Washington Monthly. 

In Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes, Julie offers insight into how elite athletes navigate mental performance and mental illness—and what non-athletes can learn from them. She explores the recent mental health movement in sports, the history and practice of sport psychology, the stereotypes and stigmas that lead athletes to keep their troubles to themselves, and the ways in which injury and retirement can throw wrenches in their mental states. Kliegman also examines the impacts of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, substance use, and more, with a keen eye toward moving forward with acceptance, progress, and problem-solving.

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Grab your notebook and a pen before you listen to this episode with Julie Kliegman, author of Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes.

What We Discuss with Julie Kliegman

• Her reasons for writing “Mind Game” and her own experience with mental health
• “For as many names as we’ve seen come forward, especially the big names, you just know there’s countless more that haven’t been able to speak up yet.”
• Michael Phelps and his struggles after each Olympics
• “If you just have these performance issues, they might be isolated to your performance for a while, but that might lead to some real distress in your sport and outside your sport.”
• “It can be so hard to find your identity outside of sports when that’s all you’re living and breathing from a young age.”
• “You need to do something to understand who you are and who you can be and who you want to be, especially knowing that sports won’t always be there for you as you age.”
• The stories of Chamique Holdsclaw and Royce White
• The support that Kevin Love and DeMar Derozan received when they came forward with their mental health challenges
• “I do think it’s clear that coming forward was life changing for both Kevin & DeMar.”
• “I think a lot of times athletes who aren’t at the top of their game don’t feel like they have that same power to come forward.”
• Sick days for athletes so they can skip an occasional press conference
• The impact of NIL and the transfer portal on the mental health of college athletes
• “I think it’s hard to remember for some people that the kids are at the heart of this and that they need to be protected and taken care of first and foremost.”

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THANKS, JULIE KLIEGMAN

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TRANSCRIPT FOR JULIE KLIEGMAN – AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK “MIND GAME: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE MENTAL HEALTH PLAYBOOK OF ELITE ATHLETES” – EPISODE 916

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with maybe my co-host Jason Sunkle here in a few minutes, but I am pleased to be joined by Julie Kliegman, the author of the new book, Mind Game, An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes. Julie, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:18] Julie Kliegman: Thanks so much for having me, Mike.

[00:00:21] Mike Klinzing: Thrilled to have you on. Looking forward to diving into your book, giving you an opportunity to chat a little bit about it. I got a chance to read it over here over the past week. Really well done. Lots of great things in there for both athletes and for coaches. I want to start by just giving you a chance to tell people a little bit about what the book’s all about, where they can pick up a copy of it, and then we’re going to kind of dive into your process and get into the content of the book.

[00:00:45] Julie Kliegman: That sounds great. So Mind Game is about the kind of twin elements of mental performance and mental illness and how they often they often go hand in hand. And so the book looks at the history and stereotypes of mental performance and mental health. Then there’s a section that dives into the moment today where we’re looking at how athletes have become more outspoken about their mental health in recent years. And there’s a look at the end at how people cope with certain conditions and really how people cope with retirement, injury, say a global pandemic, everything like that. So just hypothetically

[00:01:32] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Yeah.  Hypothetically. Correct. Correct. Hopefully, hopefully the last one that we all have to live through in our lifetime. Anyway. So, all right, let’s talk a little bit about just the why behind the book, where the idea come from. Why did you decide to write about this topic? Just tell me a little bit about your process for going through and getting this book started.

[00:01:53] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, I’d love to. So I’ve been writing about sports for ages. I’ve been thinking about sports for even longer. I grew up a fan of various sports teams Mets, Nets, U. S. Women’s National Team, and soccer et cetera, and I grew up playing soccer and running cross country and track, so I have had mental health my whole life, as far as I can remember, especially in high school and beyond, and I have the diagnosis of bipolar 2 disorder.

And so, really, it’s always impressed me when athletes are able to function at such a high level, especially when they’re juggling mental health concerns. And so that’s like the general background of where the book came from. And then if you want to get more specific about the moment it was generated, the idea, so to speak it actually does take us to the start of the pandemic where I was at Sports Illustrated at the time.

And we were thinking about articles about how athletes are physically affected by the pandemic, either how their lungs actually are affected if they were to catch COVID or everything like what it looks like when you’re away from your sport and your muscles kind of atrophy. And how do you deal with that during the pandemic?

And I was kind of like, well, wait a second. Those are great ideas. But what about how athletes process the pandemic mentally when they’re away from their sports, they’re away from their teammates, their whole support systems. And so I wrote an article about that, I believe in late April of 2020 for Sports Illustrated.

And that’s when I kind of started getting the idea, hmm, this could be a book.

[00:03:38] Mike Klinzing: So when I picked up the book and started reading it, obviously you jump into chapter one and talk a little bit about sort of the stereotypes of mental toughness. And when I think about my upbringing in sports, I’m 53 years old and in the time when I was playing competitive sports.

So you’re going back to the. mid to late eighties, early nineties, when I was playing high school basketball and college basketball, you certainly had a lot of the things that you describe in chapter one, where there was this feeling of, you can’t share any vulnerability that you have with your teammates.

You can’t share that vulnerability with your coaches. Coaches can’t talk about it. Everybody just kind of, it might’ve been there, but nobody was talking about it. And I think that that’s a stereotype. That’s a situation that as far as we’ve come in sort of recognizing athletes mental health and the connection to their performance, I still think that there’s a lot of challenges out there in getting athletes to come forward when they’re facing challenges.

And I think that’s one of the things that. you found when you were talking to different athletes that yes, there were some that were willing to come forward, but they felt like it took them a long time to get to that point. And I’m sure that you got the sense as you were writing the book and researching that there were many more athletes that still kind of keep it under wraps.  Is that kind of accurately kind of talk about what that chapter sort of lays out.

[00:05:15] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, absolutely. For as many names as we’ve seen come forward, especially the big names, you just know there’s countless more that haven’t been able to speak up yet, haven’t wanted to speak up, might never speak up.

[00:05:33] Mike Klinzing: The other thing that struck me, and as I was reading, was just, you talked a lot about how in professional sports, we’re starting to see more teams, leagues, start to take mental health seriously.

And yet at the same time, at the college level, where there’s many more athletes obviously competing at the college level, when you talk about division one, division two, division three, NAI, junior college, all these different levels of college sports. And yet those athletes don’t have nearly the resources on the mental health side of it that.

Some of the professional athletes can maybe have access to. And it was just interesting to read the different perspectives of athletes at those different levels that you talked with who felt like either a, yeah, they did have somebody they could go to, or the number of people that felt like, Hey, I just, I have nobody, I have nobody to go to.

And so as you were going through and talking to the various athletes that you had an opportunity to speak to, was there one college athlete? Interview that stood out for you as somebody that really had an interesting backstory of the people that you talked to.

[00:06:51] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, every college kid I talked to for this, or former college kid, as it were, they were all so interesting.

And, oh, man, I’m kind of blanking on which person suggested this, but there was a former football player. From a division one school who suggested the idea that he had dealt with depression and he was kind of suggesting there should be like, kind of like a VA kind of group, but for athletes where they could, anyone who had been a college athlete is a college athlete can go to and get support kind of like veterans do and have access to, not that that system is perfect, obviously, but it’s kind of better than nothing, I think was his point. And he feels kind of like the NCAA almost betrays college athletes a little bit, kind of puts them in these grueling situations and then sends them on their way.

[00:07:50] Mike Klinzing: I definitely think that, and I can attest to this in my experience as a college athlete, and I’ve shared this podcast, but I had a situation where when I was playing college basketball, I got to the point where I had, I guess you might call it the yips at the free throw line and it started when I was a sophomore and the end, maybe the last, I don’t know, seven, eight games of my sophomore year practice games, I would get up to the free throw line and I just could not get the ball to the basket.

Just could not, had totally psyched myself out. And I eventually was able to overcome that, but only, and I never got back to the point where I was before, where I felt like prior to that, I could go up to the free throw line and I knew that ball was going in no matter what. And I was able to bounce back and eventually become a good foul shooter.

But I never got back to that point that I had been Prior to it. And what’s interesting to me and again, it’s, it’s really, I guess, only interested to me in retrospect, cause in the moment it wasn’t very fun, but yeah, it was. It was just me, like my coaches. And again, we’re talking about, I was playing division one college basketball.

So we had four or five coaches. We had managers. There was lots of people around the program and teammates. Nobody ever talked to me about it at all. Once. Wow. Never had a conversation of, Hey, here’s a kid who was shooting 90 percent from the free throw line. Suddenly he can’t get the ball anywhere near the basket when he shoots free throws.

Maybe there’s something wrong. And I just kind of had to internalize that and figure it out myself. And it never got for me, it never got to the point where I was depressed, but it certainly was performance anxiety when it came to. the free throw line. And we think about, I know you mentioned in the book, talking a little bit about Ben Simmons and his struggles that he’s had.

And I think what he’s going through is very similar to what I went through and that you get to a point where you’re afraid to get free or afraid to get followed. You don’t want to go to the free throw line. And I just, again, find it really interesting looking back that nobody wanted to talk about. I know you have a quote in there from the,

And I don’t know if that was the philosophy that my coaching staff had back then, but again, here I was a 19 year old kid and just kind of had to figure it out on my own. And eventually, like I said, I did figure it out to some degree. I didn’t completely disintegrate or lose my career or not be able to play or anything like that.

I was able to bounce back the following year. I did that all on my own and not with any, not with any real technique or skill or anything. It was just, Hey, I got to figure this out so I can continue to play. And I wonder, and I’ve talked to a bunch of different mental performance people that we’ve had on over the course of time here on the podcast and asked them like, Hey, if This was the situation and you had worked with me back in 1989.

What would you have told me? And so they’ve given me different ideas and thoughts. And I just wonder if I would have had a resource like that, somebody to take me and explain what was going on in my mind and how I could overcome that. Could I have? turned it around much more quickly than what I did. And it’s just, again, there just wasn’t resources out there then that were starting to head in that direction where I think if that were to happen today, you would certainly, somebody would be having a conversation with me.  Let’s put it that way.

[00:11:22] Julie Kliegman: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s so interesting to me because I’m sure you were obviously far from the only person who was going through that at different schools across the country. And I think probably a lot of them were in the same exact situation as you, where they felt like they had no one to turn to.

[00:11:40] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. And I think there’s still, and you talk about this in the book as well, that there’s this stigma, right? That if you come forward with any kind of mental performance issue, any kind of mental health issue, that that makes you somehow weaker, somehow lesser of a player, lesser of an athlete.

And that’s one of those stereotypes that were. And I know that you share several examples in the book of athletes who kind of felt like it’s going to take an awful lot to overcome that stigma and really come out and admit that, Hey, I’m struggling with this. I need, I need help. And it’s tough. That’s a tough place to be when you feel like you’re on an island in your own mind.

[00:12:24] Julie Kliegman: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think like. Like you were kind of alluding to, even today when people do have these conversations amongst their team anwhether it’s their teammates or their coaches they do feel like something’s at stake and they’re not necessarily going to get away unharmed if they talk about this stuff.

They might be kicked off the team. They might just be benched all the time. So it really does make your story pretty remarkable that you were able to kind of figure this out for yourself and get back to a place where you felt comfortable shooting free throws.

[00:13:02] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I didn’t really feel that way back then.

You know what I mean? Like I did solve it to some degree, but like I said, I never got back to where I felt like, man, I’m automatic, which is where I felt like I was before. But again, again, in retrospect. It is when you look at the number of people, again, across sports who have sort of suffered through some form of the yips, whether you think about David Duvall as a golfer, or you think about, I know Rick Ankiel, who you talk about in the book and Steve Sax and Chuck Knobloch in baseball, that guys that just get Simmons now, who knows what he’s going to eventually be able to do or not do in his career.

And it kind of. I mean, totally derailed those guys careers. And yeah, somehow again, wish I had some insight about what I did. I changed up my motion and did some different things and just tried to relax and whatever. And man, it was tough. There’s still moments where I’ll be sitting on the couch and something I’ll think about and I’ll be like, I’ll still kind of get that.

I don’t even know what that feeling is, but I’ll still get that feeling. And I’m whatever, I’m 30 years removed from being anywhere, shooting a free throw, that means anything, so, right. It’s definitely something kind of that can have a big effect. And, and the thing that I think people sometimes discount and one of the people that is mentioned throughout the book, Michael Phelps, the gold medal winning swimmer and you think about just again, his performances in the various Olympic games that he participated in and how he felt like one of those athletes that just. You just felt like he was always going to win, like there was never a doubt. He was to that level as a swimmer and yet you have so many quotes from him in the book and things that he talked about that make you realize that despite the outer perception of where he was, the inner battles that he was fighting were huge.

Can you just talk a little bit about Michael Phelps situation and kind of what you learned as you went through and did your research for the book?

[00:15:12] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, I think what struck me the most about Michael was when I was looking through different interviews with him, when I had the chance to interview him myself for Sports Illustrated also, he’s just like remarkably consistent in what he says, like, we are so consistent in our belief that he was, I mean, like, you were at the free throw line, but to a major extent, like, automatic in the pool, right?

We did always think he was going to win. And at the same time, he’s like, Yeah, no, I was suicidal. Or like, I won all these golds and then I was suicidal. After, like, every Olympic Games, essentially. And, I mean, that is just a remarkable pattern to me. Like, in its specificity and consistency that there is this post Olympic comedown for people.

And it’s not for only the people who don’t perform up to their expectations, it’s even for the people who meet and succeed those expectations. And, With Michael, everything is just magnified times 100 because of how big of a star he was and is, and we saw hints of him being kind of quote unquote troubled, I guess, over the years DUIs there was that whole thing where everyone got really weird about him smoking a bong so You know, I guess there were hints and signs that maybe he needed something like rehab, which eventually he did get.

But yeah, that could be any athlete. If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone, right?

[00:16:41] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it speaks to that idea, which I know is the last chapter of the book, but just how tied in oftentimes an athlete’s identity is to their performance. And in Michael Phelps case, I mean, it’s hard to build a much better identity as an Olympic athlete than what he built.

And yet at the same time, it’s like, wow. And when you think about somebody who had that much success and yet still is. Kind of dealing with those, those demons on the inside in their own mind. And, and it’s kind of unable to get out of their own way when it comes to things again, outside of the pool, obviously his performance in the pool was, as you said, unbelievably consistent and what he was able to do.

But yet at the same time, you just don’t see, and again, we as the public, what do we see? We see him in the pool. We see him on the gold medal stand. We see him doing all the things that makes him a great athlete. And yet. When those cameras go off and he goes home, now he’s got to still live inside his own mind, just like the rest of us do.

And you just never know. And when you get locked into that by yourself and you don’t feel like you have anybody that you can reach out to, anybody that you can turn to, that’s when you get into situations where it transforms from just being a mental performance issue into a mental health issue. And I know that as you went through and we’re kind of putting the book together, I think that.

you tried to make sure that the reader would understand sort of the difference and yet the connection between mental performance as an athlete and mental health or mental illness, which not only affects you on the field or on the court or in the pool, but affects you in your everyday life. So talk a little bit about the relationship between mental health and mental illness, or I’m sorry, mental illness and mental performance and kind of how you think about that.

[00:18:41] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, it’s been, it’s definitely something, you’re right, that I wanted to tease out as best as I could in the book, but it’s still so difficult, right? Because you have mental performance, which is just maybe it’s the yips or maybe it’s just negative self talk or as you’re pitching a baseball or something like that.

Or maybe there’s really nothing going on in your mind that you can pinpoint, but you’re still struggling to execute in your sport anyway. So that’s kind of one end of like a spectrum, I guess. And then at the other end, you have like mental illness, which is can be very severe, obviously can be lifelong.

It could be something like depression, anxiety, OCD. Anorexia any number of things, really. And that is not separate from performance issues, because obviously you can imagine if you’re going through something like that, it’s going to probably at one point or another translate into your performance.

And like you said, the other, the other way is possible too, right? Like if you just have these performance issues, they might be isolated to your performance for a while, but that might lead to some real distress. In your sport and outside your sport, if you’re like, man, I just can’t do my job the way I used to so it’s all really, really, really closely connected, but I think it’s a distinction worth making anyway.

For a great example of how closely they’re connected, I mean, you can just look at Simone Biles. Did she pull out of most Olympic competitions because of a performance issue or because of a mental health or mental illness issue? It’s kind of a murky line to find, right?

[00:20:35] Mike Klinzing: Well, and she was also dealing with the abuse side of that whole case and having that weighing on her as well.

So yeah, I mean, it’s hard to at a certain point, as you said, that line gets blurred and it becomes very difficult to tell where does, and this is a problem, right? That I think athletes in general have, we tend to tie our identities to our sports, especially the more dedicated an athlete is to being the best, they usually end up sacrificing lots of other things, people, activities in their life.

If you’re going to get to the level of being an NBA basketball player, or you’re going to get to the level of being an Olympic swimmer, you have put in an unbelievable amount of time to develop your ability as an athlete. And in that time that you’re putting in, you are eliminating other things from your life that may give your life more balance.

And so, it just becomes where you’re Michael Phelps, the swimmer, or you’re Kevin Love, the basketball player. And the rest of the things that are part of your life kind of just melt away because that’s what you’re spending the majority of your time doing. That’s what the public knows you as, and you start to kind of internalize that for yourself.

And then suddenly when something within that realm that’s so important to you goes wrong, or maybe it doesn’t even go wrong, like in the case of Michael Phelps, it just doesn’t feel the way it’s supposed to, or you don’t get the satisfaction that you feel like you should get from winning all these gold medals, and now suddenly you look around and you’re like, well, what What am I doing here?

Why am I doing all this if I’m getting to this mountaintop that I’ve been striving for and suddenly I’m here and I’m not, it’s not making me feel the way that I thought it would when I, when I started out on this journey and that’s a, that’s a really tough place for, for any human being to be. And again, as you said, it bleeds into both your regular life and your performance on the court.

[00:22:43] Julie Kliegman: Right. Yeah. I mean, I think. It’s so interesting because, yeah, you have these really high expectations for yourself, and those expectations are not limited to the court or the pool or what have you. It’s, the expectation of, Oh, I’m going to win this. And I’m going to be so happy. And that’s like a really high bar to clear as it turns out, like, because everyone in your life also expects that you’re just so happy.

And so if you feel even a little bit of doubt, or sadness or anxiety or anything lingering, that’s going to feel so much worse when everyone else is like, wait, but why aren’t you super, super happy right now?

[00:23:24] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, right. Cause people from the outside, they don’t see all the time, effort, practice, sacrifice that you have to make.

They only see the product that’s put out on the court or on the field or in the pool or wherever. And that looks great to everybody, right? That’s everybody, that’s what we all dream about as a team. Cheers. is getting an opportunity to play professional basketball or be able to win an Olympic gold medal.

Those are the things that when we get up in the morning, when we’re seven or eight years old, that we all dream about. And very few people get to that level. So for the average person who’s watching that. and see somebody who’s got to that level. It’s hard for us to imagine like, man, this person has everything that they could have possibly ever dreamed of from the time they were a little kid.

And now look, they’ve got it. They’re making millions of dollars. They’re famous. They’re winning all these whatever championships, gold medals, and yet they just remain unfulfilled. So then I guess the question for you and for them would be, okay, so when I get to that point where my performance in my sport is starting to affect me off the court.

What are the things besides just having a person, whether that be someone who’s a trained psychiatrist, whether that’s just a friend, a parent, a spouse, somebody to lean on. What are the, what are the things that an athlete who finds themselves in that situation, what are some things that they can do to find the help that they need or to get the help they need?

[00:25:05] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I wish it had a really simple answer, but if it did, I don’t think this book would have been necessary. But I do think It goes back to what you were saying earlier about identity and how it can be so hard to find your identity outside of sports when that’s all you’re living and breathing from a young age.

So I think part of it is finding other hobbies, finding people you connect with who don’t care about who you are as an athlete or who see more in you than that. And trying to find that for yourself. Maybe you’re journaling. Maybe you’re adopting a pet. Maybe you’re crafting. I don’t know. But you need to do something to understand who you are and who you can be and who you want to be, especially knowing that sports won’t always be there for you as you age.

[00:26:02] Mike Klinzing: True. And I think that that’s something that it’s hard to wrap your head around that when you’re young and you’re still participating. When you get further away, it’s much easier to have that perspective when you are in it in the moment.

And I know I can only speak obviously to my own experiences, but I know that growing up, a lot of my identity was tied around being a basketball player. And that’s where people who recognize me or knew who I was, most of the time, they didn’t know me because I was a good student. They didn’t know me because I was a good son or a good brother or good friend, whatever.

They just knew me because, Hey, there’s Mike and he’s a basketball player. And to be honest. I was pretty happy with that. You know what I mean? That was something that you’re like, Hey, this is pretty good. All this work I’m putting in, people are able to recognize that. And yet as that came to an end, and as you start to look back on it, as you get older, you start to look at it and you start to say, and I think this is what’s interesting too, as a parent is you look at it and you say, okay, sports are an important part.

They were an important part of my life. And obviously because sports were an important part of my life, my kids got lots of exposure to sports, and yet at the same time you look and you think the single-minded sort of obsession that I had when I was, let’s say age 13 to age 22, I kind of excluded lots of other things that.

I might’ve been interested in now. I don’t know if I would do it differently if I had it to do over, but it certainly makes you think about how you raise your kids and what perspective you put on how important is this sport or this game or this particular thing that I’m doing. And is it worth excluding or limiting what I might do in other areas of life?

And that’s a really hard balance. I know it’s a conversation that I’ve had with people. And I think one of the reasons why I feel like parents and I don’t know, you can. Correct me or give me your thoughts on this, but I think one of the reasons why parents put a lot of emphasis on sports for their kids is because you only, it’s something that you can really only do when you’re young, you only get one chance to become good enough to be a high school soccer player.

And if you don’t play soccer. You’re probably not going to pick up soccer when you’re 26 and just start playing soccer in a rec league somewhere. And so it’s just an interesting dichotomy in terms of how much emphasis do we put on it versus how much do we develop the total person.

And again, at an elite level, it’s different. ’cause a lot of times those athletes have put in a lot of time and had to exclude some other things. And yet at the same time, I think about the whole mainstream population. And if you’ve ever been to a youth sports tournament in just about any sport, you can see some crazy behavior of people who take it way too seriously.

And I wonder if we’re damaging our kids in any way by the level of seriousness that we put place on it as parents.

[00:29:14] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, I mean, growing up, like I don’t even have as a kid, you notice like the soccer parents who are like, just totally, totally wrapped up in it and totally unhealthily obsessed and pushing their kid and yelling at the ref yelling at the coaches just that can’t be a good example to set.

But yeah, I agree with you. I think the kind of the age limit of sports is one of the reasons why parents push their kids into it. It’s also a healthy activity physically, it’s also a social activity, so it checks a lot of boxes. It’s interesting to hear you talk about your experience and that you might not do it differently if you could go back.

I think I would do it differently if I could go back. Obviously I never played on the same level as you did, I never played any sports in college. But I started injuring my ankle when I was like 14. I had a couple of surgeries on a tendon in my right ankle. And that more or less like, especially the second one where I had a complication of nerve damage.

It basically killed any chances I had at continuing to run at even somewhat elite level, and I just didn’t know what to do with that, like, my brain and my identity were so wrapped up in being an athlete and being a runner that I did fall into a state of depression when that was taken away from me, and like I said, like, I’m bipolar, like, that might have happened anyway, even if I had continued running, but I think when you’re that young and This stress release outlet is taken away from you and what you’re good at is taken away from you.

I do wish I had invested more in other hobbies, other areas of my schoolwork, stuff like that.

[00:31:03] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it’s super interesting. I think, so if you compare and contrast your experience with my experience, and I wonder if you flip flopped the healthy career that I had and the injuries that you had, and let’s say that when I was a junior in high school, I tore my ACL, and back in 1986 or 87 when that would have been, if you had ACL surgery back then, you were pretty much done and the surgery wasn’t quite as good as it is today.

And so I wonder if that had happened to me at that point, would I have felt differently? Like, Oh man, I put all this time into hoops and now. It’s kind of been taken away. Where are my other interests? What are things that I might have wanted to plow time into? And then conversely for you, you wonder if you had remained healthy and been able to continue to run and participate in soccer and do those things.

Would you have had those same feelings? And obviously we can’t go back and replay it, but it’s just interesting to think about how each person’s journey and the way they approach it and the way they think about it. Is different. And clearly looking back, you’re able to see hindsight is 2020 of, well, I wish I would have done this.

I wish I would have done that. And it’s, it’s really an interesting way of kind of, kind of looking at how it would be different if you and I kind of flip flop those, those two scenarios.

[00:32:29] Julie Kliegman: Oh, totally. Yeah. I think it’s interesting as well. I mean, I would go out on a limb and say, I think we both turned out all right, but we turned out all right with very different relationships to sports.

So for sure. And I think there’s a whole range of experiences that you can come away with. And yeah. I don’t know that I would trade the experiences I had for anything just like you don’t know if you would, but luckily we don’t need to relitigate any of that.

[00:32:58] Mike Klinzing: Very true. Very true. One of the stories that I really liked in the book, and, Because I, it’s not even a personal connection, but I have a very, very slight connection to Chamique Holdsclaw and I’ll tell you my slight, slight connection, and then I’ll let you kind of tell a little bit about her story and what that was like getting an opportunity to talk with her. So when she was in high school, there was a big AAU tournament that got played here in my hometown. So it played at the high school where I went and as part of the program, as part of our program. So obviously that was a girl’s AAU tournament. I just remember that our team, we had to go and keep score for the games.

And one of the games that I kept score for Chamique Holdsclaw played in that game. And wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an athlete in any sport on any court field that was the same age as the other players, but that was just so incredibly dominant. And again, this was, I’m sure at that point, I mean, I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure that was a national AAU tournament with great teams from all over the country.

But all I remember was that she was so physically superior to everyone that she was playing against, and she was so more skilled than everybody that she was playing against. And I remember, I think she was probably a sophomore or junior in high school at that point. And I remember leaving that, trying to figure out, again, it’s pre internet, like, who is this girl?

Like, she is just Unbelievable. And then kind of sort of following her career from afar. And then obviously she ended up having lots of mental challenges as time went on and it sort of derailed what probably could have been, I mean, still was a very, very good career, probably what could have been a historic career.

And I just always have found her story to be fascinating just because again, I saw her when she was. 14 or 15 years old for the first time. And when you see someone who’s that good at what they do, and just again, dominant completely in an environment where probably you had great players there from all across the country and just to, to watch her and how dominant she was.

So just tell a little bit of the story of Chamique Shamika Holdsclaw for people who maybe aren’t as familiar with her.

[00:35:41] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, happily. So, Chamique is featured heavily in my chapter on Trailblazers, meaning people who spoke up about mental illness far before, kind of, it was socially acceptable to do so.

And Chamique as you have laid out so nicely, was truly an amazing basketball player. She played her college ball at Tennessee under Pat Summitt, of course, a legend. And she, man, she was. Incredible. She became the first pick in the 1999 WNBA draft and she really started struggling. I mean, her grandmother died early in her career.

That was really hard on her and she ended up stepping away from the season and kind of like not telling anybody about it. She had a suicide attempt a few years later. She, at the same time, she wasn’t really talking to people about this. And Pat Summitt was like a parental figure to her. And even she, I think, was kept in the dark for a really long time.

At one point she stepped away from the game. I believe that was after her first suicide attempt. People were pretty stunned when she announced her retirement at that point. That was in 2007, and she ended up returning to the game a couple years later, but when she stepped away the first time she said she was very clear that it wasn’t about her depression, which was what she was labeling it as at the time.

She would later say she was bipolar but at the time all she knew was that she was depressed, which is a fairly common experience for those of us with bipolar disorder. You kind of hit on the depression first, and it’s not until certain treatments for depression don’t work that you’re kind of like, Oh, maybe something else is here.

So she steps away. She makes a point of saying it was due to her lack of interest in the game. She says, tell people I’m not depressed. She returns a couple years later in 2009. She kind of talks to the media about how depression is super beatable and how she had gotten everything under control. 

It’s kind of hard to read stuff like that from athletes because I don’t know if they believe it or if they feel like. It’s just the thing they need to say. So it’s really hard to go back and revisit stuff like that. She ended up retiring for good in 2010. And then a couple of years later, she actually pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated assault, possession of a firearm and a couple of other charges that stemmed from a 2012 incident where she broke into, or broke the windows of her ex girlfriend’s car with a bat and fired a shot into the SUV.

No one was hurt, or anything like that, but obviously that was a huge deal. At the time she said it was uncharacteristic of her. One of my regrets in this book is not having talked to her about that incident directly. I think at the time I was a little nervous to bring it up or nervous she might shut down on me, but I really wish I hadn’t just used secondhand information for that part of the book because it would have been more fair, more kind to hear what she has to say about it now. But it was in the process of that incident and that court stuff that she had met with a psychologist who diagnosed her as bipolar. It goes back

[00:39:27] Mike Klinzing: It goes back to, for me, what we talked about earlier in the conversation, that from the outside. And I remember again, when I saw her as a high school player, I’m looking at her situation from the outside.

And I mean, just an unbelievably a gifted player, be like I said, an unbelievably skilled and talented player, which means a player who put tons and tons of work into their game. And obviously with every possible tool that she had in her toolbox and yet was never quite able to get to the level that many people expected her to.

And still again, had a great career, right, and did tremendous things in the game. And yet. You probably could do the old, Hey, if you replay her career 10 times, the one that she got might’ve been the worst possible outcome, at least in terms of what she put out there on the court. And we just completely, I think from the outside, it’s so easy to look at it and just not understand what.

Somebody is going through from a mental standpoint. I think that’s one of the things that your book does really well is it takes a lot of well known athletes and paints that picture of, well, yeah, this is what it might’ve looked like if you were just sitting and watching them on TV or watching from the stands.

But when you really dive deep into what they were going through and how they were experiencing their athletic experience. It’s just, I mean, it’s really hard to even kind of put it into words in terms of what those athletes were experiencing. And I mean, Shemeika Holtzclaw to me is a, is a great example of that because she just, I don’t think at that point.

Nobody really knew or understood. And you’re always, I think at that point, people were very reticent to come out and talk about it. As you said, in this chapter of, of Trailblazers, of people who were willing to, to step forward and step out and, and talk about what was going on with them, I think is, that’s not, that’s not easy to do.

It’s not easy to do today. It certainly wasn’t easy to do when she first started talking about, about it. Whatever, 10, 12, 15 years ago. And you have to give people who are willing to talk about it a lot of credit because it’s not easy. Again, that still goes back to that stereotype, right? There’s still, I think people still feel like, ah, there’s some kind of mental weakness.

That person’s just, come on, just tough it out and you’ll make it through. And I think your book does a really good job of helping people to understand that sometimes that just telling somebody, Hey, just tough it out and try to get through it. That’s not enough.

[00:42:27] Julie Kliegman: No, no, definitely not at all.  I mean, athletes, especially professional athletes are some of the toughest people you’ll, you’ll ever meet as Chamique is certainly among them. And yeah, if that was an option, trust me, I think everybody would have taken it.

[00:42:42] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. The other person that you talk about in that. Chapter who, in all honesty, I had kind of forgotten a little bit about his story.

And then when I went back and read the book, it jogged my memory of, of Royce White and some of the things that he was kind of known for. And he didn’t want it. He didn’t want to get it. I guess the one thing that I would have remembered sight unseen was that he just, he didn’t want to get on planes that he was afraid of.

He was afraid of flying. And so he requested, Hey, I want to be able to take a bus to as many away games as possible. And of course most people look at that and are like, come on, man, like just get on the plane. And yet. Anybody who suffered from any type of phobia or something like that, it can be completely debilitating.

So tell people a little bit about Royce White’s story.

[00:43:30] Julie Kliegman: Sure. So everyone remembers about Royce White. If you ever knew his name, the one thing you do know is you’re absolutely right. He was afraid to get on planes. Gave him anxiety. Royce was a promising collegiate player who was selected in the first round of the NBA draft by the Rockets.

He had a bit of issues in college he was suspended from the team at the University of Minnesota, but he succeeded at Iowa State and signed a two year rookie contract. But, Royce never actually ended up taking the court with the Rockets, except for, I think, in the preseason.

And he was really expected to be something, to be a force in the league. But, as it goes, he had anxiety and asked the Rockets to provide alternative transportation for him. And as he tells the story, at least, the Rockets initially agreed. And then the NBA thought that accommodating him might violate the league’s salary cap.

So he didn’t attend his team’s games that fall, and then refused an assignment in the Developmental League, which was then called the D League. Which is essentially like a minor league feeder system for professional teams. And yeah, I mean, oh boy, his story is just, is just rough. He bounced around a little bit with other NBA teams and ultimately played three games for the Kings in 2014.

So it was a very, very, very short lived NBA career. He ultimately felt that he was blackballed from the league due to the way he spoke up about mental health and his need for accommodations. And man, I, I don’t know, do you want to talk about the heel turn he’s taken since then?

[00:45:41] Mike Klinzing: We can, sure.

[00:45:44] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, well. It’s really interesting. A lot of people smarter than me have written about it better than me, but basically he took up MMA but after taking up MMA, or maybe around the same time he became, announced that he was, not only became a Republican, but announced that he was running as a Republican in the House of Representatives vying for a seat held by a Democrat in Minnesota, a very prominent Democrat in Minnesota, actually.

And he’s just kind of become like a very right wing kind of troll, I guess? I don’t think he would see it that way. So I feel, I feel like that’s maybe not the best word. But, it’s just a really interesting lesson in like, people who do things you admire are not always people you agree with on politics or really, really anything at all.

He has very deep seated views about mental health in the NBA still he’s criticized. Kevin Love didn’t challenge the league in any real way. I don’t know if I would agree with that, or I don’t know if that has to be the goal of every player in general, but yeah, I mean, Royce White, I don’t know if Kevin Love would have come out without Royce White doing so first.  It’s hard to imagine.

[00:47:07] Mike Klinzing: I think when you look at the process for lots of things in life, right? It’s small steps. And what seems like a small step at one point, you look back on it and you’re like, boy, that’s, that was actually a pretty big step. And that allows the next person to go into that footstep and take an even bigger one.

And I think that when you look at what happened with Kevin Love and Demar DeRozan, two really high profile NBA players that decided to speak out about the situations that they were dealing with from a mental health standpoint. Not easy to do. And for all the reasons that we’ve already talked about, whether it’s pushback from people, whether it’s just from the fear of that stigma of, Hey, you’ve got to be that uber tough athlete.

And if you’re mentally weak, then maybe we can’t count on you to be out on the floor. So just give us an idea of what It was like to talk to Kevin Love and have an opportunity to just kind of discuss with him where he was at the moment when he decided that he was going to reveal the issues that he was struggling with and then kind of where he was when you actually talked to him.

[00:48:30] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, Kevin is such a delight to talk to. He’s so introspective and thoughtful. I really recommend that everyone who hasn’t ever seen it, or even if you have, go back and revisit his Players Tribune essay about his anxiety and his panic attack on the court, which he had the year before he ended up coming forward about that, and his anxiety.

I think, really, DeMar tweeting about just sending what he thought was an offhand tweet, a song lyric about depression. I know Kevin was really inspired by that, so in the same way there wouldn’t have been a Kevin without Royce, there might not have been a Kevin without DeMar either.

And Kevin is really quick to sort of funnel credit DeMar’s way and say like, Look! I’m just a white dude. Like he’s black. He faces different discrimination and different challenges than I do. And DeMar, for the record, wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. He thinks it was very difficult for both of them and doesn’t see himself as having had a particular challenge because of his race.

But I think Kevin acknowledging that as a possible factor, at least, speaks a lot to who he is. And you know, he’s doing a lot better today. It sounds like, or at least when I talked to him, they both are really. I was fortunate to be able to talk to both of them and really hear where they’re coming from and hear that they have been able to accept help and feel comfortable in their own skin.  It’s really remarkable.

[00:50:07] Mike Klinzing: What do you attribute that sort of turn of events. Do you think it’s been the ability to be out in the open? How much of it do you think they’re turning the corner and being able to deal with it? How much do you think going public with their struggles? How much of that do you think Help them.

I mean, I know you can’t put a percentage on it and neither can they, but just when you think about them being open and honest and being able to talk about it instead of hiding it, I got to believe that that’s something that it just kind of is a burden that you’re sort of able to, you’re able to exhale and release.

And now all of a sudden. Yeah, it might still be there. It might still be lingering, but now it’s something that if things get bad that you can, you can talk about it. You can have somebody there to, to help you just, just how much do you think that going public with them, how much do you think they would credit that with sort of kind of helping them get over the hump?

[00:51:06] Julie Kliegman: I think it helped them a lot. I think they both came forward right around the same time and they had a huge outpouring of support from coaches from teammates, from opponents. I think LeBron said something. I think Steve Kerr said something. Just truly like icons of the game in different ways.

And they were really fortunate to have that support. I don’t know if they necessarily expected it, even if they didn’t necessarily think anyone on their team was like a bad guy or a jerk. I don’t think they realized that everyone would have their back so thoroughly. And we’ve seen that it’s not always the case.

But yeah, I think certainly if they had to keep that bottled up and who knows, maybe Kevin would have had another panic attack on the court. Maybe DeMar wouldn’t have been able to show up to play basketball. I don’t know. I’m just speculating. Right. But I do think it’s clear that coming forward was life changing for both of them.

[00:52:11] Mike Klinzing: It had to be. I mean, I just think that when you think about anything in your life that you’re kind of holding in that you haven’t shared with someone, and it might only be that you’re holding it in for a day or 15 minutes or whatever. But when you’re holding onto something that It’s tough. I mean, that really weighs on you in so many different facets of your life that to be able to, again, unburden yourself and just exhale and share that with people, that that’s something that you’re going through.

And now you do have an outpouring of support. And as you said, maybe they weren’t expecting that, but certainly it’s something that I’m sure that they appreciated in the moment. And it also unburdened them. And then it also gave audience to, Hey, If these two guys at the top of their profession in professional basketball, seemingly having everything in life that any person could possibly want, if they’re affected by this, then certainly if I’m a college athlete, or I’m a high school athlete, or I’m just a fan of an athlete that I can come forward and I can support them, then reach out and try to get the help that I need and I can confide in someone.

And I’m sure that the, the tentacles of who they helped and sort of how those things kind of trickled down, we’ll, we’ll never know the true answer to that, but I would guess that a lot of people were helped as a result of those two guys going forward with going coming forward.

[00:53:58] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, I don’t think they’ll necessarily ever know the extent of it, but I think they do know part of it, and that must be really gratifying for them.

I mean, these are two NBA All Stars, and that’s a huge impact, I would say. And I the other interesting thing here is I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were All Stars, that they were kind of at the peak of their profession, because I don’t think that a lot of times, I’m going to say lesser athletes, and I still mean really, really good athletes because they’re still in the NBA, right?

But I think a lot of times athletes who aren’t at the top of their game don’t feel like they have that same power to come forward. Or I think Kevin Love was an institution on the Cavaliers. I think he had to know at least partially that speaking up, he probably wouldn’t get fired, right?

Like they probably were not just done with him. Yeah. So, but if you look at, I don’t know, one of his teammates who might’ve been a rookie or a younger player and didn’t have as much money as Kevin has amassed and doesn’t have the name recognition that Kevin has amassed. I mean, they might’ve.

[00:55:23] Mike Klinzing: I think that’s really, really a good point that it does take someone with a higher profile to come forward.

A, they’re more recognizable and there’s an impact there. But I think more importantly, like you said, that their teams, their coaches, their leagues are much more likely to be supportive of a player who is of that higher stature, simply because if that player has to walk away or has to leave because of mental illness.

There’s going to be a lot of questions that that team or that league are probably going to face. And so it’s maybe counterintuitive or it’s maybe not right, but I do think you’re a hundred percent correct that the higher the stature of the athlete that comes forward, the more likely it is that they’re going to be better received and they’re going to go through that with the support of people around them. Whereas again, if it’s a player at the end of the bench who doesn’t play, who’s maybe not as important to the team’s winning or losing that player, it’s a lot easier to brush that under the rug and just, okay, well, this guy’s no longer with the team because to do whatever it might be where it’s a lot harder, harder to do that with a player of DeRozan’s status or Kevin Love status.

There was another thing that stuck out for me. And I don’t think I knew the story or heard the story when it came out. And I have to say that my days of tennis viewing were a lot higher back when I was younger, but Naomi Osaka’s challenges in dealing with the press after matches and the one suggestion in the book was, I really like this, that athletes should be given, just like anybody else in their job, a couple of sick days where they don’t have to report to the press conference after the game.

Because let’s face it. I mean, I think that we as normal people kind of take it for granted that here’s these athletes that win or lose good performance or bad performance. They have to come out and they have to sit down in front of reporters who, look, many of them ask a lot of great questions.

Sometimes they ask questions that maybe aren’t so great. And in a lot of cases, just because of the nature of a given sport, the questions that you have to answer oftentimes are Let’s just say repetitive for lack of a better way of saying it that you have to keep kind of answering the same thing match after match or game after game.

And so I really like that idea of, Hey, I’m going to take a sick day because whatever I’m feeling a certain way or this, I just, I don’t want to have to go in and do this press conference today because it’s going to have a negative impact on me from a mental standpoint. And I had never heard that. And in all honesty, I look, I know that anybody who makes a living in the media.

Right? Wants players to be available. Leagues want players to be available because that’s how they connect with fans and that’s how the stories get out there. And yet at the same time, when I read this, I’m like, this is a great, great idea. So I don’t know if you were aware of that before you did the interview for the book, if you remember that being brought up at the time, or just give me the genesis of that idea and what your thoughts were on it.

[00:58:56] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, I think the idea, if I remember correctly, came from an article that Naomi wrote for Time, or was interviewed in for Time, one of the two, and I hadn’t heard of it suggested at the actual time she came forward so, and I don’t think even if it was out there, like, I think the discourse would have drowned it out at that time anyway but yeah, I, as a journalist, I have some pretty mixed feelings about allowing athletes to skip press conferences, but I think ultimately what she proposed is pretty reasonable.

Like, you can’t skip every press conference, she seems to understand that. And she seems to understand that if that’s how she feels, she needs to pull out of a tournament because you’re not doing a significant part of your job. But yeah, like it’s people ask such stupid questions sometimes. I’m sure you’ve heard them like you just alluded to it, too.

Yeah. And even when reporters ask good questions. I mean, they’re challenging. That’s the nature of being a journalist and interacting with athletes is you want to get inside their psyche a little bit. And in order to do that, sometimes you have to ask a question that isn’t super comfortable or is something that they’re not necessarily expecting to answer that day.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this, as I think I said in the book, I tried to write an article about rethinking press conferences a few years ago for Sports Illustrated. I’m currently trying to write this article again, because I think there’s it’s been years and I think, A, I need content, right?

I’m a journalist, but B, I think there’s just something really interesting about the idea and about. Are we treating athletes the best we can? Are we, what is our responsibility as journalists to assist them, I guess, in their mental health or at least not actively make their mental health worse?

[01:01:00] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it’s, I mean, again, it’s all a fine line, right, where depending on which side of that equation you’re on and in which moment you’re looking at it, you might have a different opinion.

And it’s easy to have empathy for the athlete in that case. And it’s also I think at some point, easy to have empathy for a reporter who’s just trying to do their job and ask questions. And as you said, sort of get inside the mind of the athlete. And so you have this kind of push and pull and it’s tough.

I mean, it’s, it’s very, it’s a very difficult situation. I think where that’s where a case of, I really, the sick day idea just kind of jumped off the page at me. Cause I’m like, that makes a lot of sense when you think about here are these athletes that. There might be a day that they just don’t, they don’t want to go and answer those questions.

Maybe it has nothing to do with the game. Maybe it had something to do with what was going on in their life before the game started. And they just, man there’s, we’ve all had days, right. Where you’re just kind of looking forward to the day ending and going and laying down in your bed and putting your head on the pillow and closing your eyes and just like us as regular people have those days. I’m sure that coaches and athletes have those days too. And to be able to just kind of have this mulligan of, Hey, I’m taking one of my sick days today and not going to go and face that. I just thought it was a very interesting, it was just something that I had never thought of or never heard anybody sort of share.

So that was an interesting tidbit from the book. I want to talk one final topic before we wrap up, Julie, and that was One of the things that always strikes me as someone who played college sports, coached at the high school level I’ve got a son who plays high school basketball, who’s on social media and uses social media, and I just see what goes on.

You have NIL, you have social media, you have the transfer portal, you have all these different things going on. in college athletics and just give me a general sense of with all the different people you talk to at the college level, how are people feeling about all those things and how they’re impacting athletes?

I know it’s, we could dive down into specific specifics, but just give me sort of the general overview of how, what, what college coaches, administrators, athletes, where are people with all those things?

[01:03:33] Julie Kliegman: Yeah, I think depending on your position, you might have a very different take like a student to an administrator to a coach, etc.

We’ve all heard a lot of coaches rail about the transfer portal. We’ve heard coaches rail about NIL. We’ve heard administrators rail about NIL. But I think ultimately, both NIL and the transfer portal, things like that. They’re good for the students. They give them agency. Now does that mean that they’re universally good for your mental health?

No, not necessarily. I think with the transfer portal, like, yes, it’s good to be able to remove yourself from an unhappy situation, but you’re also removing yourself from like an entire support system that you might have at that school, just because of like your situation on say the basketball team. So I don’t know, it could be bad to keep uprooting yourself every year, every two years to try to do that.

I think ultimately it’s good to give people choices and I think a lot about what frustrates college athletes. Historically, they have not had many choices. You can choose where to go to school if you get multiple offers, yes. But, you’re kind of stuck there, and you’re doing all this coursework, which at most schools, let’s be clear, you are doing the coursework.

And so you’ve got that to grapple with. You’re a developing human being with developing emotions and stuff like that. You have that you have your sport on top of this, you might be dealing with injuries. You’re not getting paid. I mean, that’s the thing that lets people put up with a lot of bad situations is when they’re getting paid well for them.

So in college, you didn’t have that option. And you obviously still don’t fully have that option. But at least with NIL, you can be compensated in some capacity, at least with the transfer portal, you can leave a situation you’re not happy in without worrying about your scholarship or whatever going away.

So I think ultimately these are good things. I think, like I said, and like, I was thinking I was quoting the journalist, Kate Fagan, when I, when I talked about this in the collegiate chapter, but at the end of the day, like college and sports just like, aren’t a super happy marriage all the time. And maybe we should revisit that at some point. I don’t know. That’s a big, big, big thing to say.

[01:06:03] Mike Klinzing: There’s your next book, Julie, right there. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That is something that, I mean, you hear it far more often today than ever before. There are a lot of people that feel like at some point that the NCAA is going to disappear just because of as you said there’s a disconnect and then you have just how different you think about like power five football schools and then you think about Division three women’s volleyball and just then they’re sort of under the same umbrella and yet They’re in no way, shape, or form comparable in terms of just the, all the things that surround each of those sports.

And look, my own experience with talking to college coaches, and since NIL, since social media has been on the rise. With the transfer portal, all these things, I think what they’re finding, at least, and again, I’m more talking to the coach side of it is they’re just trying to find ways to be able to help their athletes to be able to navigate it in a positive way.

And what that looks like, I think everybody’s still trying to figure that out. It kind of goes to the same thing that we were talking about here as it relates directly to mental health, right? You need somebody that you can turn to when you don’t necessarily understand what’s happening. And I think in NIL and the transfer portal and social media and being able to navigate all that as an 18, 19, 20 year old kid. That’s a lot to have on your plate. And that can, again, as we, when you have a lot on your plate and you get stressed and there’s things that are happening in your life, then that can start to have a big impact on. And so I think what I hear college coaches talking about is, hey, we need to be able to figure out how do we provide those resources, whether we have to train ourselves as coaches and gain a better understanding of how we can help, or if you go one step further and think about athletic departments, how do they start to put people in positions where they can help?

And I think it. starting to go that direction, but just like anything else, it moves, it moves awfully slow when you start talking about changing an entire, an entire system. As fast as NIL and the transfer portal came on, being able to adjust to those things has been a much slower process.

[01:08:42] Julie Kliegman: That is absolutely true.

Yeah. I mean, these things just move at like a glacial pace and some of that’s for good reason and some of it’s not, but yeah, I think it’s hard to remember for some people that the kids are at the heart of this and that they need to be protected and taken care of first and foremost. But I mean, hopefully some of these changes once the kinks get ironed out are really positive steps.

[01:09:14] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. All right. Is there anything else from the book that I didn’t ask you about that you want to hit on to kind of make a final point and then we’ll let people know where they can get the book again and go from there.

[01:09:26] Julie Kliegman: Yeah. I guess just I think to sum up, like. One thing that people often ask me about, just not even necessarily interviewers, but just friends and stuff, they’re like, well, what surprised you about writing this book?

And nothing really on its own surprised me, I would say, but just the breadth of stories taken together, the number of them, the little details of all of them, I think that’s what’s surprising, is that there are so many stories in this book, dozens of stories, and every one of them is just like, a little bit different or a lot different from all the others, and I think mental health is a really rich tapestry, and sports are a really rich tapestry, and when you combine the two, it’s just like, There are so many experiences out there that we need to account for, and I hope that by reading this book, people will start to absorb that and start thinking more critically about the sports that they play, the sports that they watch, etc.

[01:10:32] Mike Klinzing: Well said. All right, before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share one more time. Where can people find the book? How can they get it? And then after you do that, I will jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:10:43] Julie Kliegman: Great. Thank you. So Mind Game: An Inside Look at the Mental Health Playbook of Elite Athletes is out March 5th.

If you’re hearing this before then you can pre order it from the Roman and Littlefield website. That’s the name of the publisher, or you can go on Amazon, bookshop. org, Barnes and Noble anywhere you buy books, as they say, and check it out. I really appreciate it.

[01:11:08] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. We will have links in the show notes so people can go there and get hooked up with the book.

It is an outstanding read, Julie. You did a fantastic job of researching, the number of people that you talked to, the number of stories that you shared. I think anybody who has participated in athletics will recognize and I think the stories will resonate with people who have participated in athletics.

You may not have. gone through something as severe as some of the athletes have gone through, but I think we can all relate to the stories that you told in the book. So, thank you for that. We appreciate everyone out there in our audience listening tonight. Please go out and pick up a copy of Julie’s book, Mind Game, and to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks!