How Minnesota families can help teen athletes manage stress and anxiety driven by sports

Whoever thinks professional hockey players are too tough to talk about their feelings should have seen St. Paul RiverCentre on Jan. 4, between games at the World Junior Championship.

Paul Martin, Paul Broten and Jamie Langenbrunner — three former Minnesota high school stars who went on to NHL careers — were on a panel at the convention hall, discussing mental health and addiction.

“As a hockey player,” Martin said, “the ability to say you need help, or you’re struggling or going through something is not something people often talk about.”

Said Broten: “You see a lot of professional athletes that once they’re done playing, they try to go back to their normal life. It’s not always as easy, and they struggle, and they use things like alcohol and drugs.”

“You can’t force somebody to get help,” Langenbrunner added. “I couldn’t be forced. I had to hit my own rock bottom, and probably more than once.”

Today’s high school athletes have broader access to mental health resources than those players did. Students, coaches and administrators are passing along educated advice, and there is more of an open dialogue at a time when social media can complicate the whole picture.

With Mental Health Awareness Month coming in May, here is advice and examples of how teenage athletes can manage stress caused by sports, but also use sports as a mechanism to heal.

Focus on the fun

St. Cloud Crush senior Micah Davis is heading to the University of Virginia with a goal to swim in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

But before winning the first of his eight state championships, Davis was a freshman with extreme nerves.

“I still remember it very vividly,” he said, of sitting behind the diving boards at the Jean K. Freeman Aquatic Center, waiting for the 200 freestyle to start.

“I was standing there, and I was shaking, and I was like on the verge of tears,” he said. “Three months of training, strictly for this one race, and it all came down to a minute and 37 seconds.”

He wound up winning that race, of course. Now, instead of dwelling on things that can go wrong in a race, Davis tries to “flip it” and think of the opportunity.

At the state meet his sophomore year, he was on the deck, waiting for the 100 butterfly alongside a good friend, Wayzata’s Nathan Carr.

“We were sitting next to each other, and we were just trying to have fun with it,” Davis said.

Davis wound up shattering the state record, at 46.94 seconds, and right behind him was Carr, who is also heading to Virginia.

“That was a huge moment that kind of just taught me that I don’t need to be so nervous about everything,” Davis said. “I just need to go have fun.”

Lean into a support system of friends, teammates

Anoka second-year softball coach Morgan Paaverud wants the Tornadoes program to be as welcoming as possible for all students, while still striving to get back to the state tournament.

“She’s definitely opened the door for so many girls to be able to express the different struggles they have going on,” senior co-captain Audrina Kissel said. “She knows her players, she knows the girls who need to talk.”

Sometimes Kissel needs it, as her mother is battling breast cancer.

“I’ve always preached since day one that this is a family,” Kissel said. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re on the B-squad, JV, varsity – we all play together.”

Paaverud played on Anoka teams that finished third in the state in 2015 and second in 2016. She then spent four years playing for the University of Toledo.

What’s some of her advice for high school student-athletes?

“Knowing that the sport doesn’t define you, that it’s OK to fail, that your failure doesn’t define who you are as a player,” she said. “That it’s an opportunity to learn and grow. And if we’re not able to learn and grow, we can’t really move forward in life and become a better person.”

At tryouts, make anxiety your friend

Dr. Erin Ayala is a New Hope-based sports psychologist with more than a decade of experience helping athletes through issues such as performance anxiety, burnout and depression.

She serves on the Sports Medicine Advisory Committee for the Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL).

Some of the most stressful situations young athletes face come with tryouts, whether it’s competing for a spot on the varsity or a top club or AAU team.

“It’s OK to feel anxious,” Ayala said. “It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, because anxiety gets a pretty bad rap.”

Sometimes a student’s athletic career comes down to that one moment, and the pressure gets to them.

“The more you try to fight it, the bigger it’s going to get,” Ayala said. “So we try to bring it along for the ride. As silly as that sounds, I’ll turn anxiety into an overly helpful friend or teammate.

“OK, it’s trying to help you. How can we work together? So that can be helpful because they’re not fighting it as much.”

Ayala also said it helps to set “process goals,” focusing on smaller steps along the way and not the outcome.

“A lot of the kids are going to have the goal to make varsity, for example, but they don’t have a lot of control over that,” she said. “The more they focus on the outcome, the harder it is. I often say it’s kind of like falling asleep. The harder you try, the worse it gets.”

Use information from trusted organizations

When the MSHSL added Ayala to its medical advisory board last year, the league continued to make mental health a priority.

The main objective on that front now is adding more mental health resources for coaches, many of whom have other full-time jobs and don’t have the time to dive into the research.

“Obviously, we don’t expect coaches to be mental health providers,” MSHSL associate director Lisa Quednow said. “But they’re developing those relationships, and they’re recognizing when kids are having a really good period of time, and when they’re struggling.

“We want to give them the resources so they can get kids some help if there’s help needed.”

Sophie’s Squad is one organization that can help. Founded in 2021, Sophie Squad holds mental health awareness games throughout the state, with the motto: “It’s OK not to be OK.”

Matt Lee, Sophie’s Squad vice president, said the goal is to help athletes understand that they should treat their mental health like their physical health.

“You see it at our events, where kids will talk about what they do specifically to focus on their own mental health,” Lee said. “But then you see these kids starting to normalize the idea that it’s OK if you’re not doing well.”

The National Federation of State High School Associations offers a free online course on the NFHS Learning Center entitled Coaching Mental Wellness. The NFHS’s We See You website also provides resources.

Other organizations focused on mental health include the MAX Foundation out of Warroad and Paul Martin’s own Shine A Ligh7.

Try to avoid social media chatter

The same St. Paul panel with Martin, Broten and Langenbrunner also featured Rhonda (Curtin) Engelhardt, a former Roseville High School and Gophers star who now scouts for the Nashville Predators.

“I think that social media piece is big,” Engelhardt said. “That pressure — and especially kids during their draft year, you talk to them afterwards, and it’s a hard year for them, and they’re trying to perform. It’s up and down. And it just gets to be a lot for kid.”

Her daughter Elliana Engelhardt is a standout hockey player at Hill-Murray who is committed to Minnesota State Mankato, and they have seen the modern social media impact.

Rhonda Engelhardt gave the example of a 12-year-old goalie finding a social media post ranking the “Top 10 goalies,” and not seeing their name on the list. That can be hard on a student’s psyche, even for a pre-teen.

“It’s just starting younger now,” Engelhardt said.

Ayala said social media has changed the game when it comes to mental health.

“Earlier generations — if you had an embarrassing performance, it wasn’t going to be posted on social media,” Ayala said. “And nowadays, everything is livestreamed, or people are recording, and so there’s more of a threat that they’re being evaluated, and it could show up somewhere in the future.”

Ayala said it can be especially hard for determined to prove themselves for a college scholarship.

“That creates a lot of stress that I think other generations haven’t seen,” she said. “A lot of [college] coaches will look to their social media to try to get a feel for their prospects. So it, unintentionally, is reinforcing this problem that the best 10 percent of our lives being posted online, and that’s what all their peers are posting.”