Female athletes unite to promote physical and mental wellness

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Female athletes unite to promote physical and mental wellness

Anytime senior basketball player Maddie Reed swiped into the dining hall over the last three years, a sticker on the back of her student ID reminded her how many calories and macronutrients should make up her meals.

“It wasn’t as helpful as you think it could be,” Reed said.

These nutritional guidelines did inform her food choices to a degree, Reed said, but she wanted the knowledge to create meals that would fuel her performance in practices and classes alike.

Reed’s struggle to fuel her body with the best foods is an issue that resonates with many female athletes at Hillsdale. But nutrition is not their only problem. The women balance academic rigour with athletic excellence. They reconcile society’s ideal physique with their bodies they’ve built to perform. And they check their competitive nature with the dangerous game of comparing one’s self to others.

To help players manage these realities the student-athlete life guarantees, Reed and several other female athletes created the Female Athlete Support Team at a Student Leadership Workshop held last May.

“It’s often very challenging to figure out how to be a college athlete and still have healthy nutrition, exercise, weight, and body image,” said Director of Health Services Brock Lutz, who mentored the women as they created FAST. “I think this was the main impetus for this group beginning.”

Thirteen female athletes comprise the FAST council, with each of the six sports played by women represented proportionally, according to sophomore Dani Jones, who runs on the track team and plays volleyball. The members are responsible for seeking out information, resources, and tools that could benefit their teams, using FAST as a hub of knowledge on exercise, mental health, nutrition, and more.

“We want to be a resource for female athletes, and bring together female athletes so they know they are not alone in their stresses,” Reed said.

The council has shared a file with all the female teams that delves into nutritional tips, mental health indicators, and a letter of support written to freshmen.

“Those council members are also the mentors for their teams,” Jones said. “They’re on the lookout — if they see anything that might look like an eating disorder, they’ll get the help that person needs.”

As a part of FAST’s development, Reed and Jones said they surveyed all female athletes returning to campus this year to measure how the women are affected by the issues FAST is trying to resolve.

Out of 52 athletes who took the survey, 10 women said they themselves had suffered or were currently suffering from an eating disorder, a number just shy of 20 percent of all female athletes in the survey. More than 60 percent said they knew someone who had an eating disorder.

“Finding this out, we thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there are a lot of people who need this help,’” Jones said.

Reed pointed to three possible factors that cause athletes to develop eating disorders: pressure to play well, pressure to look good, and pressure to eat right (without knowledge of how to do so).

“With the athletes we have, we’ve been driven our whole life. We’re competitive and we’re almost perfectionists,” Reed said. “We want to be the best we can be, but if we don’t have the knowledge to do that, we can be inadequately fueling ourselves.”

Both Reed and Jones said athletes are often challenged by the difference between society’s definition of what a woman ought to look like and how their sport requires them to shape their bodies.

“We’re expected to have so much muscle. We have to gain weight for season, but it has to be good weight. But with how society views women, you’re expected to be small,” Jones said. “You need to be bigger for sports. Based on how people see you, you want to be small. So trying to find that balance is hard.”

Jones said the council members plan to accomplish small goals this year, but they intend to bring in other female athletes and nutritionists to encourage their fellow players.

“We just want to get the conversation started, not make it a stigma,” Reed said. “We want to be able to help people if they have an eating disorder, or just having trouble managing the student athlete life, which is kind of intense.”