Silent Soldiers - Why Male Athletes Stay Quiet And How Coaches Can Help

Silence can look like discipline, toughness, and focus. It can also be a warning sign we are trained to ignore. “Silent Soldiers” is my clearest message yet about male athlete mental health, why so many young men learn to bury distress, and what happens when sport rewards performance but punishes honesty. 

I walk through the latest NCAA athlete death data shared in a 2024 British Journal of Sports Medicine study: across 2002–2022, suicide becomes the second leading cause of death among college athletes, and the proportion of athlete deaths due to suicide doubles over 20 years even as other causes decline. Most of those losses are men. If that makes you uncomfortable, good. Discomfort is often the first signal that something needs to change. 

Then we get practical. I break down the biggest barriers that keep male athletes from seeking support: stigma and embarrassment, fear of losing a role or scholarship, pressure to conform to masculine norms, and low mental health literacy that makes it hard to tell the difference between normal fatigue and depression or anxiety. I also explain the difference between mental toughness and emotional suppression, and why suppression does not make athletes stronger. 

Finally, I give coaches and sport leaders a proactive framework: learn what distress looks like in men, build emotional connection into training through structured activities, use independent facilitation so players can be honest without hierarchy, and treat mental performance coaching like strength and conditioning. We also talk about the risk window after sport and why our responsibility cannot stop at the final whistle. 

If you care about athletes, share this with one coach or teammate today, then subscribe, leave a review, and tell me: what does your team culture reward, silence or honesty?

The only podcast that is all about Athletes Supporting Athletes!

Transcript

Welcome Back And Listener Pushback

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Plan B podcast. I'm your host, Coach B. And if you listened to last week's episode, then you heard me reconnect with collegiate water polo player Jasper Dale. And in his meeting, we talked about how we met back in 2022 when I first started my focus, my really my academic focus on how we could improve the care for the mental health care for male athletes. And that episode was a lot of fun. Of course, woven in that was the great story of how Jasper got involved in water polo, how he's now transitioned to be a coach, and how he's doing things slightly differently than how he experienced it. Okay, and I did say at the start of the episode that there were going to be a few awkward moments. Oops. Okay, because there obviously some people did feel it because I had a few kind of messages during the week. But any type of feedback to me is good feedback. Okay. So love it or hate it, it doesn't matter. What I loved about my experience with Jasper, Jasper, you were fantastic. People were having to go at me, not you, by the way. Just need to clarify. One person said to me, Oh, it's not very professional. It's too personal. Okay, let's just stop there for a second. I've been a competitive athlete, well, was a competitive athlete since I was nine. I spent my entire childhood as an athlete, my entire adolescence as an athlete, my entire young adult life as an athlete, into my 30s as an athlete. So many experiences that I've had, both with coaches, with athletes, with trainers, with doctors, you name it. Sorry, sorry that you found it personal, pretty hard not to. Sport's been my life, very passionate about it, and the population that I deeply care about. You guessed it, it's athletes. So yeah, hey, if last week made you feel uncomfortable, might have something to do with the fact that it was honest. Okay, and sometimes when you're honest with people and you say things that other people wouldn't say, oh, because because I I'm gonna hold my tongue because I you know, when you didn't, it's not that you didn't speak the truth, Belinda. It's just that maybe, maybe you shouldn't say it. Okay, sorry. This is my field is athlete mental health. And you know what happens when you don't address male athlete, just all athlete mental health, or if you let it deteriorate? Okay, we'll go back to season one. All right, I think it's episode nine, and you'll discover what happens when you neglect the mental health of athletes. Okay, I've also experienced that firsthand. So, sure. My style might be a little bit different from your average sports psych, and that's okay. I like to pride myself on that, and I believe that is my gift that gives me the ability to connect with athletes. Now, today I'm gonna go even deeper. Ouch. But don't worry, it's very specific. Today's episode is actually called Silent Soldiers. And I hold I chose this name very deliberately because that's what so many male athletes are. They're silent soldiers. They're expected to perform, they're expected to conform, they're expected to adapt to whatever is thrown at them at all costs. And for what? For the sake of winning, even when they're struggling. They stay quiet, they push through it, they bury it. And do you know how they do that? Because most of them, like Jasper, who started water polo at age three, have been conditioned by sport, okay, to do this. Now, I'm a female athlete, okay, but I trained predominantly with male athletes. But I'll tell you where, and hey, this is okay, sorry everyone, yeah, it's gonna get personal personal again. Not only was why I am very passionate about this subject, I actually have older brothers, older brothers who were great Aussie Rules football players. To be honest, had they had the right support and direction and perhaps encouragement from their coaches, they were 100% better athletes than I was. And I grew up looking up to them. In fact, I loved watching them play so much that when my dad was a coach of an Aussie rules team, I was the water girl. All right, so picture this. I think I was about 10 at the time. And it's not like, you know, don't get any kind of weird thoughts. It was me wearing like an Aussie rules football top, Aussie Rules short, hat on, ponytail, and I was my dad's messenger for the guys on the field, and I give them water at the same time. And if you know anything about Aussie rules, those guys, and sorry, I still speak in metric because I'm from Australia, those athletes on average run around or can't run up to around 25 kilometers during a game, which is a lot of running. So it was actually great training for me. So that was the beginning of me going out there with a water bottle. My dad would go, all right, go out to our fullback and tell him he isn't staying on his man. I'd go, right, Dad. I take out the water and I'd go, listen, Johnno, dad says you're not staying on your man. Okay. Can you imagine a 10-year-old female saying that to a guy? But that's what I did. And believe it or not, they listened. One, because my brothers were big. And two, my dad was a coach. So I did this right up until I became a distraction on the field, which was probably about 15. So about four years of running water for the team. So my love and support of male athletes has been there for a very long time. But today, we are going to talk about how we desperately need to improve the proactive care of male athlete mental health. And I'm not saying this because it's a nice idea and because I love my brothers. Okay. And because I had the best training teammates in the world for 15 years as a pro, and because two of my best friends are male. Hello to Tim in London, steel back in Australia. That's not why I'm doing this. And I'm going to explain why. I'm going to share with you why this is so desperately needed and why we need to sit up and pay attention. First of all, let me start with some numbers. And I just want you to sit with these for a moment and reflect. A major study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2024 analyzed 20 years of data on NCAA athlete deaths from 2002 to 22. Now, during that time, 1,100 athletes died. Of those, 128 took their own lives. Suicide is now the second most common death among college athletes behind only accidents. But this is where you need to stop. And this is why I won't stop having uncomfortable conversations. And this is why I won't stop going up to coaches and saying, hey, excuse me, I don't think that behavior is okay for those athletes, even if it cost me my job, which it has. Okay, and some other feedback I got last week was, Belinda, nobody wants to hear about the person who's been wronged. I don't care. It's a lot more serious than me just losing my job. This is about saving lives. And I'm going to explain why. We need to pay attention because the proportion of deaths that were suicide has doubled for athletes over a 20-year period. I'm going to say that one more time. The deaths of that was suicide over the last 20 years for athletes specifically have doubled. They've gone from 7.6% in the first decade to 15.3% in the second. Every other cause of death for athletes, cardiac events, accidents, illness, that went down. But guess what? Suicide for athletes went up. And of those 128 athletes who died by suicide, 77% were male, 98 young men. The yearly number of male athlete suicides more than doubled, going from 31 in the first decade, this is the beginning of 2002, to 67 in the second. An earlier NCAA study found that suicide rates for male athletes was 1.34 per every 100,000, compared to 0.37 for every 100,000 females. Now that is a relative risk of nearly four times higher for men. Okay, four times. So here we are, we're creating Title IX and we're supporting our female athletes, and I think that's fantastic. I think it's well overdue. I'm a huge supporter of women in sport. Why wouldn't I be? I was a female pro athlete. But what the heck are we doing for male athletes? What the heck are we doing for them when the risk of suicide is four times higher for men? Okay. This is why I believe the need to create a new framework around coach interpretation, coach communication, interpretation, and athlete communication is so important because we need to reach these athletes. We need to connect, we need to do a better job of supporting them. So these numbers that I've just shared, okay, they're college numbers. Research by LingVist and colleges found that suicide rates among former male athletes after retirement are estimated at two to four times higher than the general male population. Okay, just sit with that for a second. Two to four times higher. So these are the guys you cheer for at the games, the college games that you go to. These are the guys who give everything for their sport for your entertainment. When it's over, they're falling through the cracks and nobody cares and nobody knows. Well, newsflash, I care, and I want to do something about it proactively. I don't want to wait till they're depressed and then go, oh, here you go, come and sit down, let's have a talk. Because if you understand male athletes, that is the last thing they want to do, right? So let me put this all in perspective for everybody. Less than 7% of high school athletes will go on to play college sport. Okay. That's about one and then 1% will ever go pro. So when we talk about the mental health of male athletes, we're not just talking about the ones who make it to the big stage. We're talking about every young man who pours his identity into sport and then faces the moment when it's taken away from them, whether that's through injury, deselection, graduation, or just retirement. And guys, by the way, if you're looking for some fantastic advice on post-retirement ideas, you know, how what is life like after sport, please go back and listen to Case Monteneil. He is a former UCI soccer player who has transitioned successfully out of sport and into a new career and thriving. So hey, good on you, Case. You're amazing. So let's try to understand a little bit more than hey, guys are just different from girls. Why do male athletes stay silent? So the question becomes: if the numbers are this alarming, why aren't more athletes getting help? All right, so the research, unfortunately, is painfully clear on this. In 2023, 2023, a systematic review of meta-analysis found that only around 22% of athletes seek formal mental health support. That's roughly one in five. Among male athletes, okay, and that's just in the male athlete pop, that's just male population. In the male athletes, the rate is even lower. In an NCA student athlete well-being study, they found that about two in five female students, 44%, reported feeling overwhelmed constantly or almost every, you know, practically almost every day, probably from the schedule, probably from just juggling life as a college student plus college athlete. For the male athlete, one in five, that's 17%, that that's what their study found, only one in five said they were struggling. Now, does that mean the men are not struggling less? Is that why we created Title IX because it were the female spoke up about it? Or does it mean they're just not reporting it? I think it's the latter. And I tell you what I believe, okay, my personal inverted commas, after 24 years of working with alongside male athletes, they're not reporting it. And here's why. The research identifies several key barriers, and they all keep coming back to one thing: the culture. And Jasper talked about what culture was like at water polo, and it was so awesome to listen to that. That was last week's episode, Jasper Dale, water polo player. He broke down the water polo culture that he has been part of for since he was three. He's now about to graduate from college. And he helped us understand, hey, this is what it's about. This is what it's like. So if that is the culture for his sport, what is the culture like for your sport? Have you ever stepped back and identified what are contributing factors? Well, it's also not just the culture. We have stigma. It doesn't matter how many movie stars come on or Matthew McConaughey comes on and says, you know, you know, I need, you know, I've gone and got help. It doesn't matter. One study found that over 40% of the barriers athletes listed were related to stigma and embarrassment. Male athletes in particular seek, sorry, see seeking help as a threat to their identity. A 2025 study of 426 male collegiate athletes found that conforming to masculine norms explained over 50% of the variants in their willingness to seek help. The more a young man conformed to traditional ideas of toughness, emotional control, control, self-reliance, the less likely he was to reach out. And, you know, I saw that. I witnessed that. I was part of that. I saw my teammates, but I also saw them behind closed doors because I had that privilege. They were my training partners, they were my roommates, they were my travel mates. That's what happens when you're an elite female, is that you don't train with other females, you train with men who push you harder because it's very hard to find females at the same level when you you on the world stage. So I had an insight into that. I saw what my own brothers experienced, and I witnessed this so-called toughness mentality that male athletes are supposed to have. That's right. They're expected. So boys are taught from a young age that emotions are a weakness. Boys don't cry. That messaging doesn't disappear, okay, when you turn the song off. When they put on their jersey, it gets amplified. In sport, mental toughness is celebrated. Okay, go hard. But there's a difference between being mentally tough and being emotionally suppressed. Let's let's let's show what that difference is. Okay, so I'll say that again. There's a difference between being mentally tough and being emotionally suppressed. What are we doing to create spaces to support male athletes emotionally in a way that makes male athletes feel comfortable? Okay, they're not like women. They're not going to sit around and talk. They're not going to sit around and cry. What are they going to want to do? How do you recreate that for athletes to give them the space to be supported emotionally? Research consistently shows that societal expectations of men as stoic, self-reliant, lead to significant emotional suppression, which makes anxiety and depression worse, not better. They also have, like, you know, one of the things that came up in that's contributing to these scary statistics is fear of deselection. Athletes worry that if they admit they're struggling, coaches lose trust in them. Okay, and they might lose their spot. Oh, you know, geez. Okay. Did you hear, did you hear, you know, Paul last week? Did you hear how he broke down geez? He's unreliable. Okay, in a system where roster spots, scholarships, and playing time are on the line, for male athletes, silence feels like survival. Okay? Guys, don't say anything. Just keep your head down, push through. They're soldiers. Okay, and that's the whole topic of today's conversation. Male athletes are silent soldiers because they're told to shut up and survive. Push through, get through it. And they do. They survive, they get through college sport, they get through pro sport, and then they crash. There's also what's called the low mental health literacy. Okay. And we're not putting male athletes down, okay? But they're what we're trying to say is that sometimes male athletes simply can't distinguish between normal sport-related fatigue and sadness and the symptoms of clinical depression or anxiety. They don't know what they're experiencing and they don't know when to ask for help. And here's a heartbreaker, okay? Female athletes, okay, I love every single one of the female athletes I work with, they seek help. They talk, they talk to each other, they process. The research supports this statement, okay? It shows us that women are more likely to disclose mental health issues and seek psychological support. Male athletes stay silent, push through until when? Until they break, until they have nothing left, until they quit the sport. Or worse. So, yes, yes, to my feedback last week. Okay. Yeah, it's not the world's greatest podcast, but it's real and it's honest. And yeah, okay, 100%. This is personal to me. I've spent my life doing this with sport and now, you know, moving into the field of research to hopefully leave something behind that other coaches, athletes can utilize. And 24 years of training solely with male athletes, I've seen this pattern play out over and over again. The silent soldier, the guy who shows up to every session, does the work, never complains. And then one day he's gone. He quits. Or he's injured and nobody checks in on him emotionally. Or you find out later that he was struggling with something nobody knew about. Sounds kind of scary. It actually reminds me of the NFL player that we lost last year. When I worked, okay, with Jasper's team and two other teams, the foundation of everything that I was building and some of the quirky exercises that we were doing, you know, some worked, some didn't. That's okay. That's what you do when you're a researcher and you're experimenting. And the guys all knew that. That's why I was there. But what we were trying to do was build emotional connection between male athletes. Not for the sake of feelings, not for the for the sake of performance, because I wanted them to feel great. Because when men feel safe enough to be honest about where they are at, mentally, emotionally, they perform better. They will run through walls for each other. The team performs better. Psychological safety and emotional connectedness with teams correlate directly with improved performance outcomes. Now, of those teams where I initiated this process, all three of those teams within a year won their conference. Okay, think of forming, storming, norming, performing. But the performing happened after I was gone. All right. Because the boys had each other. That's the magic. You just need a facilitator to start the process. Because we addressed the emotional infrastructure first and we built the foundation. And you know what? If you listened last week, Jasper backed me up on that. I hadn't spoken to Jasper for three years, by the way. So it's not like I was, hey buddy, can you come on here and say all these things for me? Blah, blah, blah. No, it's real, it's honest, and sometimes it's uncomfortable. Hey, and if you or any of those people coaches felt uncomfortable, hey, I'm sorry, but maybe you need to have a check yourself. Okay? Because it's so important. There's a deeper meaning to this than just our egos. So you don't get male athletes to open up and say, hey, little tomo, tell me how you feel. That doesn't work. Okay. It doesn't work. They don't want to do that. They're not listening. You create environments where connection happens naturally. You build activities into training that normalizes vulnerability. You show them that emotional awareness isn't a weakness, it's a competitive advantage and it's a strength. And this is just not my opinion. I know some people are thinking, yeah, Blinda, she thinks she knows it all, but she doesn't. It's just her personal opinion. No, it's not. The research supports exactly this. Studies show that role models who share their experiences reduce stigma. Team cultures that promote open communication change attitudes. When coaches and sport professionals create safe spaces, athletes are more willing to engage. Sport, in fact, offers an ideal setting in which we can challenge traditional masculine norms around mental health and promote this mental health positivity. That's the proactive piece. We don't want to wait until someone's in a crisis. We build the infrastructure before the crisis ever comes. All right. So how do we do all this? Okay. Coaches, I want to talk to you. All right, directly right now. And athletes, if you're listening to this, and if you like I've said before, if you think your coaches need to hear it, send it to them. Just say, hey, just you know, and they don't want to listen to all of it, just hey, speed through to the last part. She's talking to you, and I am. Coaches, we're on the front line. We see these young men more than their parents do in many cases. We set the tone for culture. And if the culture we create says shut up and compete, then we I'm saying myself, I've been a coach, we are part of the problem. So here's what I'm asking you to do. Okay. And here's what I'm asking sports administrators to do. First, educate yourself, understand what depression and anxiety looks like. In male athletes, because it doesn't always look like sadness. Okay. It can look like anger, withdrawal, increased risk taking, substance use, or a sudden drop in performance. Second, let's build emotional connection into your programs. Okay, but here's the uncomfortable part. Okay, get ready for it. You're not part of it. Sorry, coach, head coach, you're not part of it. It's just for the team. And you have to trust the facilitator to set the foundation and structure the activities. That can be tough. So you also need to trust the process. It can be structured activities that can bring athletes closer together. It can be team rituals that create a space for honesty. It can be as simple as facilitating the right questions, not by you, by the way, because there's a hierarchy thing, an authority thing. Let's remove authority. Do you think they're actually going to be honest when the head coach is in the room? Forget that. Okay, we want somebody to come in and independent. Third, normalize help seeking. Talk about mental performance coaching in the same way you talk about strength and conditioning. Get rid of the word sport psychology. Okay, it's scary. All right, psychology, weird. Okay, sometimes connected to medication. I'm not saying that that's my opinion. I'm saying that's how it can be perceived by others. If you want your athletes to start taking mental health seriously, you have to first. And fourth, hey, let's check in once the game is over or the race finishes. Retirement from sport, whether it's 18 or 35, it's one of the most vulnerable periods in a male athlete's life. And we know this again through research and through statistics, sadly, that 70% of former male collegiate basketball players, for example, reported a loss of personal and social identity after retirement. It's just one sport leading to depression. We have a responsibility that extends beyond the final whistle. There's so much to learn from our athletes. Just like learning from Jasper last week, just like learning from Case, learning from all the athletes that come on. Okay, learning from Maddie, the UCLA gymnast, a female athlete. Sewing Olav, who was who was kicked off season one. Incredible. Let's listen to our athletes. But I want to sort of reiterate this point. These young men are not machines. They are not commodities. They are human beings who happen to be extraordinary at what they do physically. It's really enjoyable to watch. I get it. I love watching college football. I love watching college sport, period. But if we don't take care of what's going on inside, the outside will eventually break. Silent soldiers, okay, that's what I called them. Well, that's what they are. They're expected to perform, conform, and adapt at all costs. But guys, coaches, silence isn't a strength, it's a warning sign. Okay, if you see an athlete withdraw, go silent, pay attention. If you're a coach listening to this, start the conversation. If you're an athlete listening to this, you are not weak for struggling. You're human. Okay, and that's a great sign that you're human because you can have empathy and compassion for others. One of my favorite psychologists, Alfred Adler, said, What is life other than just to contribute and to support others? So if even if you're if you're an athlete right now and it's not you who are struggling, pay attention to your teammate. Are they okay? And if you're someone who's listening who loves an athlete, check in. Okay, don't wait. It has to change, okay? And it starts with us. Well, okay, I know that's kind of heavy, but thank you for listening. This has been the 10th episode of season two. Wow, it's hard to believe. I am going to take a break from the Plan B podcast as much as I love doing it, and as much as much as I love talking to athletes, making some other people feel uncomfortable. But it's a it's a passion. Giving athletes a platform to share their experiences, to come forward, to support and inspire others. That's what we want to do. And as coaches, that's what I want you to do, you to do for each other as well. And I'm hoping in a very small way I'm doing that for you. Okay. So part of the Plan B podcast is that we it's 100% nonprofit. And I wanted to create something also that could be an initiative to support athletes that need mental performance coaching that can't afford it. Okay. You can contribute. And that's available on our Buzz Sprout website if you go there. As always, it's 100% nonprofit. So, okay, until next time. Until next season, take care of your people. I'm Coach V. This is the Plan B podcast. It's been awesome.