“You see college athletes on TV performing amazing physical feats and are awestruck, but when you turn the TV off and they leave the gym, they go back to their rooms. They go back to their beds,” Steinfeldt said. “They do normal life tasks while sacrificing physically, emotionally, and mentally to perform. They hurt, they cry, they bleed, they laugh—they are humans, not just performing robots. And as odd as it seems to have to say that, the average fan underestimates the pressures and difficulties that athletes face to play the games that they love. And in the college stage, those pressures have magnified over the past few years.”
Through the podcast production, doctoral students in the sports psychology program will now have access to a national platform where they can talk about their research, demonstrate their clinical work, network with professionals in the field, and see real life application of their classroom content in the voices and faces of athletes they bring on the show. Future episodes include discussions around masculinity and mental health in college football players, managing an NFL lifestyle and working through adversity and injury to perform at the highest level, performance anxiety-related issues among athletes, and the ways that NIL and the Transfer Portal have transformed college football in a few short years - with many more topics upcoming. The topics are ones that anyone could glean something from, whether or not they’re involved in athletics.
“(The podcast) has something for everyone,” Steinfeldt said. “Athletes will hear about issues that are relevant to their daily lives. Coaches listen to get a better understanding about what their athletes are experiencing so they can best motivate and support them. Administrators listen so they can understand how to implement policies that will maximize athlete productivity while concurrently maximizing their well-being. Psychologists and other mental health professionals (can) hear about different interventions, perspectives, and happenings in the field. Parents are for sure listening as they struggle to find the best ways to support their athletes as they develop, advance, struggle, grow, and succeed. And sport fans will listen because this helps humanize and personalize the heroes they see on the TV and on the fields. It may help them give grace and take pause before jumping on social media to condemn an athlete for not being perfect on the court, when they realize that this athlete is someone's brother, someone's son, someone's friend who hurts, smiles, cries, and bleeds. So that being said, perhaps the better question is—who wouldn't listen?”
