A Letter To Ted Lasso

Dear Coach Ted Lasso,

I’ll warn you from the start that this isn’t your average piece of fan mail. I have written many iterations of this letter, and they’ve all been tossed and audibly crunched in the electric trash bin on my computer desktop. I guess I’m a lot like you in that I try to keep things light and peppy; I’m good at keeping things positive. But when I approach a topic that feels uncomfortable—like the one I will eventually spit out here—I want to push it away and keep chugging forward. This is how I was conditioned to navigate my life as a high-performing athlete; embrace the pain and grind through it. But this isn’t always healthy. 

You see, I was a competitive swimmer for many, many years and connected with this season’s storyline about mental health and sports more than your average viewer. I devoured the latest season and was thrilled by your big, sweeping statement in the finale when you tell the press we need to change the way we talk about mental health in athletics. It felt like the perfect endcap, but a few days later I was unsettled. Why is this big revelation about mental health and sports happening NOW? Why couldn’t it have happened ten years ago when I was struggling? Where were coaches like you when I was competing? Would my story have ended differently?

Let me rewind and briefly summarize my career in athletics for you: became a single-sport athlete at age eight—swimming and only swimming. Eventually trained with the team that produced Olympic greats like Michael Phelps. Qualified for big swim meets—Sectionals, Junior Nationals, Nationals, missed Olympic Trials by 3.86 seconds. Competed for a NCAA Division I school and received a generous athletic scholarship. Broke multiple school records at my university; name is still on the record board. 16 minutes and 32.80 seconds in the short course mile and 9 minutes and 56.55 seconds in the 1,000-yard freestyle. Retired after my senior year of college. End scene. 

Ted, I can sum up my swimming career in a paragraph, but the mental toll it took is something I can’t easily encapsulate. I started swimming because it was the one thing that eased my anxiety as a kid. Existing in and moving my body through water was the only thing in life that felt effortless. The pool was my sanctuary; the place that took my anxious stomach aches away and returned me to my parents, a different child. I got so wrapped up in it all as I got older—the competition, the performance, the expectations—that it became a monster. Unfortunately, my coaches weren’t always helpful. I had one that was banned from USA swimming for inappropriate sexual behavior towards an athlete. Another had anger problems that resulted in chairs being thrown across the pool deck and verbal abuse. Another consistently praised me for throwing up during practice and banned all sports drinks because they were high in calories. I don’t share these details to evoke pity; it’s just the way it was.

There is this phrase in the swimming community called “hitting a plateau.” It’s a point where you simply can’t improve your competition times no matter how hard you train. There is a physical block often accompanied by a mental block too; sort of like a golfer or a gymnast having the yips. I experienced several plateaus. If I picture my swimming career as a landscape, there would be areas with green, daisy-covered hills living beside dark caverns full of bats and stalactites. And then there would be the expansive plateaus; flat, dry desert land with no other life in sight. Existing in this area makes you want to crack yourself open, let the sun fry your internal yolk as an offering to those who might stumble through this land after you.

My coaches told me not to crack. Trust the process and keep going, they told me. As a teenager, I’d emerge from the plateau battered and eager to forget my scars while lying in the grassy fields as a champion. But it was different in college. I had a stellar freshman year in the pool, and yet I was battling anxiety and depression that made me feel rawer than ever before. By sophomore year I hit another plateau in the pool and a psychologist recommended I start taking antidepressants to treat my anxiety and depression. The medications helped tremendously, and the fog started to clear from my head, allowing me to see the world clearly. But as a side-effect of the medication, my muscles would cramp up in practice and competition to the point that I couldn’t keep swimming. At this point, I still listened to coaches more than the licensed health professional I visited once a week. I needed to keep my scholarship. I stopped taking the medication in hopes that my performance in the pool would improve.

This is where you come back in, Ted. Season two, episode five deals with your team captain Sam going through a plateau of his own. You and Roy take him to a neighborhood pickup game where he reconnects with his childhood passion for the sport. This helps him overcome the plateau. But what would have happened if Sam’s rut continued? What would you have done? Would you have told him to quit before the game was ruined for him forever? My rut continued for the last two years of college and I just kept crawling through the desert, slowly breaking. I grew to despise swimming. 

When I finished my senior season and retired, I did not anticipate feeling like a part of me died. I had thought I was ready to distance myself from the sport entirely, yet Swimmer was the label I’d always worn. Who was I without it? I had no other hobbies; there wasn’t another passion. I tried to find a job that would fill this void, but that backfired. I nearly worked myself to death for a laughable wage. Like you, I fled the country attempting to leave my issues in America. I accepted a short-term gig teaching swimming in Mumbai, India, thinking this would lead to some sort of great awakening. It didn’t.

I told myself I didn’t need therapy after college because I was no longer competing—there was nothing to worry about now; the pressure was off. Plus, I couldn’t afford it. But my mind was in a dark place. I was drowning, my days felt meaningless. I started having panic attacks that made me feel like I was navigating the world with drunk goggles. I told myself I could work through it; just keep pushing and toughen up the coaches in my mind told me.

But five years post-college, I finally cracked and asked for help. I found a psychologist and psychiatrist that I could visit during lunch breaks at work. I slowly started floating towards the surface for air, but every counseling session, swimming would find a way to follow me into the therapist’s office and dominate the conversation. Some weeks I’d feel like I was making progress, and the next I’d feel like I had taken ten steps backward. I was cooked. 

I have been piecing myself back together with the help of professionals and pills for several years. Now that I have some distance, I find myself wondering if things would have turned out differently if I’d had a figure like you around who acknowledged mental health and valued my emotional well-being over performance. What if someone like you had been there to tell me that it was okay to stop pushing forward? That it was possible to lay in a field of daisies without first traveling through an inferno? 

Ted, it’s taken me several years, but I’ve learned to enjoy swimming again. I swim laps in a lane by myself without looking at a pace clock. The pool is once again the place I escape to when I need to shut out the rest of the world and hide under water. Sometimes I’m in the pool when kids start arriving for their swim practice, and I love watching them laugh and playing on the pool deck like when I was a kid. Yet, I often look at the young girls and worry; I see my younger self and I think this is the real reason I’m writing you this letter.

My simple ask of you, Ted, is that you don’t let this mental health in sports storyline disappear as the show continues. Maybe my former coaches are watching. Or maybe new coaches are watching and will train their athletes with a different mindset. I want young competitive athletes to know they are valued beyond their performance. They don’t need to crack like you and me.

Sincerely,
Jessie W.

Jessie O’Dea Walker is a non-fiction writer currently based in Baltimore. She received her B.A. from the University of Richmond and is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore. Jessie is a swimmer, wife, cat mother, educator, and lover of anything that makes her belly laugh. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Fork Review, the Under Review, and Random Sample Review.