Original Story from ESPN.com

By Ashley Scoby | Special to ESPN.com

Kally Fayhee was 6 when the water became her safe place.

After her family moved to its suburban Chicago home, Fayhee’s parents could hardly keep her out of the pool at the neighborhood YMCA. It was, after all, a great place for the new kid in town to meet new friends. As she grew older, Fayhee found the water had the opposite effect, the outside world melting away when she slid into the pool. She pushed herself physically, but it was the kind of exhaustion that exhilarated her.

It wasn’t long before Fayhee discovered that the water, beyond being a haven, could morph into a stage. Folks applauded her performances. Once she moved onto high school and club programs, big-name colleges came calling.

Then, as with other things that consume a life the way swimming consumed Fayhee’s, the sport started to sour. In 2008, when she was still in high school, Fayhee came one-tenth of one second away from the Olympic trials — a dream washed away in less time than it took to blink.

Vowing to try harder, Fayhee moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to start her college swimming career at the University of Michigan. But the pressure she put on herself, the anxiety of always trying to be better than a broken dream, mounted. With that “.1” monopolizing her mind, and with the next chance at Olympic trials around the corner in 2012, Fayhee struggled with race anxiety. She needed an edge, she thought.

So she turned to food restriction.

“I needed to lose weight to be faster in the water,” she said, explaining the reasoning that seemed logical to her at the time. “I started paying attention to what I was putting in my body, which isn’t a bad thing until you become obsessive.”

But the obsession began. Fayhee started purging — a word that still makes her skittish to this day. If she ate something she deemed unworthy, she would “take care of it.” She couldn’t sleep without the constant worry, couldn’t eat without the constant guilt.

“It just kind of snowballed,” she said. “I was using it to control anxiety, when at the end of the day, it was controlling me.”

Read the entire story on ESPN.com.

Original story from the Michigan Daily:

Athletes Connected: Fighting the hidden battles

By Kelly Hall | Michigan Daily Sports Editor

Garrick Roemer was scared. The 17-year-old wasn’t comfortable in the back of the ambulance. He didn’t want to be there, and on the surface, it didn’t look like he belonged there either.

His mom, Cathy Radovich, overheard him nervously asking the paramedics if his emergency trip to the hospital was going to follow him, if people were going to hear about it.

Outside that ambulance, Roemer seemed to be living out a reality he had strived for. As a 2012 graduate of Saline High School and lifelong Michigan fan, he grew up a hop, skip and a jump away from Ann Arbor as he ran to an All-State title in the 400-meter dash. He committed to Michigan’s track and field team as a preferred walk-on, rejecting a partial scholarship from Michigan State in order to don the maize and blue. There are pictures of Roemer dressed in Michigan apparel from the age of 2 onward, and a scholarship offer from his rival wasn’t going to sway him. He came to Ann Arbor to fulfill his dream.

But you can’t always tell what’s really going on from the outside looking in.

On that day, the future Michigan track athlete didn’t want to go to the hospital, didn’t want to talk about his problems — but Radovich knew he needed to. The spring of his senior year of high school was difficult for Roemer, so after consulting his therapist, Radovich called the paramedics, and Roemer reluctantly got in the ambulance.

He looked physically healthy, and he wasn’t sick in the traditional sense. But he had threatened to hurt himself in front of people at school, and that was enough cause for alarm.

When people suffer from a heart attack or a stroke, they don’t worry about seeking medical attention. But when people need an emergency psychiatric evaluation, they very rarely seek the help they need. Sitting in an ambulance with his life in danger, Roemer was wondering what other people would think.

For most athletes, the biggest battle takes place internally. And far too often, that struggle goes unheard.

A 2014 study conducted by Dr. Daniel Eisenberg and Ph.D. candidate Sarah Ketchen Lipson at the University showed that of a random sample of approximately 7,000 students at nine colleges, just 30 percent of those with depression or anxiety sought mental health services.

For student-athletes, the statistic was even lower. Just 10 percent of student-athletes with depression or anxiety used mental health services.

In May 2014, following his second year at Michigan, Roemer committed suicide. According to Radovich, a “perfect storm” of events had hit her son, including injury and an isolating redshirt sophomore year that prevented him from traveling with his teammates.

“I think stigma really was a part of what stopped him from getting the help he needed, and that’s kinda why I’m here (talking about it),” Radovich said. “Whether you’re an athlete or not, it hovers over you.”

Read the full story

Original story from the MLive.com:

Michigan interim AD Jim Hackett donates half his salary to ‘Athletes Connected’ program

By Nick Baumgardner

Jim Hackett’s biggest task during his time as Michigan’s interim athletic director was to fix the football program.

Last winter, many believe he did exactly that when he was able to convince Jim Harbaugh to return to Ann Arbor and coach the football team.

During his time in charge of the department, Hackett’s been working on a month-by-month basis designed by president Mark Schlissel. He was paid a salary $600,000 annually.

But Hackett insists his time in Ann Arbor hasn’t been about the money. In fact, he gave half of it back — or, more specifically, donated it to a cause he and his wife, Kathy, felt was important.

“I’m happy. Kathy and I gave back half our salary this year to the university,” Hackett said Wednesday night. “We gave it to the depression center, there’s a ‘Athletes Connected’ program.

“Kathy thought this was a really special thing for athletes. She was moved by that. It was her idea, and I thought ‘let’s do that.’ ”

Michigan’s “Athletes Connected” program is a wellness initiative that’s designed to support the mental health of student-athletes.

The program is designed to help student-athletes with a variety of issues related to their overall experience at Michigan.

Per The Michigan Daily, the program is a joint effort between Michigan’s athletic department, the School of Public Health and the university’s Depression Center. It was started with a $50,000 grant from the NCAA.

Hackett — who was officially appointed as Michigan’s interim athletic director on Oct. 30, 2014 — announced his plans to transition out of his role late last year. Since then, Hackett’s served on Michigan’s athletic director search committee — which is being led by Schlissel.

Hackett said Wednesday that the university doesn’t have a specific timetable when it comes to making a new hire, adding that Schlissel is more concerned on getting the right person for the job.

In the meantime, Hackett has continued his role as the day-to-day leader of Michigan’s athletic department.

He also said that he plans on staying on at the school for an extended period of time after the new AD is hired, as he wants to make himself available to the new hire to help the transition go as smoothly as possible.

From SwimSwam.com:

HEART OF A CHAMPION AWARD: EMILY BRUNEMANN, KALLY FAYHEE, AND ATHLETES CONNECTED, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

2015 began with a dark cloud over the sport, as a run of suicides by young swimmers weighed heavy on swimmers’ hearts across the nation. The list included the deaths of two very high profile high school swimmers, Jake Miller and Vance Sanders, along with several others whose losses were no less significant.

In parallel with these tragedies, the University of Michigan launched a program called Athletes Connected, believed to be the biggest initiative of its kind in addressing the specific mental health issues young athletes deal with on a daily basis.

Among the many people who worked, and continue to work, to make this program a reality are a pair of former swim team captains at the University of Michigan: Emily Brunemann and Kally Fayhee.

Read the entire article here.

University of Michigan student-athletes Beth Williams (Water Polo, ’15), Emily Browning (Water Polo, ’17), and Maddy Frost (Swimming, ’17) had a message and an idea. Amidst their demanding lives as student-athletes at an elite academic institution, they decided mental health was important enough to them to do something about it.

They recently unveiled their work, a video promoting mental health awareness and combating stigma: