My Pen-pal Katlyn Taylor and I have been in communication with each other through email, texting, and social media such as Instagram. We have an aligned interest for wanting to help raise awareness towards mental health struggles amongst athletes. Since her job description of being manager of the sports facility operations grants her special privileges and access to the UNC campus stadium, she is able to use her connections to use the arena for campaigns spreading awareness to the athlete\u2019s mental health. When I brought that idea up, she instantly loved it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We decided to create a website to advertise the importance of mental health across athletes, which is where I will utilize my knowledge and experience from my Communications major. This is just a branch of our idea, because once the website is up and running then we will take it to social media to advertise it frequently. We will both come up with different slogans and advertisements to use. Once it has been popularly established, we will host campaign events in the arena so that the audience can have a real connection to the athletes setting. Each meeting will have different signs for visual effect, enjoyable games to play, along with free snacks and water upon welcoming. It is almost like a perfect partnership with this quest. I am more familiar with social media content than she is, which is perfectly fine because I feel like that is one of my most important contributions to our quest. She hosts events all the time at her venue, so I am learning from her how to do that when we host the campaign meetings together, while she allows the campaigns to take place at her venue as long as it is available. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We plan on hosting these campaign meetings 4 times a year (every 3 months). This will hopefully bring further awareness to the mental struggles that athletes endure frequently. Our hopes are to raise enough awareness for mental health professionals, such as psychologists and councilors, to want to assist us with doing free assessments and counseling to athletes the days of our campaign events. Not all grand gestures start big, and I hope that this quest can evolve even more overtime with the connections that we come across while hosting these meetings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We already determined that the songs being played in the background during the games played on campus are highly competitive, so we already made the plan to use more uplifting songs to hype up the crowd and team, rather than just dominating the opponent. Sports are supposed to be fun with the use of sportsmanship, and it is hard to have fun if the players mental state is not 100 percent. There wasn\u2019t any kind of confidential information needed for us to work together on this plan, and she is aware of this assignment for my class. It also doesn\u2019t take up much of her time to coordinate back and forth with me. We are both interested in athletes receiving the mental health care that they need. She understands the pressure because she used to be an athlete too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My Pen-pal Katlyn Taylor and I have been in communication with each other through email, texting, and social media such as Instagram. We have an aligned interest for wanting to help raise awareness towards mental health struggles amongst athletes. Since her job description of being manager of the sports facility operations grants her special privileges… <\/p>\n