Spring 2016 | Issue Two
discussed besides a few comments here and there. The lack of education was the big thing. Even if we wanted to eat right, most people didn’t know how. “I think we need to do a much better job at educating student athletes on how to eat healthy,” Dudley says. “I think a lot of weight issues come from being underfed. They are not getting enough fuel during the season and their body is holding on. In the off season, people eat more but their body also holds onto it because they know next season is coming up and your body instinctively knows you’re not going to get enough food.” The lack of recognition could be a result of the "more is better" culture. The former volleyball player Olivia had a hard time figuring out what ‘excessive’ really meant. “To be honest, I don’t even think I know what excessive working out really means. Is there such thing if we are all doing it? Like, what makes a workout just a workout, when does it become excessive? I legitimately don’t know. It’s just [a part of] that unspoken culture.” Natalie says judging the athletic department's recognition of the problem is not black or white. “This is where I think it gets confusing. You know girls on the team think it’s an issue, but then you have your teammates sitting there wondering if our coaches realize what’s happening or our trainers realize what’s happening. You don’t want to be the person who is making someone else’s business your business. You don’t want to be that nosey person so you kind of sit there and hope that someone else will notice. There are all of these people around but no one talks about it, so you don’t know if people who are in charge of her health are realizing that it’s a problem.”
bers—thought the most obvious solution to this problem is education. Hanses, the former volleyball player and dietetics major, suggests having a registered dietician on staff to provide support and education would be a game changer. “I think just having registered dieticians or people with degrees, like Jason Dudley, talking to the girls about food intake and excess working out" would make a difference, she says, adding that "coaches not being so hard on players" would also help. "I think the constant pressure to be perfect can stem into other areas of athletes' lives, I think that is under recognized as well.” Kari Johnson, the head athletic trainer at CWU, started, along with fellow staff members, Peer Athlete Wellness Supporters (PAWS) because they believed student athletes needed more resources to go to when it came to health and wellness issues. “The purpose of PAWS—we called it PAWS to correlate to the Wildcats—the peer mentor program, is just to provide student athletes with peers who can hopefully be there and guide them to the resources that they need,” Johnson says.
“I think the constant
pressure to be perfect can stem into other areas of
athletes’ lives, I think that is
PAWS will be made up of student athlete mentors who will be there to provide support for fellow athletes in regards to guiding them in the right direction in order to get the help they need. The athletes who form part of PAWS will be going through training to get educated on the various wellness programs at CWU and also about mental health and how to handle issues like depression and anxiety.
under recognized as well.”
SOLUTIONS: THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION
When asked what needs to be done about this ongoing problem, the majority of people interviewed— whether they were athletes or athletics staff mem-
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Johnson admits PAWS is "definitely not enough" to solve the issue of disordered eating in college athletics, but it is a start. "I think this is just a small piece of it. I think education is a good thing; we are going to have a grad assistant nutritionist with us next year for athletics, which we never had and I think that’s a big step." She says the health center is also hoping to develop an eating disorder program.