Matt Rhule, Dr. Brett Haskell Talk Sports Psychology and Mental Health Awareness

Welcome back into the Huskers Radio Network podcast. I'm Jessica Cootie. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and in terms of sports psychology and all of the intricacies that come along with that, very few places in the world of college athletics have the kind of resources and support like Nebraska. So we thought it would be great to have a conversation as we wrap up the month of May and Mental Health Awareness Month with Director of sports psychology, Dr. Brett Haskell and head football coach Matt Rule about the growth of the field of sports psychology, but also the importance of those resources that are provided to Husker student athletes and making sure that they are absolutely taken care of the best possible way in every single aspect.

Well, Coach Rule, Dr. Haskell, thanks so.

Much for being here. I know this is an important topic for both of you guys in terms of mental health for student athletes. And Dr. Fred, I want to start with you because we've heard you and we've heard your perspective when student athletes are sharing their different journeys and different perspectives, but we've never got your backstory. So how did you even want to get into sports psychology?

So, honestly, I wasn't a great high school student. I was an okay high school student, but the only class I took in high school that I actually enjoyed and was like, oh, I could study that more was advanced psychology. And so when I went to college, I thought you were supposed to declare a major, so I just declared psychology because I was like, well, that's the class I liked, so I'll do that. And I was a student athlete. I played volleyball in college. And so then they made us do research. The program that I was in did pretty extensive research programming for undergraduates, which was really cool. And they kind of pushed me into doing more and more research. And I had access to student athletes because I was a student athlete. So I started doing research on aspects of student athletes experiences related to their psychological wellness and high performance and things of that nature. And I really fell in love with it, and it was really interesting to me. Unfortunately, at that time, there really wasn't a field in sports psychology, so it wasn't like a path that I saw. I thought, like, oh, I'll go into clinical psychology or something of that nature. But when I got to the end of my career, I just was really, like, I was really passionate about what I was studying from the research side. So I was like, maybe I could actually make this into something. And so I found. I Googled sports psychology programs and I found like, four or five, and I applied to those four or five programs. And at the time I didn't really understand the difference between performance psych and mental skills training and clinical counseling. And so. But then I got into several of those programs and I didn't know where to go.

So.

So I started reaching out to people who were doing sports psychology. And the woman who was at the Olympic training Center, actually, who's now, she works for the Australian Institute of Sport. She got my email and said, hey, do you want to jump on a phone call? Which was incredible because she was at the top of the field at the time and I was just a lowly undergraduate. And she, and I jumped on a call and she was like, well, you need to get training in mental skills training and performance psych and then you need to go get a clinical, clinical mental health degree if you really want to work in applied work. So that was kind of the route I took and took her advice and moved to North Carolina and studied out there and kind of the rest is history. And the field really exploded. So it was fortunate for me that the field exploded around the time I happened to be studying it. Yeah.

And how have you seen as a coach that change too, the narrative, the conversations about mental health and sports psychology just since you were a player and throughout your coaching career?

Yeah, I don't remember really hearing the term, you know, mental health or, you know, maybe some things about performance, mindset, sports psychology, but not much when I was a player. And I think it's been a change for the good. I think, you know, when I, when we were at temple, you know, we utilized the resources on campus, you know, student resources on campus. When I got to Baylor, my time there, they hired the first, you know, full time psychologists to help the student athletes. You know, now you come here, we have the robust program led by Dr. Haskell. So I think it's, as Dr. Haskell said, it's a, it's a field that's, you know, exploding. And I think, you know, from, from two perspectives. A, you know, mental health is something that's affecting a lot of people and at the same time, sports performance, like, you know, everyone's looking for an edge and the way you think, the way you, way you prepare yourself mentally, I think is as important as anything else. So it seems to be a unique time and we're well positioned with Dr. Haskell here.

A lot of pressures that come with being a student athlete, a football player. So how important have you seen that become too, with just managing everything that kind of comes along with it and the way that just the world overall has changed.

Yeah, I think when I played, you know, if, if the starting receiver dropped a pass, you know, he's kind of nervous like tomorrow, like what's going to happen in the, in the meetings on Monday now it's like they're probably thinking about when I get to my phone, like, am I going to be a meme? Like, you know, am I going to, what's my, what's my grade going to be online? I just think with all the great things that come with social media and the instant access with all the information comes a lot of, you know, negative opinions and negative information. And so our young people, them being able to process that, deal with that, prepare for that, offload some of that, I think, you know, they need help in doing that.

How have you seen that change?

I mean, I think that that is such a unique challenge and I think the best programs that are competing at the highest levels are being very intentional and deliberate about how they educate and train their players to cope with that culture of surveillance. Right. Because people are under a different microscope than they, than they were 20 years ago, than you know, either of us were when we were college athlet. And you can ignore newspapers, right? Like you cannot go pick up the newspaper. There's no way to interact with the people in your life without picking up your phone. And so it's really, really hard for our athletes to avoid that constant feedback from strangers. Right. I tell, I talk to my athletes a lot about like, who's your audience? And like, let's be really deliberate about what you want, who you want your audience to be. Not that we don't want to please the fans, right. But like you have to in your mind, kind of get really clear about who you're letting evaluate your worth and value. And so it's a lot to manage and they have to work really hard at it. And great athletes are working really hard at it.

Coach brought up a point about, you know, even just the sports performance part of it. I mean some people might think, oh, I'm going to go talk to you and sit down with you and just talk about my feelings. But it's not just a one stop shop. We've had student athletes share their journeys of eating disorders, of depression, of trauma, of anxiety. I mean there's a lot of different types of mental health that, that you guys work with and deal with.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that they're young people and I think the, right now the, the numbers on a college campus are like one in Four people will deal with a diagnosable mental illness. We're dealing with the whole scope of brain health and wellness, which is all the way from mental illness to. To optimal performance of the brain.

Right.

And so when you're dealing with that whole scope, a quarter might deal with mental illness, and then you're gonna have half of that population that's really just trying to deal with the normal developmental things at this age, and then being a high performer, and then you've got another quarter that are really just trying to figure out how to brain hack and optimize their decision making, their reaction times, their ability to be in flow when they're on a field. So there's a lot.

When you got here and realized the resources here, because we've talked about that a lot here, not a lot of college programs have the staff that you guys have here with. In terms of sports psychology, how important was that for you to find out that that was a resource here?

Yeah, I actually shared a note the other day with Dr. Haskell, like, that I had written before I took this job, and it was like some of my non negotiables. And one was to have someone like her, someone embedded in the program, not just for the student athletes, but for us as well. You know, I sit down with Dr. Haskell once a week, and I think the term optimal brain health is really important. Like, I have a lot of things coming at me and having a chance to sit there and talk to her and have her, you know, articulate back to me what I'm saying. And really she tells me what I should be saying because she can tell. She can tell what's supposed to be coming out, but it optimizes me. And I think, I love when she uses the term brain health. Right. Because we always think of this purely as illness. Right. But it's like there's a whole spectrum here. There's everything from, you know, illness to, like wellness to optimal. And I want to be optimal. And I'm not always that way. Sometimes I am stressed, sometimes I am anxious, sometimes I am nervous. But for me, it was paramount. It was, it was first and foremost. You know, when you've coached as many kids as I have over the years, you recognize the pressures and the anxiety and the stress and the things that are out there. But also when you go through the draft process and you recognize that, like I told our team one time, everyone turns on the combine because they want to see how fast you run the 40. But I can promise you, in those meeting rooms, they're talking about the way you think, your mindset, how you're. How you're going to handle things. And so having someone here that's working on that, their brain health, just like Corey Campbell's working on their physical health, I think it was a game changer for me in terms of where I wanted to be.

We talked to Garrett Nelson last year. He's kind of one of the stories that I found really intriguing about how he just was like, c ball, get ball, and he was utilizing, using too much energy, and he learned how to manage that, and it helped him become a better football player. Have you seen instances of that throughout your career where you've realized that, okay, maybe even just tapping into talking about that sports performance part of it has helped an athlete excel?

Oh, all the time. You know, I mean, I think there's many skills that Dr. Haskell and her staff will teach guys, whether it's, you know, she'll talk about it better than me, but imagery, visualization, mindfulness, I think sometimes it's just, you know, being neutral. You know, sometimes young people, they think of things as, like, good and bad. Like, I played well. I didn't play well. No, you played. You know, some things are good, some things were bad. And just kind of having the opportunity to, like, remove the emotion and step back and just see things for what they are. I think sometimes you need it. Most times you need a third party to train you in how to do that and help reinforce that. And so she does that for me. I'm sure she's done that for many other guys. And, you know, getting our guys to sleep is hard. So getting them to getting. Getting me to sleep is hard. So getting, you know, even, you know, hey, here's. Here's a sleep meditation. Here's some things that you can do. I just think that brain health manifests itself in a lot of different ways.

You're shaking your head pretty adamantly over here.

Oh, yeah. Sleep is like. If there were, I always tell the athletes, if there was one thing I could do, prescribe to every student athlete that would take Nebraska athletic performance through the roof, it would be like high quality sleep. It is the foundation for all things physical health and all things mental health. It is where our brain recharges and restores. Kind of like plugging your phone in at night. If you don't charge your phone, then it's not going to work very well the next day. Sleep is the same thing for your brain, and your brain is what's controlling all of those other physiological processes. That allow someone to get strong and get fast and, and have good reaction times and things of that nature.

I know you guys have a lot of coaches on campus that you guys work really well with, but how important has it been to have coach Roll and his staff be very accepting of the work that you guys do?

Honestly, I think the exciting piece for me is they're not just accepting. I think we've had a lot of accepting coaches. He's already done a lot of the work, so, you know, he's an advanced level student, so to speak. And so I think that's what's been really cool, is that we don't have to do all of this educating and trying to earn the buy in and stuff, which is a lot of that can be labor intensive and that can take years to earn the buy in and earn the credibility. And it's waiting for those, you know, success stories like a Garrett Nelson to help with credibility and understand, helping a staff understand why it's important to invest here and why it's important to teach your athletes about training this aspect of sport. And, and they've already been doing that for a long time. And they came in and they were like, we've done this and we've done this and this is how we like to do it. And I'm like, that's awesome. And it nicely aligned with a lot of the ways that I tend to approach things already. So that's helpful when it's a good fit like that.

I know you've worked with a lot of your staff for a long time, but is that conversations that you have with them of, hey, this is an important part of what we're gonna do here?

Well, I think because we've tried to over the years embed this within the program. Going outside and hiring private companies before we had the resources and then having an embedded person at our last stop. A lot of the guys have coached with me and worked with me before. They've had this and they've seen this. And then I think I have 12, 13 former players, you know, on staff, so they're the ones, you know, I try to always model it. I talk a lot about the times that I try to utilize Dr. Haskell's expertise and have it help me. But it's our players, it's Austin Larkin who played for me in Carolina, getting up there and talking about his, his routine as an NFL player and how this can help you. It's that level of buy in, I think that helps. And so, you know, a lot of us I think when we become parents, we start to see the. We start to see the ups and downs that our kids go through, and we start to see the resources that we would like for them to have. Shouldn't we do the same thing for the young people that we coach? And so normalizing it, and then eventually you want to get to a point where it's almost like an expectation of, like, why would you not want to have your brain firing on all cylinders on test day, on game day, on every day? And that makes so much sense that, you know, the destigmatization phase should be well over within our society.

It's crazy you brought up about, you know, your process through it, because I was going to ask you that for a lot of people that work so much. And did you ever have to come to a point where you realize, hey, I got to take care of my mental health, or was it something that evolved for you?

Oh, no, I have to be reminded. That's why, I mean, I set a weekly appointment with DOC because left. Left to my own devices, I'll say I'm good. And, you know, I always tell our players the things, the same things I tell our players, like, why are there not a lot of great schools? Why are there not a great organizations? Because there's a lot of good ones. And sometimes when we get to good, we're just happy with being good. And even when we talk about mental health, we always talk about getting out of kind of crisis mode, but there's so much more to it, you know, and when a guy breaks his leg, we don't just say, hey, let's get it healed. We want him running fast again. So I think for me, left to my own devices, I'll just burn out and work hard and work hard and taking some time to have that time with Dr. Haskell. But more importantly, her, then. I mean, she's elite. She checks up. She asked the student athletes, she asked the coaches, she asked all of us, like, how are you doing in this? And I think that not just accountability, but that care makes you remember it's okay to care about myself. And the best thing I can do as a coach is make sure that I'm firing on all cylinders and I'm optimizing what I have. And so I'm still working on sleep. I don't know if that's. But I'm doing better in a lot of other areas.

I think your Twitter feed can. People can attest to that. Appear that you sleep much. You check that time code and be like, hey coach, you need to go to bed earlier.

Yeah, make him show me his whoop data.

But for him to share that and his, his perspective of it, just like so many of the student athletes have, I mean, how, how important is that?

Well, I think that for. It's funny because I, I think we've actually destigmatized help seeking around brain health and wellness and high performance mindsets here at Nebraska a lot. But I've seen athletes who are juniors who've maybe been reluctant would be the best way to put it. And him sharing how much of a priority he makes it for himself has really opened the door for them. And if not him, then somebody like Austin talking about it, who's been where they want to be and has already done it and there. And they can see a pathway to success that's clearer and gives them some, some mile markers, so to speak, of how to get there. And I think there we've, we've seen a decrease in even those kind of reluctant folks in saying, oh, maybe I don't have to have something wrong to come in and get ahead of this and be very proactive about optimization.

And I talked about earlier, but can you speak to maybe the staff and the resources that Nebraska has maybe compared in regards to the rest of the country?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that we're probably staffing wise from a ratio of student athletes to providers, which is the best way to think about it. Because athletic departments vary so much in the number of student athletes they have, we're probably in the top three in terms of the ratio of providers to student athletes. The unique thing about all of our providers is that most, most of them are dual trained in both performance psych and clinical mental health. So they can address folks across that whole continuum of care, no matter where they're at on that continuum. And people will move up and down. That's the other thing about health and wellness. Right. Like if you think about physical health, sometimes our blood pressure's really good, sometimes our weight's in a really good place, sometimes our resting heart rate's in a really good place and sometimes we're not taking great care of ourselves and those things kind of sink a little bit and we gotta pick it back up. And mental health works the same way, brain health works the same way. And our folks can kind of meet people where they're at in that process and continue to nudge them towards optimal elite functioning. We have next year we'll have eight bodies. Some of those will be trainees. We're trying to get a training program off the ground because one thing we've noticed is that there are not qualified people to meet the needs that now exist in elite sport. And places are sitting with positions open for a really long time. And we feel a lot of responsibility that we've got a great program here. We need to help train that next generation.

So last thing I got, just when you're bringing in news to, now that you're talking to parents, how important is it for you to be able to say, hey, we're going to take care of you? Not just academically, not just, you know, all of that, but, but everything, all phases of when you come to be a student athlete, we want to provide those resources for you.

It's everything. You know, it's like, hey, if you come here, your life will be better. I mean, that's our goal. Our goal is that you leave, leave here saying, you know, my life's better for having been here. And, you know, I love, you know, just to go back on something that Dr. Haskell said, like, you know, we're in the top three yet we're starting this training, or she's starting this training program because we, we don't want to be complacent. Right? And whatever the need is now is going to continue to grow in our society. It's going to continue to grow. And so being proactive, and I think that's one of the things we've tried to do in football is it's not okay to be one of the best. We want to be the, the best, and she wants to be the best. But I want parents to know that if they send their kids here, their kids are going to be taken care of in all aspects of their life. Because your mental health, your brain health, it doesn't just affect your performance, it affects your academics, it affects your life, it affects your relationships. And so knowing that there's people both in the football office who care, there's people down her office that care. There's people in the academic office that care, not that are doing their job, but that care, I think that's a big deal.

What else? Anything I missed?

That's a pretty good summary. I like that. I like the care piece because I think that it's, you know, it's an investment in our future as a country, as a society. Right? Like, if we have healthy people who can manage and be resilient and gritty and pick themselves back up and raise another generation with that kind of mental flexibility and reserve, I think we're going to be healthier across the board. So I love that idea of just having a community of people who really care about them is going to help us train that next generation.

But it's cool what you said, like, gritty. Because, you know, people so often, they think of all this as, like, you know, just weak. Like, hey, go in and tell Dr. Haskell your problems. Like, she's tough. She's tough. Like, I say tough because she helps you do do the work, but you got to do the work. Like, she can talk to me, hey, Matt, that. Think of this way. Think this work this way. But I've got to go do the. The things that she tells me to go do, and I got to take the time to go do it. So just like Corey's making them work in the weight room, though, she's helping us all work on our. On our brain health and being optimized. And so it's not something soft. In fact, it's something that's really, really tough and gritty. And I love. I think that's cool.

Our job is to teach people how to do hard things, but there's a lot of skills that are critical that you have to have a toolbox to go do hard things. Right? You can't just put people in hard situations and expect success or expect them to respond the way you want them to. You have to give them skills. That's one of the things. When I've observed you coaching, you do some. I think I've told you this before, but you do so much teaching while you're out there, and you highlight when someone needs a skill and how to use that skill, and you, you know, you push pause and you talk directly to a player so everyone else can hear, because then you're teaching them all. You're modeling for all of them. That's a moment where you can use a skill to get through this hard thing.

And that's why Jessica, the program works so well, because it's integrated, because she's at practice, she's at the team meeting. Like, look, a lot of places have the numbers of people, but they're not integrated, right? Like, she's out there and she's seeing me coach and teach, and then can then give me feedback on how to do it better, both what's working and what's not. And then she can hear that. And if she's talking to a player, maybe she. Maybe she can sit there and say, well, I think this is what coach probably means. So I think the integration of everything that we're doing is the holistic approach. That's why I can tell parents you should send your kids here, because college football is turning into, like. It's turning into, like, you know, turning into some bad things in some places. And here, really a beautiful thing I think is happening because it's holistic, it's caring, and she's a big part of it.

Yeah.

I was going to say, I love to like you. You're on the sideline for the basketball, and you are as fired up as anybody else sitting on that bench. Your staff is the same way. They go to games. They're there and they care and they care about how the athletes are performing. It's not just, hey, we're going to come and sit in your office, and then we're not going to see you. Like, you guys are on the front lines and you are at these competitions, too.

Yeah, we're real people. And I think that when they get to know us as real people, I think that deepens the work and the learning that can happen. So. Yeah.

Well, what a great conversation. Appreciate you guys both spending some time and giving us your perspective. And I know you always provide us the resources, so we will put all of that in the description box if you or anyone needs help or want more information on any of that. Dr. Brad always gives us some great resources, so thank you so much for listening.