We’re Overlooking One of Our Most Powerful Mental Health Resources: Coaches

SWB coach-mentor (right) shares words of encouragement to a particpant at SWB Bay Area.

By Dr. Swap Mushiana, SWB Director of Behavioral Health & Wellness

As the world prepares for another era-defining World Cup, millions of young people will watch soccer’s biggest stars and dream about what’s possible. 

But long before packed stadiums and international broadcasts flood the U.S., something equally important is already happening on neighborhood fields and community pitches across the globe. 

On these fields we see coaches doing the quiet but powerful mental health work. They’re checking in after practice, building trust among teammates and helping young people find places where they belong. 

These moments don’t make headlines. They won’t be a part of post-game analyses or sideline reports. In fact, if you’re not watching closely, you may miss them altogether. But they may be some of the most important interventions happening in youth sports today. 

For too long, we’ve treated mental health support as something that only happens inside clinics or therapy offices. Those spaces matter, but we can’t expect them to reach every young person who needs help. 

SWB alumni coach-mentors celebrate alongside SWB participants at their high school graduation.

Our kids face some of life’s biggest challenges: isolation, displacement, discrimination, financial uncertainty, family separation, and trauma. Many of them will never walk into a therapy office because they don’t have access. For those who do have access, those offices don’t always feel safe enough to enter. 

But they will show up to soccer practice. 

Sport is a language, and it’s one that more than 27 million kids in the U.S. speak. 

In my work with Soccer Without Borders, I get to watch coaches run passing drills and teach how to dribble. I also watch them help athletes navigate grief, stress and identity. I watch them coach a game, then attend graduation, then help a family find food and housing.  

Most coaches don’t just care about the X’s and O’s of the game, they care about the athletes as people. In many cases, these coaches become one of the few consistent adults in a young person’s life who truly sees them. 

SWB coach-mentor (left) provides support to a participant in a Colorado classroom.

That work isn’t separate from mental health. It is mental health. So why do we keep treating it as if it isn’t?  The U.S. is short on therapists, short on culturally responsive providers, and short on access points in the very neighborhoods that need them most. We will not therapy-office our way out of a youth mental health crisis. We must expand who counts as a mental health helper, and equip the trusted adults already in young people’s lives, like coaches, to do the early, relational work that prevents crisis and builds resilience.

That is what “Meet Me on the Pitch” is built to do. It’s a five-year clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health, that equips coaches working with newcomer youth to lead culturally rooted mental health conversations, without turning practice into therapy or coaches into clinicians. The intervention is what responsive coaches have always done, made visible, named and supported.

Every player understands that scoring a goal requires assists, teammates and navigating defenders. Life works the same way. 

Sometimes the defender is anxiety. Sometimes it’s housing instability or discrimination. Sometimes the assist is asking a coach for advice. Sometimes the teammate is the friend who reminds you that you don’t have to navigate life alone. These aren’t soft metaphors. They are the body’s language for processing setbacks, growth and connection, long before kids have the clinical words for any of it.

SWB coach-mentor stands on the sidelines with a participant at SWB Maryland.

And this is the deeper reason sport works. Soccer is itself a structure. There is the structure of being known: a coach who shows up every Tuesday and Thursday, a team that returns, a season with a beginning and an end. For kids whose lives are structurally unstable, that predictability is itself an intervention.

Then there is the structure of the game. Positions, shapes, pressure, transitions, open space.

Soccer is social structure rendered in motion. When a coach teaches a young person to read

the field, find where the pressure coming from, who has their back, what shape are they in, they are teaching the same cognitive moves a young person needs to read the systems pressing on their life off the field.

“Meet Me on the Pitch” is intentionally located where that pressure is most acute. The

intervention isn’t new wisdom added to newcomer youths’ lives. It is the wisdom they already

carry on the pitch, surfaced by coaches so they can use it off the pitch too.

As we end another Mental Health Awareness Month, the question is not whether coaches should be part of our mental health response. They already are. The question is whether the rest of us (funders, policymakers, health systems, schools) are willing to build the training, support, and infrastructure that turns what they’re doing into a workforce we can scale.

Soccer has always spoken this language. The question is whether we are finally ready to listen.

>> Help support youth mental health with a gift to Soccer Without Borders