DOCIAsport supports the Mental Health Foundation’s Mental Health Awareness Week – ‘Community’

The Mental Health Foundation established Mental Health Awareness Week in 2001 to help reduce stigma, raise awareness and promote better mental health for everyone. Each year has a theme and for 2025 that theme is ‘Community.’

This has made me look at sport and physical activity – communities within the sector and the role it can have in creating communities. Here are a couple of examples that I have or am involved in.

In the sector

High performance sport can be a lonely place for the athletes. Even the phrase ‘high performance’ can create its own pressures and play on the mind creating ‘imposter syndrome’ amongst those on a Talent Pathway or at the top of their game. The thought of ‘Am I good enough?’ is never far away when the focus is on ‘high performance’ and there’s competition for places. So an athlete can be in a community (team or squad) and yet not feel fully a part of it. It can also be a particularly challenging time when an athlete is injured or ‘de-selected’ from their ‘community’ – especially when either means the end of a sporting career. Then the athlete can be both alone and lonely. There’s a difference. Being alone is more of a physical concept but being lonely is more about emotional isolation. That is where there’s a need for the individual to feel part of a community to help their mental health and wellbeing because many feel a loss of identity and/or purpose and need people around them who understand and care.   

SwitchThePlay Foundation is a charity dedicated to helping UK athletes transition from performance sport and has created a peer group of athletes the ‘SwitchedOn’ community of athletes from across sports in the UK who are in similar circumstances. Like in most communities there are ‘elders,’ in this case a cohort of TEAMmates who act as mentors. Other support services for the community are available too like the Psychological Care Pathway that I project manage which offers help from a dedicated team of psychotherapists.

Changing lives in sport | Switch The Play 

Sport and the community 

It is generally accepted by health and social care professionals that sport and physical activity is good for an individual’s health and wellbeing. So how can the sector make a sustainable contribution to the communities that they sit in? In DOCIAsport I looked beyond the narrow linear definition of getting people to play e.g. rugby, by helping the Rugby Football League create Community Wellbeing Hubs using the facilities that the sport can offer. Then the clubhouse and facilities (pitches, car park) were utilised in a more beneficial way to help the communities by making the use more diverse, for example creating a nature walk for locals to use (and have a coffee in the clubhouse afterwards) or opening the clubhouse to other sports like Boccia (for elderly people with limited movement) or just a meeting place for anyone who was alone and perhaps feeling lonely.

The leaders in the sector can often be very linear in their thinking and could and should look more into how to better deliver their duty of care to the communities they serve whether that is in a high performance or grassroots setting. With (genuine) collaboration and a more open mindset the sector can create sustainable communities that will better serve the people within them.