It’s baseball season. Roll school into the mix of practices, lifts, and games, it can be a lot. But this is my fourth year doing it at a collegiate level so think I’d be pretty good at this school, baseball, life/relationship balancing stuff. Nah. It’s like doing it for the first time every year. The easy way to fix that is to take the “life/relationship” in “school, baseball, and life/relationship balancing” and shove it deep down a hole, promising you’ll see it again after the season’s over. Spoiler alert! That’s not healthy. Readjust your sights a little bit and you’ll realize that that’s the daily struggle for the average collegiate athlete every year, and more so every in-season semester. Sometimes that sacrifice causes turmoil within athletes, which can affect their mental and physical well-being and ultimately can harm their performance on the field.
In an age where athlete mental health is often overlooked, Phoebe Olden, a Lincoln Christian University graduate with a psychology bachelor’s degree as well as a biblical studies associate’s degree has taken the step forward to be an advocate for athletes at Union University. She has also received her master’s in sport leadership from Dordt University and is working towards a second master’s degree in social work.
She played collegiate volleyball for Lincoln Christian University, so she understands the grind and the toll that being a student athlete has on you. She has taken it upon herself to construct a position at Union University which is first of its kind.
“The title is a couple different things,” Olden said. “It can be a mental health consultant or the more sporty term is the mental performance trainer.”
Although she has had experience understanding the mental side of the game of volleyball and basketball, baseball is a new challenge. Since the fall of 2024, Olden has been working with the Union University baseball team to emphasize mental health in applicable ways.
“It’s more of an as-needed position, which is different from your typical jobs,” Olden explained. At a private practice, you would have clients, which is how you make your money. You should have clients that way. But here, it’s been more planning the next team bonding thing, next leadership activity meetings with coaches…”
And it also includes meeting with players in one-on-one meetings. She covers everything the player is struggling with. The yips, performance anxiety, depression, academic struggle, social struggle, and even tunnel-vision. Olden understands that although they all play the same game, every player is unique and reacts to situations and areas of life differently.
“But I really wanted to be an advocate for athletics. I really feel like God’s leading me back into the mental side of this, to not travel and to stay on a campus or in a private practice where I can really be beneficial for players in those sports.”
Sometimes coaches fail to recognize that fact. Olden knows this firsthand. It was part of the reason why the love of sports began to slowly fade while playing volleyball in high school.
“I had a horrible experience in high school,” Olden said. “I actually quit after my junior year because I had a coach who had professed to do a lot of things that weren’t really followed through, right? And so I was like, I think I’m gonna be done with sports.”
Olden decided to run the whole thing back after unexpectedly being offered a full-tuition scholarship for Lincoln Christian University. The amazing coaches restored the love and passion for volleyball and just competing in sports. But what she didn’t know at the time was that God pushed opportunities to dabble in areas of sports she had never visited before.
“I did a coaching stint at a university in Iowa (Dordt University), and just really felt like that was the best way that I was connecting with players,” Olden said. “It was recognizing that they’re all different, and they’re all created in the image of Christ, and that they’re all important, beneficial in different ways of sports.”
The UU baseball team being under Olden’s guidance has really been one big experiment to see how this sort of position could really work in action. Does it really make a difference? Where does it impact the team the most? Does giving our guys opportunities to understand their mental struggle really enhance their performance on the baseball field?
Olden is confident it does, and she’s proactive in proving that that its true.
And I don’t mean she’s sitting in an office waiting for the phone to ring. Olden constantly makes sure that she is present and available to the guys as much as she can. She often shows up to practice, sometimes to games and is always checking in with us every week to see her patients at work with her own eyes, which gives her insight into what her patients may be struggling with.
“For me, Pheobe has been very beneficial since she’s come onto the program,” pitcher and sophomore general biology major, Chase Spears, said. “I feel like she allows me to get things off my chest that I usually can’t get off with certain people. So, I think her joining the team has been not just beneficial to me but for the team in general.”
And the baseball team is only a portion of her responsibilities. As much as Olden works as Union’s Mental Performance trainer, Olden is also a graduate assistant who works in Campus Rec while she finishes her master’s degree in social work. If Olden not only focuses on the baseball team’s wellbeing, university intramurals, and being a student, how does she focus on her own wellbeing? How does she hold herself accountable to her own worldview on mental health?
She reads a lot. Not every day, but a lot in one day. Like us student-athletes, Sunday is the only day where she has room to breathe and sit down to read a hundred pages of a novel that allows her to completely escape the everyday grind. Maybe that’s all you can do. You can’t run away from it all. Its life, and it’s a lot, but at least Pheobe Olden can rest on her Read-a-ton-Sunday knowing that she’s a leader who we admire here at Fesmire Field.
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