Jackson Thompson
April 5, 2021
Montee
Ball and Chris Borland helped Wisconsin win the inaugural Big Ten championship
in 2012. Five years later, they helped the university make a groundbreaking
addition to its athletic training staff. Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Graham
Mertz felt more mindful on every snap last season.
The University of Wisconsin quarterback had a unique advantage
over every other passer in 2020: The only full-time meditation coach
in college sports.
Chad McGehee became the first person in the world to earn the
title of Director of
Meditation Training last May, when Wisconsin's athletic
department approved the groundbreaking hire.
"As soon as he got on staff, you could see a difference in
guys just being more in the moment." Mertz told Insider.
McGehee
joined Wisconsin just in time for Mertz's redshirt freshman season, a hiring
that Mertz said was critical to the team coping mentally during the COVID-19
pandemic. The added mindfulness training helped Mertz lead the Badgers to a
Duke's Mayo Bowl victory over Wake Forest in his first year as the
starter.
For Mertz, the training has helped him keep a short memory on
the field and build a new layer into his relationships with teammates.
"It's a little reset for me," Mertz said. "How
can you reset every play to be ready for the next coverage, the next blitz?
Chad always talks about being in the eye of the hurricane, and that's his
metaphor for 'you got a
lot of uncontrollable stuff going on around you, and how can you ground
yourself in how you think and how you act?' And that's truly just being in the
moment."
Now, with a year of meditation experience under
their belts, Mertz and his teammates are becoming an example that other
programs might follow soon.
"Lots
of people have reached out, and I think there's growing interest," McGehee
told Insider.
"Sixty years ago, most
athletes weren't lifting weights. They thought it would wear their bodies out.
Now, of course, it's central to every athletic training program at every
level," he added. "I see what we're doing at Wisconsin as being on a
similar trajectory, where we'll
look back in five, 10, 15 years, and training the mind in this way will be just
as normal as training the body."
Chris Borland's shocking NFL
retirement set the stage for a key experiment
The university's decision to invest in McGehee was based on a 2017 pilot program conducted
by the Center for Healthy Minds – a research institute at Wisconsin focused on
studying the mind and emotions. The program involved 17 former football players
recruited by Wisconsin football alum and former NFL player Chris Borland, who
devised and planned the program.
Borland, a third-round draft pick out of Wisconsin in
2014, stepped into a starting linebacker role for the San Francisco 49ers as a
rookie. But after his first NFL season, Borland retired at 23 due to
concussion concerns – making him the highest-profile NFL player to quit
the sport at a young age because of worries about head injuries.
Borland
pitched his vision for a group meditation experiment with athletes to Richard
Davidson, the founder and chair for the Center for Healthy Minds.
"Athletes will do anything that works ... whatever gives
you that 1% edge," Borland told Insider. "Thanks to Richie's
groundbreaking research, I didn't have to do a lot of that transitional work. I
said, 'look, it might sound funny or strike you as strange or sound entirely
new to you, but here are the brain scans, here are the testimony from people
that have gone through similar work ... It's physiological. It's
effective.'"
Chris
Borland Barry Brecheisen/Getty Images
Borland and Davidson spent the next
year planning a first-of-its-kind experiment that would train former the former
football players unlike any physical training regimen ever devised for
athletes.
"It was almost like
a rookie class or a freshman class because 14 out of 17 guys were completely
new to the practice and never formally meditated," Borland said.
McGehee,
a former Division III soccer player turned meditation specialist, was assigned
as the main instructor.
McGehee's passion for the practice stemmed from experience
during his own athletic career in college, when he struggled to balance it with
his ongoing grief for his father, who'd died during McGehee's senior year of
high school.
"It was a tremendous amount of suffering I was dealt with,
and then I go off to college, and I was playing soccer," McGehee told
Insider. "How do I manage my life? Manage the demands of being a college
athlete, including the academic demands? It just kind of all felt like too
much. I really wished I would have had someone who could have been slowly
working with me to develop skills to deal with those things."
McGehee first took a step toward
specializing in meditation training for athletes with a session for field
hockey players at Kent State University and his experience as an athlete made
him an ideal candidate for what Borland and Richardson were looking to achieve.
Borland said McGehee could relate to athletes better than other meditation
specialists.
Athletes were unprepared for the program's surface-level
exercises
After the program's second session, McGehee wasn't sure if the
participants would be back for a third.
"I was asking these guys to do practices, to kind of get
closer to the experience of what was happening in their own minds and
bodies," McGehee said. "Which is a radical thing for most
athletes to train to do, especially if there's any level of pain or
difficulty."
For McGehee, the
goal was to help the participants build endurance mentally, just as they
already had for physical challenges. All 17 returned in week
three.
"Pain plus
resistance is suffering. So it's the mind that has a whole lot of that
resistance, and by seeing that, by shifting our relationship to it, then a lot
less suffering happens," he said.
Former running back
Montee Ball, a Heisman candidate for Wisconsin in 2011, was one of the
participants who came to the program without prior meditation experience.
Chris
Borland and Montee Ball Dan Sanger/Icon SMI/Corbis/Icon
Sportswire via Getty Images
"My
first ever time doing a meditation practice was in that group." Ball said.
"We lied down in the middle of the floor and just looked up at the ceiling
... we were then instructed to focus on parts of our body that were in pain,
and it was actually my left knee. And after about five minutes, the pain had
significantly decreased."
After Ball's NFL career
ended in 2016, his post-retirement commitment to mental health and a
friendship with Borland from their playing days at Wisconsin led Ball to delve
into mindfulness.
"When
I was in college, I would not have been receptive to it," Ball said.
"I wish I would have; I wish it was available then, but unfortunately, it
wasn't."
Meditation could spread to more athletes and schools
Wisconsin's incoming classes will have McGehee as a resource, as
well as athletes like Mertz who've gotten a year of their own meditation
experience to share.
"I will definitely try to get everybody on it," Mertz
said. "It won't be really forced on anyone, but it's an option, and it's a
great option, and a lot of guys will go with it."
Mertz admitted he would even be willing to participate in
programs similar to the one led by Borland to help spread meditation training
to more athletic programs in the future.
Meanwhile, the 17 members of the original 2017 pilot program are
scheduled to meet for a Q&A with The Center for Healthy Minds later this
month to reflect on their experiences.
"We want the center to keep working in
sports, so we're just checking in on the guys and just having a Q&A about
what they think was good, what could be improved, and how to continue," Borland said. "As it gets
more press and people realize the benefits, I see that being replicated
elsewhere. I just think they've started something that will catch on."
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