Past the first hole of a golf course, down a long, winding road, alongside a luscious lake where swans sunbathe, around the back of a luxury hotel, down a thin dirt track strewn with pine needles and lined by a forest marsh where tree trunks are reflected back at themselves, is the place where sportspeople go for help.
Behind a set of gates sit two modest cottages, either side of a patch of grass that has cones, a temporary net and a few footballs lying around. They have three footballers in residence when I visit, and though the session started as a game of badminton, the footballers can never last long without introducing a ball to proceedings.
This is the Sporting Chance clinic, where for 26 days four current or former sports professionals are treated for extreme addiction. Privacy is paramount here – it’s so private that Google Street View ends well before you reach it – and I have been granted extraordinarily rare access to a place where most who use it would prefer you not to know.
During their stay they are taken out regularly for walks, meals, meetings for their addiction: Gamblers Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous. Although anonymity is a condition their visitors often lack. In the past, footballers have been inappropriately approached and asked for free tickets, although it does not happen often.
Part of the treatment includes using the spa facilities of the five-star hotel, the tennis court, the swimming pool. There is a horse hospital next door. They can have scuba therapy and equine therapy and, essentially, a rolling menu of meditative and therapeutic services.
The current group are out at a gym off-site when I visit, allowing me the full tour. The red-brick cottage to the left is where they live communally for the residential stay. It has three bedrooms but sleeps four.
There is a Tony Adams autobiography on the kitchen counter – my tour guide, head of education Alex Mills, jokes that Sporting Chance’s founder is trying to boost sales – next to a bottle of squash and an Old El Paso fajita kit.
“Some people forget how seminal it was for someone of Tony’s stature at that time to turn around and say actually sportspeople do need help, too, and perhaps the environment they’re in is not that conducive to getting it,” Mills says.
There are single beds in the bedrooms, three sofas huddled around a widescreen TV in the living room, an ironing board off to one side of the landing. For a while, they had a dart board, but decided to take it down. Gamblers – a problem that afflicts their most frequent visitors – will find anything to wager on.
While many of its occupants will be accustomed to five-star hotels and multi-bedroom mansions, the cottage is comfortable but basic – it has the feel of well-kept student digs.
In the adjacent cottage is the therapists’ office. Marcia Ewen and Barry Trott, part of a larger team who look after the residents, are here now. Between them they share 37 years’ experience in rehabs. They are trained therapists who specialise in addiction.
There is room upstairs to sleep another resident, if required, but it is usually reserved for one of the therapists to sleep. Somebody is on-hand 24 hours a day.
Recently, they also took on some other unwanted guests. “There are bats in the roof,” Barry says, recalling how not long ago he walked into the other cottage to find two rugby players freaking out and chasing after a bat that had snuck inside. They managed to throw a blanket over it and carry it outside.
Marcia and Barry take therapy groups, one-on-one sessions, education working groups, teaching the residents about addiction and what they are dealing with. Keeping life varied is important.
Between residential stays there is usually a fortnight gap – they are so busy that is currently down to one week – and in that time they run a variety of sessions. Southampton FC, for example, bring their injured academy players to discuss coping methods and to talk about what it’s like being unable to play.
For the residential stays, smartphones are handed in on the first Monday on arrival. Their owners are given an hour to tell loved ones they got here safely and to make any calls they need. On Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday they are allowed access to them for another hour. But they must keep off social media.
Should they need to call a manager or an agent, they can do. And if something necessitates using a phone out of the allotted hours they can. One rugby player was selling a house recently and needed to speak to his solicitor and estate agent.
Phones can be a huge problem for gamblers. Players try to hide them and other devices, so bags have to be searched.
There are family days and relatives can stay in the nearby hotel. They can take part in sessions and learn what their partner is going through. A residential stay usually involves four weeks pre-visit, four weeks at the clinic, six weeks of aftercare. Some of them come back to help those who arrive after them.
“It’s an immersive process,” Barry says. “People who actively engage in recovery, tend to stay recovered.”
When somebody picks up a telephone and rings Sporting Chance for help, their journey begins in a small room occupied by Rosie Squire and Claire Jones. Rosie is a psychology graduate who has worked in alcohol and drug addiction clinics and with domestic violence victims. Claire worked for an airline for two decades before deciding on a career change.
Fifty metres back down the dirt track from the cottages is a log cabin that you could easily miss if you were not looking carefully enough. It contains a main meeting room, a few smaller offices, a kitchen and a bathroom with a shower.
Lined up on the desks either side of Rosie’s and Claire’s modest office are smartphones colour-coordinated to a particular sport. Red is football. Green is cricket. Yellow is rugby. And so on. For some on the other end of the line, this will be the most important call of their life: the beginning of recovery that will last their lifetime.
The residential clinic is only a tiny fraction of what Sporting Chance does, the remainder is linking struggling sportspeople to its network of more than 250 counsellors, so that they are able to have a face-to-face meeting within 45 minutes of their home or training facility. If an athlete calls in the morning, they are usually connected with a counsellor by that evening and can have an appointment in their diary within 48 hours. Sooner if necessary.
“It is a complete privilege to be there for someone dealing with something really difficult,” Rosie says. “It’s challenging and upsetting sometimes, but it’s also incredibly rewarding.”
They can make anything between around 12 and 30 referrals a week. Conversations range from short, 10- to 15-minute calls or longer — 60 to 90 minutes – when people offload. Confidentiality is crucial. “I can usually sense when Rosie is on a difficult, sensitive call so I might leave and shut the door,” Claire says.
The residential clinic treats people with gambling, alcohol and drug addiction. “When Sporting Chance started in 2000, I think a lot of people were ringing up Tony [Adams] going, ‘I think I drink like you and I’ve got a problem, what can I do?’” says chief executive Colin Bland during a two-hour conversation about mental health and sport.
“Today the profile of a footballer is different. Drinking is not as big a problem. Football players and gambling has been a theme of the past few years. But every sport is different, and themes change. We constantly have to evolve and our ear has to be to the rail to hear what’s coming down the track.”
Low mood, as it’s referred to, is by far the most likely reason for a call, followed by anxiety.
“People might ring and say they’re depressed but depression is a clinical diagnosis,” Colin explains. “They’re more likely to be sad. Low mood is the language we use. An element of those will suffer from clinical depression, but generally it’s situational or emotional.”
Sporting Chance is funded predominantly by the contracts it has with each sport, often through the players’ unions. In football, most people come to them via the Professional Footballers’ Association, but it also deals directly with the Premier League and all the national teams under the Football Association.
Contracts work a bit like a gas and electricity bill. Bland, who joined the charity nine years ago, and the team work out roughly how much the service required will cost and set the bill. But they meet quarterly: if by the end of the year the client has overpaid, they can pay less in the fourth quarter or roll it over to the next year.
The 12-step programme – three of which are completed at the clinic – and talk-therapy treatment approach is not that dissimilar to those used by mental health professionals around the world, but Sporting Chance’s USP is that “we’re still able to say we’re the only residential clinic in the world that treats professional sportspeople exclusively”, Colin says.
“We can feed them right, train them right and they can leave the clinic fit enough to play.” They had a rugby player attend the residential clinic, leave on the Friday after 26 days and play top-level rugby the next day.
And its services continue to evolve. The residential clinic opened in 2000, the vast one-to-one network was established in 2010, the pandemic accelerated a shift online that created new opportunities. They can now offer services to individual competitors whose sport takes them around the world. When many tennis players were forced to quarantine for 14 days ahead of the Australian Open in 2020, Sporting Chance provided support via video call therapy sessions with the players.
You probably did not know about that. In an ever louder and connected world, they continue to go quietly about their work, hidden out of sight.
Sporting Chance reveals huge rise in calls this year
Sporting Chance experienced an increase of more than 100 per cent in sportspeople calling for help in the first quarter of 2021, i can reveal.
After working through what staff describe as the quietest period in memory at the start of the pandemic’s first UK lockdown, the charity, which provides mental health support exclusively for sportspeople, witnessed a spike in contacts at the start of the year.
Calls to its helpline in January, February and March were more than double that of the entire first half of the same period pre-pandemic.
“We all came to the end of 2020 with high hopes January would bring more freedom, the end to restrictions, and of course we were whacked,” chief executive Colin Bland tells i.
“In our first quarter of 2021 we saw more referrals than we saw in the first six months before lockdown. Now our figures have gone up and up.
“When we went into the first lockdown sports were affected greatly – there was no sport played. A lot of our stakeholders were really concerned about the mental and emotional wellbeing of their players.
“But it was one of the quietist times I’ve experienced in my nine years here with our phone ringing. From March through to October 2020 we were very, very quiet.
“Talking to players, it was very much some were pleased to be out of the pressure cooker of the game, some of them enjoyed lockdown. For others who weren’t enjoying it so much, they thought ‘well everyone is feeling rubbish anyway’.”
Head of education Alex Mills adds: “I think that’s a key one. The idea that Covid sort of put everyone in society locked inside their homes. The idea that more people started talking more about their mental health to each other.
“The feeling that everyone is going through this and this is very circumstantial. And I can see the connection to my [situation] and I can ride this out, because this will change for everyone when the circumstances change. The need for and pressure on services is now.”
Sporting Chance works with a long list of sports including football, rugby league, cricket, tennis, horse racing, snooker and darts. Most of its services moved online during the early stages of the pandemic but have since reopened in person.
There is the belief that even if athletes wanted to speak to a mental health professional they may have felt uncomfortable doing so due to the lack of privacy in their home during lockdown.
“Anecdotally, we’ve had feedback from people we’ve worked with who perhaps didn’t get support back then and waited until the situation had changed, I definitely think that was a barrier,” Mills says.
“Even if a service is online, people were in their house with other people, it’s not the best environment for them to be engaging in that.
“Online therapy is great and is a good resource, but you have to build a relationship of trust – which is fundamentally what a therapeutic relationship is – over Zoom, and people might not be used to that process.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3HC37bn
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