Dear Friends,
We are Claire and Rosie, and we work within the Triage Department at Sporting Chance.
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We thought it would be really useful for you, our friends, to understand the process that an athlete may go through when reaching out for support, from the initial call through to the provision of support.
We work across a variety of different sports including, football, rugby, cricket, horse racing, snooker, and darts to name a few. Individuals from these sports are able to contact us to access support through our 24-hour helpline, via email or using our online contact form. They can also be referred to the charity for support directly from their stakeholder.
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Regardless of how the initial contact is made, we will usually have a call with the athlete in the early stages of the process. During our initial call we carefully listen to each person and explore what it is that they are experiencing in a bit more depth. Often people can’t quite explain what’s wrong or why they have phoned, and that’s absolutely fine too.
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Together we then decide what support to put in place, whether it be a course of short-term talking therapy, or a potential referral to our clinical team in cases where our addiction services may need to be accessed. The therapist we arrange for the athlete will be local to them (within a maximum of 45 minutes travel from their home or training base) and we always endeavour to place athletes with a therapist who has a specific background to meet their needs.
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People often think that because we work exclusively within the world of professional sport that we only deal with sports related issues such as dealing with injury or non-selection. However, whilst this forms part of the work we do we find that more often than not we are just working with people, presenting with the same issues as others, such low mood or an inability to cope with difficult life events that may be happening.
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Being able to see first-hand the impact Sporting Chance has on the lives of athletes is extremely rewarding. If we could get every person who reads this to share our work with one other athlete then the impact we may be able to have on the professional sporting community, and the lives of the athletes within it, could be huge. To echo the words of our colleagues, thank you for being a ‘friend’ of Sporting Chance and supporting the work we do.