Arsenal Tech Titans Gain Benefits from Mental Resets
INDIANAPOLIS — In 2023, the Arsenal Technical High School football team in Indianapolis finished the season without a single win, but the team rallied the last two seasons with winning records in conference play.
The team took a different path. Through a pilot program supported by a grant from the Riley Children’s Foundation, these athletes started trading some of their practice time for mental resiliency training.
Dr. Elaine Gilbert is a pediatric psychologist at Riley Children’s Health. She’s been a big part of the football comeback the last two seasons. She leads the pilot program, which teaches players how to cope with the stress and setbacks that inevitably come with playing sports.
“I think that this is an underserved population in terms of mental health and recognizing that we devote a lot of resources to their physical health, but recognizing the need to support them from a mental health capacity in both skill set and learning,” Gilbert said in an interview with Inside Indiana Business.
Players like Brian Nichols faced adversity when he was sidelined by a football injury and a basketball injury.
“I started having like a lot of doubts that I was getting ready to quit because I just kept losing confidence, as I just kept constantly dealing with injuries,” he told Inside Indiana Business.
However, the mental resiliency training helped Nichols bounce back. He says he realized he has people that are here to help him.
The Arsenal Tech football coach says he saw the change across the entire roster, observing that before the program.
“They let their emotions get to a level where they were almost uncontainable,” he told Inside Indiana Business. “The kids nowadays call it crashing out. There was a clear and evident difference between these kids not having somebody to talk to, not having some tools to work with when they had issues, to having those things, and we just improved exponentially.”
It helped the team win on the field, but the goal is for players to also be more resilient in their lives. Now the program looks to expand across all Indianapolis Public Schools, proving that a strong mind carries just as much weight as a strong hit.
