In 2017, former Temple Athletic Director Patrick Kraft made a significant hire to his department by bringing in Dr. Stephany Coakley as the senior associate athletic director for mental health, wellness and performance.
Coakley became the university’s first-ever full-time mental health specialist as Kraft and Temple began to take steps to prioritize student-athletes’ mental health. Once Coakley got to campus, she got right to work by implementing new initiatives.
Coakley created TUWell, Temple Athletics’ mental health and wellness provider, which offers counseling services for student-athletes. She started as the only mental health-related member of the department, providing the resources for all 17 of Temple’s Division I teams. The staff has expanded in the eight years since her hiring to efficiently meet student-athletes’ needs.
“My goals for TUWell are to provide compassion and care,” Coakley said. “To be an exemplary mental health program for the NCAA and our conference, to also prioritize psychological safety so that we can build student-athlete resilience and well-being.”
Current Athletic Director Arthur Johnson met with Coakley before he was hired in 2021 and was pleased that Temple had a full-time mental health specialist in-house. One of his only goals when he took the job was to continue providing the support Coakley needed for TUWell to flourish.
Coakley feels that Johnson has supported TUWell sufficiently and was especially helpful in providing every staff member in the athletic department with Mental Health First Aid training, she said.
“The Mental Health First Aid was very important,” Johnson said. “Because it does allow people who are around, if they see a change in someone, they can be able to respond or help or they know, ‘Hey, refer it to TUWell.’”
Coakley looked at the NCAA’s mental health best practices as a stepping stone while structuring TUWell. The practices include having a mental health screening process for all student-athletes to get baseline information, an emergency process for any potential crises and ensuring every student-athlete has access to a mental health provider.
While those practices were a great place to start, Coakely had much more in mind. The NCAA began promoting wellness as a best practice in 2022 — but that’s something Coakley’s been implementing since the beginning. She went beyond that by providing wellness and mental performance services in addition to mental health services.
TUWell representatives speak to each of Temple’s athletic teams at the beginning of every year to inform the athletes who they are, what they do and how to access their services. For Temple’s Men’s Soccer midfielder Rocco Haeufgloeckner, one of the biggest struggles is knowing where to get help, so TUWell’s effort to make itself known eliminates that.
“It was tough actually because Temple provides a lot,” Haeufgloeckner said. “It’s very easy to get into different stuff, but I think the first step is always the most difficult one.”
Coakley has expanded and evolved to better serve student-athletes throughout her time at Temple. She’s achieved more by hiring three more full-time workers to focus on mental health. The four-person staff divides the work by assigning specific teams to each person. They don’t exclusively aid their respective teams, but the system provides coaches with one specific person to reach out to if they need anything.
When Coakley created her staff, she wanted to ensure that any student-athlete seeking help would have someone they could be comfortable being vulnerable to. Coakley emphasized that strong therapeutic alliances lead to better outcomes, so she does what she can to ensure that every client can form a connection.
On TUWell’s referral form, there are questions based on the student-athletes’ preferences of who they want to speak with most. If there isn’t a member of the staff that fits what the student-athlete is looking for, TUWell does what it can to find an ideal resource for the client.
“It’s very important to me to have a diverse clinical and medical performance staff,” Coakley said. “So that whether we are representative of the race that they’re from or not, that they feel comfortable working with a clinician. But at the end of the day, truly is if that person hears you, listens to you and can help you, because that’s the most important thing.”
Coakley is pleased with the mental health space TUWell has built but believes her accomplishments aren’t sufficient. She hopes to continue raising the bar for prioritizing mental health in student-athletes.
“We’d like to build out the mental performance space,” Coakley said. “Where we are now, really taking a deep dive into mental performance, how to train the mind to perform consistently at a high level, to take advantage of all these resources put together and allow that to allow you to have a big performance, consistently.”
Colin Schofield contributed to reporting.
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