Every day, more than 500 student-athletes walk across campus to train, sweat and prepare before they are ready to don the Volunteer jersey.

For track and field athletes, that day begins in the weight room at 6:30 a.m., where they train for about an hour. After training, they eat breakfast and then attend a full day of classes. Lunch is served at Smokey’s in the Neyland-Thompson Sports Center, and practices for individual sports begin around 2 p.m. Individual sports stagger their practice time, but by 6 p.m., each athlete has put in somewhere between 2 to 3 hours of training. They have some downtime after practice to shower and eat dinner, and then homework and academic credit hours fill their evenings.

Then they go to bed, sleep and repeat.

This high-level of organization is crucial to creating a winning athlete and team as well as successful students. Beth Alford-Sullivan, the director of track and field and cross-country, said this structure keeps their success rate high both on the track and in the classroom.

“This is college, and it’s the first phase in life where you don’t have that structure like high school,” she said. “In college, you have a lot of free time and a lot of downtime in a day. Student-athletes have to be productive. They have the demands on them which keeps them very structured.”

This structure works; the proof is in the results.

The track and field and cross-country teams have multiple national and SEC championships, with the men currently ranked No. 2 in the nation, and the women ranked No. 7. But these student-athletes are not the only ones competing at a high level.

These same types of structured days apply to sports across the board, from football to rowing to soccer to golf, and can place a lot of pressure on athletes to perform, while they are simultaneously taking full class loads and trying to navigate the college experience.

“There is a lot of pressure when you put on the uniform, and you go out there,” Alford-Sullivan said. “You’re competing for so much, not just for yourself. I think that’s something our student athletes have to grow into. You’ll see a lot of young people in their first or second year, trying to make that balance happen and trying to understand that it’s not letting everybody down, it’s the effort that matters … But at times, you can feel that pressure. ”

This high-stakes environment and packed schedule can take a toll on the mental well-being of not only college students, but athletes at any level of sport, and without proper attention, this can lead to damaging mental health issues.

In 2013, the National Athletic Trainers Association released guidelines on how to best address both the physical and mental well-being of student athletes in secondary school and college. It offers guidelines to recognize mental health issues and how to refer young athletes to the care they need.

For assistant professor of practice, Jedediah Blanton, this release was somewhat overdue.

“More and more universities are hiring clinical psychologists or adding clinical psychologists to their sports medicine team, which is great,” he said. “But think about the history of sport. For the National Athletic Training Association, one of the most respected sports medicine organizations in the world, to only come out in 2013 with a statement about how to best manage this is a little late.”

And this does not apply only to college-aged men and women. Most of the time, student-athletes began growing up in the world of sports from a young age. They develop a drive to succeed, but if there is no balance or checks along the way, winning can become an obsession.

Coach Alford-Sullivan makes it a point in her program to remind her athletes about this perspective.

“An athlete has to be given good perspective, and our coaching staff is very capable of providing that,” she said. “ As long as a student can hear that with open ears, maybe the moment the race ends. But maybe the next day, they tend to grow and get better too.”

In his study of the psychology of sport, Blanton focuses on adolescent athletes, which often includes the transition from secondary to college athletics. At a Division I school, such as UT, the pressure on student-athletes to perform at such a high level is huge, especially for those who play football.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to step out onto Neyland Stadium and have 100,000 plus people there to see you,” Blanton said. “One, that’s got to feel really good and really validating that ‘I’m good, and people want this.’ But if the athlete perceives it otherwise as ‘Oh my gosh, there’s 100,000 people watching me. I’d better not screw up,’ that’s pretty extreme pressure.”

This pressure, combined with academics and social stresses, can take a huge toll on the mental state of an athlete if left undiscussed or undisclosed by the athlete him or herself. In an effort to address these issues, athletic programs around the country are now starting to require certified counselors as part of the coaching staff to help student-athletes cope.

Coach Alford-Sullivan has witnessed the growth of mental health and support programs herself.

“One of the things that has evolved over my coaching career is all of that support system,” she said. “Coaching at Stanford in the mid 90s, those programs did not exist there. They’re now in place at Stanford. Penn State actually was the first to create an academic service center for student athletes.

“It started off as an NCAA grant, and it gained such success that it is now a mandate for all athletic departments. It’s one of those things where to be competing at the very best, they have to utilize services, so we encourage them quite a bit to utilize what’s out there.”

At UT, Team ENHANCE and Team EXCEL are available for athletes to use whenever they want. The groups offer counseling, information and a holistic approach to physical and mental well-being.

Alford-Sullivan regularly encourages her athletes to take advantage of the resource.

“I know individually, many of our student athletes will meet with our sports psychologist, our social worker, our nutritionist, obviously all the academic support system as well,” she said. “It’s highly utilized, and it’s a great support system.”

And while UT has programs in place to support the mental health of athletes, general awareness of the issue is still not widely known.

“We’re still striving and helping them become incredibly successful physically,” Blanton said. “But we can’t forget that they’re a human being and operating in a tricky world.

“Adolescence is terrible, college is stressful, and we have to remember that they’re dealing with all that as well.”