Every Monday, a group of strangers walk into a room. They sit in a circle and grieve.
They are part of a new student therapy group on the University of Oregon campus called Catch-Feelings that helps former student-athletes adjust to changes in their sports careers through physical movement and group sharing.
The group is a partnership between UO Health Services and UO Intramural Sports and grew out of personal experience. Dusty Destler, the group’s facilitator, played competitive baseball through college and understands the sense of loss, change in identity, grief and confusion that often comes with the end of a competitive career.
“A lot of things (that) are born often come from people’s own personal experience,” Destler said.
Destler took those experiences and did some math, calculating what percentage of the UO student body might be feeling the same way. He found that roughly one third of the over 24,000 students on campus “have potentially played some type of sport in high school.”
“That would be looking somewhere in the range of like 8,000 to 10,000 students (who) could be walking on campus dealing with some of these identity issues, sense of loss, you know, concern for what their future might look like. Maybe some of their relationships, or most of their relationships, might have been tied up in the sport or activity that they were doing,” Destler said.
Courtney Gorwitz, a first year graduate student who is not part of the group, said her sports, soccer and field hockey, gave her a community that couldn’t be recreated after they ended.
“I tried out to play a club sport in undergrad and it just sorta hit me that it was the people, not necessarily the sport that I missed and I found other ways to stay active because it was more about being in contact with that community,” Gorwitz said.
Denzel Jones, who is also not part of Catch-Feelings but played football and ran track, said playing sports was like having a “second family.”
“Just the sport itself, and having the people there to play it with created bonds. It was like a home away from home,” Jones said.
Not having the constant of a sport, Jones said, made him feel “incomplete,” but he’s optimistic about his sports career.
“I’ve run as far as I could, but I still have a little more in me. It feels unnecessary to have the athleticism that I have and not be able to continue,” Jones said.
Catch-Feelings runs for roughly six weeks, with each session split into two components: a physical activity where participants perform “sport specific movements” and a “classic therapy group” session.
Though unconventional for a therapy session, Destler said, the outdoor portion will allow participants to tap into the emotional experience and “procedural memories” they retained while playing a competitive sport.
“The second component is, after the 20 (to) 30 minutes (outside), we’ll walk into a classroom in the rec center, and then that’s where that process group will take place,” Destler said. “Kind of like your classic therapy group, where we’ll all sit in a circle and be able to talk about the things that came up for us that day, which would also include identity pieces and all those other things, like sense of loss, concern about the future, things like that.”
The partnership between UO Rec and UO Health Services began in the summer, according to Assistant Director for Intramural Sports and Youth Camps Sean Graninger.
In an emailed statement to The Daily Emerald, Graninger said he hopes students take advantage of the group to help with “the transition away from the structured world” of sports.
“With so many opportunities on campus to stay active and engaged, such as Intramurals, Club Sports, PE classes, and student organizations, we hope every student is able to find a sense of belonging and community during their time at UO,” Graninger said.
The goal of the group, according to Destler, is for student-athletes to recognize that they are not alone in their feelings and to reintroduce them to their sport in a different way.
“Oftentimes, when people are kids or adolescents, the way that they are interacting with the sport is often dictated by external forces, whether it’s parents or coaches,” Destler said. “And here’s an opportunity for adults to really put that experience under a microscope and to be like, ‘okay, what of that experience do I want to retain? It feels good, and what of it do I want to shed and kind of make my own value system’ and alter it to work for them.”
The group runs quarterly, once in the fall, winter and spring and does not allow drop-ins.
