Being a college student is tough. The rigorous coursework and the long hours spent outside of the classroom can be demanding and challenging. What’s even more challenging, physically and mentally, is demanding athletes to try to balance a collegiate sport along with the academics.

Now before you jump to any conclusions, or turn to your fixated stereotypes about student-athletes, I would just like to point out that it is, in fact, a grind every day.

I feel as though I need to defend myself and other athletes because everyone thinks we get everything handed to us, everything is easy, and we get people to do our homework for us. Funny, right? People actually think student athletes have people do their homework? But I've heard this so many times before. Apparently, we live stress-free lives and breeze through college toward our degrees... Sounds pretty accurate, right?

Wrong.

This is not the case, at all.

There’s this idea in people’s heads that athletes are mentally invincible and are immune to stress.

I mean, why should we be stressed out? We're getting our tuition (at least some of it, in most cases) paid to do something we enjoy. So why would we have anything to worry about?

We get to go to these cool places, get awesome apparel, and play a game we love while getting an education! Again –– what is there to worry about?

Well sadly, there are things that are being worried about, such as performing at a high level in said sport, maintaining a decent GPA, getting up for 6am weights, trying to figure out how to have friends and have a healthy social life, study tables, and trying to find time to decompress for yourself because sometimes some of us just need that.

The amount of pressure we put on ourselves to perform is tremendous. In all aspects of our lives, we are expected to be the best. Whether it’s in the classroom or on the field.

I’ve experienced days where I am trembling at the idea of going to practice because I do not want to mess up. Not because we are discouraged when we do fail, failure is a part of every sport. But I put so much pressure on myself that I would not even want to go to practice and attempt anything because of the pressure I would put on myself to perform perfectly.

It’s challenging, and when you’re an athlete, you are seen as tough. You want to hold up that tough mentality and not let people show you are weak. Most student-athletes don’t seek help when they are showing signs of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. This is partly due to that toughness factor, and the negative stigma around mental illness in general.

This needs to be talked about more. When a tragedy does take place on campus regarding a student-athlete such as suicide, all people do is say things like “I am here if you need someone to talk to”, or people send their "thoughts and prayers."

Well, I am thankful that you are reaching out and offering to talk, and also thankful that we are in your thoughts and prayers, but the reality is there needs to be more than just “I’m here and thoughts and prayers.”

But, after the initial week of grief, people carry on and act like nothing ever happened.

And we are back to square one.

I don’t know the solution, and maybe you don’t either. More needs to be done to stop the tragic events that occur among the student-athlete communities because of mental health issues. We need to stop losing fellow college athletes because we don’t see the signs and they feel like they can’t talk about the fact that they have problems that could be solved if they get the right professional help.

We need to talk about it.

We need to not be afraid of it.

We need to end the stigma.