When University of Virginia men’s lacrosse player Quentin Matsui was a first-year student, he noticed that at practice, his teammates worried about schoolwork, and in class, they were worried about their performance on the field. As a student in “The Art and Science of Human Flourishing,” a first-semester interdisciplinary course sponsored by the UVA Contemplative Sciences Center (CSC), he learned about mindfulness, and thought that his team might feel less stressed if they incorporated the practices.
In the spring of 2020, Matsui and 3 other UVA athletes were chosen as inaugural Citizen Leaders and Sports Ethics Community Impact Fellows. The fellowship was designed to encourage student athletes to identify a specific, pressing challenge to the well-being or flourishing of their teammates or the larger community of student-athletes at UVA and spend their fellowship year designing and implementing programs to overcome those challenges. Fellows are also required to assess the impact of their projects using effective research measures.
Leslie Hubbard, CSC’s Program Director for Student Engagement and Contemplative Instruction, coached the fellows during bi-weekly virtual meetings during the summer of 2020. “We took their initial ideas and broke them down into things they could measure, and things they could do without a budget,” Hubbard said. “I told them, whatever you do, you have to have buy-in from your team and your coach.”
For Matsui, that meant tapping into enthusiasm after sports psychologist Bob Rotella gave an inspiring talk to the team last summer. As a follow up, the lacrosse coach planned to have the team talk about a chapter from Rotella’s book, How Champions Think in Sports and In Life, each week. Matsui realized that the sports psychology principles aligned well with mindfulness and asked his coach if he could introduce a mindfulness practice each week as part of the book discussion. Matsui developed a curriculum and has been working with his team to practice mindfulness as his fellowship project.
“For someone like Quentin, as a second-year, to be brave enough to engage his upperclassmen lacrosse team on something like mindfulness and being more sensitive is amazing,” Hubbard said. “I think it is very cool to see how this fellowship can slowly change culture.”
Another fellow, Maddie Bolyston, used the video discussion platform Flipgrid to ask her volleyball teammates questions each week and then lead a discussion on Sunday nights about their answers.
“Maddie asked about things that they never talked about but that could really affect performance and the ways they perceived each other, questions such as, ‘If you mess up on the court, what are helpful things teammates can say,’” Hubbard said. “The fellowship gets them thinking and empowers them to take action and create change in their community.”
As the inaugural year of the Citizen Leaders and Sports Ethics Community Impact Fellowship wraps up, the CSC is reviewing applications for 2021-2022. The first cohort of four fellows were all second-year students, but the fellowship is expanding to include all classes. Fellows will attend a Summer Leadership Academy to plan their projects and begin implementing them in the fall. She is excited to see what will happen when even more student-athletes develop the knowledge and skills to pursue more engaged, healthy, values-driven, and successful personal, professional, and civic lives at UVA and beyond.