The playing and coaching staff were delighted to attend a recent mentoring session on Mental Health & Wellbeing with former Armagh Gaelic Football star Oisin McConville at in the Oval Performance Suite. The session was arranged through SportNI and focused on the struggles professional athletes can find themselves in at the height of their careers.
We strive to develop and support our team to be the best on the pitch as well as off. Mental health & wellbeing are just as important as physical health & fitness and who better to speak to professional sportspeople about lifestyle choices and mental health than Oisin McConville.
Oisin's shared his own powerful story in a straightforward manner, holding nothing back and allowing those in attendance a glimpse of the devastation that depression and addiction wreaked on his life. The fact that Oisin uses his own story to help other professional sports people around Northern Ireland is amazing, and Glentoran FC is very thankful for his time.
Oisin spoke to www.glentoran.com : “Mental health for players is something which all clubs need to provide support for. Obviously as sportspeople we all need to be focused on performance and how we can improve as players and individuals. But we also need to recognise that mental health is of a massive importance, We hear a lot about mental health and a lot of people tick the boxes in relation to it. but I think it's a little bit more important than that, especially in sport with all the pressures and expectation that goes with it.
Often, we’re talking about young lads, and really that’s the demographic that doesn't share its feelings, particularly young men. These are the guys we need to protect and when we're protecting me think we need to educate them as Well. This is the perfect scenario for that.
Today’s session at the Oval was great as the guys are very interactive and we had a bit of fun with it because although people sometimes think it might be a difficult thing to talk about. But given the right environment lads will share things as they did today, Everyone was able to share because everybody in this changing room is more or less going through the same things. So it was great, and I think the players got something worthwhile out of it.”
