Photo PHOTO Courtesy Terri Morris
Medicine Hat Olympian Sage Watson (left) and local mental health speaker Trevor Moore (right) took part in a Q&A at the Affect 15 event last month hosted by Terri Morris and The Carter Morris Legacy Project.
zmason@medicinehatnews.com
After her 14-year-old son passed away in April, Terri Morris launched the Carter Morris Legacy Project in his memory, seeking to raise awareness for youth mental health in the community.
Carter, an avid athlete, played both football and basketball. In her initiatives with the Carter Morris Legacy Project, Morris wants to combine his passion for sports with her advocacy and help other youth in the community that are struggling with their mental health.
So far, the Carter Morris Legacy Project has put on two events in Medicine Hat. The first was a memorial basketball tournament, which raised $1,000 earlier this summer to set up a sportsmanship scholarship in Carter’s name.
Last month, the organization hosted an event Morris called Affect 15, which featured talks from local mental health advocate and speaker Trevor Moore and two-time Olympian Sage Watson on the topic of youth mental wellness in sports.
Moore, who has worked with the Medicine Hat College Rattlers as well as smaller local youth teams, says that smaller sports organizations rarely have the resources to incorporate mental wellness into their programming.
Morris wanted Affect 15 to fill that gap.
While donations were encouraged, Morris says it was important to her that any interested groups or individuals could have access to the event, which she hoped combined inspirational and compelling storytelling from Watson with a constructive conversation about mental health.
“We need to start supporting these mental health initiatives on teams,” said Morris.
“We need to stop being naive about mental health. We need to have open conversations. It needs to be an ongoing discussion. You can’t just talk about it when something terrible happens.”
Moore says major topics covered in his and Watson’s comments included navigating injury, overcoming self-doubt and regulating performance anxiety.
“This is the direction things need to start heading,” said Moore.
“I’m blessed to be able to work with some of the big programs that have big budgets and have these types of speakers and things come in. But I realize there’s tons of stuff that’s missing for the smaller organizations and smaller groups.”
Morris says that for many youth struggling with mental health, sports is a lifeline. When her son was battling mental illness, Morris says she spoke to his coaches about resources available in the sporting environment. She says that any mental health programming is left up to the teams, which rarely had the funding to provide supports.
“It was really lacking, which, for some kids, fine, they don’t need that. Unless you actually need to access mental health support, you don’t realize how important it is,” she said.
It’s an insidious problem, since the stigma around mental health issues is also higher in sporting environments.
“People want to not be perceived as weak. Kids have a fear of their weakness somehow being held against them, and it is certainly a stigma that the sporting world struggles with even more than regular society,” said Moore.
Morris says high performance in athletes can also be misconstrued as a sign that everything is okay. Her goal is to scale up Affect 15 with donor funding, so that local sports organizations and youth athletes can attend future events completely free of charge.
While the Legacy Fund is focused on the intersection of youth sports and mental health, in her own advocacy Morris has had a focus on the obstacles to accessing mental health care in general rural and remote areas.
Since launching her advocacy campaign, Morris says she’s had conversations with Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Justin Wright and the executive director of Recovery Alberta about the barriers her family faced while trying to navigate mental health care for Carter.
Morris says the Carter Morris Legacy Fund will be bringing back both the memorial basketball tournament and Affect 15.
Another tournament is loosely scheduled for August of next year and Morris is in the midst of applying for funding for a second Affect 15 event, which would invite a new guest speaker from the sporting world to share insights about athletics and mental health.
Morris says the best place to find out more about upcoming initiatives is the Carter Morris Legacy Fund’s Instagram page. She also has an email for inquiries related to the project, cartermlegacy@hotmail.com.
