By Greg Mumm For me, mental health issues always felt like being stuck on the bench in a game I desperately wanted to be involved in, pacing the sideline, living each moment of those people on the field, but having a nagging thought in my mind that for some reason I wasn’t good enough to be out there. And no matter how much I stretched or warmed up on the sideline, there was an imaginary coach somewhere that would never allow me to join the game. I never had the awareness, nor did those around me, to notice what was probably a mental health issue when I transitioned out of sport. It wasn’t spoken about. There was still a stigma that there was something wrong with people who couldn’t handle it mentally. This was the weight that pulled on your own thoughts when you entered those spaces - that there was something wrong with you for feeling the way you were feeling, so you hid it for fear that someone else would realise it too, and kick you out of the group, put you on