The Zone is designed to integrate with a team’s wellness initiatives to improve the access and options available to users.
The Zone’s platform is an innovative and proactive approach to student-athlete wellbeing. (Main image: The Zone)
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Those social repercussions persist, as do new pressures related to name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities — and all the other stressors that come with being a college student and competing in a sport at a high level.
The Zone, a mental wellness app catered toward the specific demands of college athletes, has gained traction and today announced its largest deal yet, a multi-year, conference-wide deal with the Big East. The app will roll out slowly to start, with 100 student-athletes at Georgetown and Marquette onboarding this spring, before a similar number of app licenses will become available to all other Big East schools thereafter.
“Our student-athletes have reported some of the most significant challenges center around the pressures of being a Division I student-athlete and the need to make your life seem perfect on social media,” Big East Senior Associate Commissioner Katie Willett wrote in an email. “Additionally, student-athletes have struggled with the reintegration following Covid and successfully managing academics, athletics and community service.”
The Zone encourages users to complete regular check-ins in the app, answering questions about mood and academic and athletic updates in a gamified way. Through machine learning, the app offers advice, connections to on-campus resources, suggested activities like meditation and even the ability to book appointments with a counselor or therapist.
The Zone makes reaching out for mental health support easier for student athletes through the platform’s accessible and streamlined process (Image: The Zone)
“Performance anxiety is the biggest trigger we’ve seen over the last two years,” said The Zone Co-Founder/CEO Ivan Tchatchouwo, a former Division II basketball player whose own experiences with mental health challenges informed the founding of the app. “And it shows up in different ways. It’s not just performing on the court, right? It’s performing through the anxiety of being a first-generation college person on campus. Your parents pressure on you, or fans, friends and family. NIL pressure is causing performance anxiety because now it’s like, ‘I want to get paid just like a teammate.’
“Time management is another huge one that’s causing a lot of stress and anxiety for young people. And then also, lack of community. They’re in teams, but those two years have taken them away from knowing how to communicate correctly.”
Lehigh, Seton Hall University and St Francis-Brooklyn are all early adopters of The Zone; Memphis and Stony Brook previously used it as well. Former America East Commissioner Amy Huchthausen became such a strong supporter that she joined the company’s board of advisors. The Zone first connected with Big East leadership when hosting its fourth annual Student-Athlete Well-Being Forum at the University of Connecticut in June 2022.
Tchatchouwo says about 4,000 student-athletes are enrolled in the app, of which 2,800 remain active. Monthly participation is almost 25% whereas recent peer-reviewed research estimated that industry average for digital mental health apps is 3%.
“We spent the whole last year testing what works, what’s sticky, what doesn’t work. We’ve added a whole new content strategy,” Tchatchouwo said.
“That experience has to consistently be fresh for them, to want to go through it,” he added. “It also gets daunting to just see all the time, the same kind of inundating stuff. We’re getting creative on how we push that up. Machine learning is a big thing that we’re jumping bigger into and really understanding what it is that your data is saying. What is your storyline? What are your trends? And how do you the trends play out the life? And then what are the next steps for you?”
Tchatchouwo is quick to emphasize that The Zone is not a replacement to existing mental health services or professionals but rather a complement to or conduit for those options.
“The Zone is a state-of-the-art mental wellness platform that integrates perfectly into our institutions’ wellness programs,” Willett wrote. “It will make our services more effective by enabling a culture that prioritizes mental wellness, an important topic this day and age for our student-athletes. Our goals are to provide our student-athletes with a safe space and easily accessible resources to complement the amazing services being provided by our institutions when it comes to mental wellness.”
Other universities might try to buttress students by hiring additional psychologists to counsel student-athletes, but Tchatchouwo said that approach can suffer from inefficiency. Often the ratio of students-to-psychologists remains overwhelmingly high. Even then, the students need help discovering and accessing those resources. It’s important to have layers of defense, and The Zone seeks to drive awareness through content and to make specific referrals within the app to help maximize the use of what’s already available.
“You still need to educate the people that are on the forefront of what it looks like for their athletes,” Tchatchouwo said. “So we want to launch that education series for the coaches and the staff and administration, so they’re also educated, which makes the mental health investment even that much better.”
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