Out of the Darkness

In 15 years’ worth of practices, games, tournaments, and off-season workouts, Marcus Alston ’13 was fortunate enough to never witness a coach administer CPR—a lifesaving technique in which coaches receive mandated training and certification. However, he can’t count the number of times he’s seen a teammate in some sort of emotional distress and found his coaches tragically ill-equipped to support their athletes. 

Marcus played football at Saint Francis University and saw his own mental health take a turn for the worse after graduating and transitioning out of the sport that had become such an integral part of his identity. With his own experiences in mind, in the fall of 2019, he founded Alston for Athletes. The nonprofit organization’s mission is to advocate for student athlete mental health awareness through policy change and by providing access to mental health services. 

In 2021, Marcus won the Howard County Changemaker Challenge—a Shark Tank-esque pitch competition for social change. This was a pivotal moment for Alston for Athletes; Marcus knew his organization had the potential to be a real catalyst for change. His award-winning proposal: mental health training for coaches. 

“In my own experience, I was fortunate enough to have some really great coaches,” Marcus shares. “I really looked up to them, and maybe if they had some mental health education, they could have helped point me to resources and support.” 

Marcus argues that coaches could be on the frontlines of recognizing and addressing mental health symptoms because of the amount of time they spend with their athletes weekly and the relationships they build. There is a stigma attached to mental health issues in athletics, a world in which strength, toughness, and resiliency are all-important. But it is also a world with an abundance of factors that take a toll on one’s mental health—the stress of time management, the pressure to perform, injuries, overtraining, eating disorders, and burnout. 

“[The Aspen Institute] surveyed coaches across the country and found that 18% of coaches feel comfortable linking their athletes to mental health resources,” Marcus says. “And 67% of coaches want to receive more training in mental health.” 

Marcus knew he was on to something after the Changemaker Challenge. He wanted to take his idea to statewide legislation. With support from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), he began working on a bill to mandate mental health training for coaches across Maryland. In January 2023, he got a call from Baltimore City Delegate Dalya Attar’s office: “We just wanted to let you know that we’re working on your bill,” they told him. 

Marcus was new to public policy, having studied information systems in college. The learning curve was sharp, but he threw himself into the legislative process. He spent the summer calling up senators and delegates in search of co-sponsors. Senator Shelly Hettleman signed on. As it turned out, Senator Hettleman’s Chief of Staff is Maura Dunnigan, mother of Marcus’s classmate Connor Dunnigan ’13, who remembered Marcus from her son’s youth basketball team. 

By the time the bill got to the Senate floor, it had 13 sponsors. It passed unanimously. Having already passed in the House, all that’s left is a signature from Governor Moore. When the bill officially becomes law, Maryland will be the first state to mandate that all public high school and college institutions provide training for coaches to recognize indicators of mental illness and behavioral distress in students. 

With his first big win under his belt, Marcus looks forward to expanding his advocacy efforts to include pushing for mental health screenings as part of athletes’ regular physical readiness assessments. He also continues to raise awareness through speaking engagements, like serving on MTV’s Mental Health Youth Action Forum, and his podcast, Mindful Athletes. 

Marcus serves on the board of directors at NAMI and as a Public Policy Committee member for Mental Health America. He has also recently taken on a new role as a Lived Experience Advisor at ieso, a UK-based digital mental healthcare and therapeutics company. “It’s cool to get to combine my two passions: mental health and technology,” he says.

While he will be taking a step back from the day-to-day operations at Alston for Athletes to balance his new responsibilities, Marcus will never stop raising awareness, advocating for change, and creating access to mental health resources for athletes who need it.