When starting this project, I was already aware of and concerned about stigmas attached to mental health in the sporting world of tennis and had seen players begin to open up about any struggles they had been facing on social media but had not heard about anything that the powerful organisations in the sport had done about this issue. Therefore, alongside breaking the existing stigma, my aim became to look into what the key organisational bodies of the sport thought about mental health and what policies and procedures they had in place, if any, to ensure these could be improved and highlighted.
I compiled a list of players that I had previously seen posting about their mental health online, which I included in the potential cast list in my pitch, and had already managed to get a quick interview with Kiki Bertens when working as press at a tournament during the Summer, intending to use it for this project when it came to it.
Noah Rubin was a player I was keen to have involved in the project as I had followed his Behind The Racquet platform from when it was first created, where he gives current and retired players, and others who are interested in tennis a platform to post their own stories and struggles.
As well as my main interviewees, I also had conversations with various people involved in tennis - players, journalists and employees of the men's and women's pro tours (the ATP and WTA) - and it became clear that this was an issue all parties were now very concerned about and invested in, and were making efforts to do better in this area because everyone felt there was still a stigma to be broken. I also found that there were different interpretations of the level of support on offer from the ATP and WTA, usually dependant on which tour the person had more contact / experience with and how their experience had gone.
This made it more important to speak to employees of the ATP and WTA who were directly involved in any form of mental health support of conversation as there were varying opinions of their levels of concern for this subject and I had still not been able to find out exactly what the tours did to offer support. This was difficult because of the nature of the pro tours, half of the creation of my project fell during the off season when most people were unavailable and out of office, and when I was in contact with people at the end of the season they were busy with the year-end tournaments, but for the ATP I was able to get around this as they provided me with a statement to use.
During my research for this project I found that the WTA had an Athlete Assistance department which worked with the physio and medical team but instead offered psychological and mental support to their players, and managed to interview the department's senior director Kathy Martin, during which I was told the department would be changing their name for the 2020 season to the Mental Health Department in effort to make the area less of a taboo. This interview was one of the most insightful parts of this whole project as I had been completely unaware of the level and quality of the support that was on offer from the WTA to their players and had never seen it reported or spoken about, which was surprising as the duty of care the WTA and its Mental Health Department have shown to their players deserves to be more widely known, which is something I hope I can now contribute to with my documentary.
Overall, I'm finishing my project feeling positive that change is happening and steps are being taken to break the stigma of the mental health conversation in tennis, improve existing support and speeding up the process of implementing new support as all key stakeholders in the sport recognise that this is a prevalent issue and that mental health struggles are common and those affected need support. Everyone involved seems to want the same end goal of a sport where the topic of mental health is destigmatised so players can easily access the help they need and speak about how they are feeling to ensure it doesn't affect their careers and their level on court.