Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

Happy New Year! I hope you have a wonderful, prosperous, happy and healthy 2025.

Sorry for the delay between editions. The spark was out for a while and we’ve had some things to take care of, including Peach’s recovery from a broken toe.

She’s about four weeks out from the injury, hitting the early part of the four-to-six-week recovery window. So far she’s navigated the recovery mostly pain-free, although the sores from toes running into each other have been a bit of a challenge. It’s looking like she’ll probably make pretty much a full recovery.

We’re handling a tough subject, so I’ll be dedicating this edition to exclusively covering it. College football has some wild playoffs going on, the NFL is nearing its postseason, and other leagues are in full swing, but they can wait for next time.

And as a content warning, there are many references to suicide, self-harm and other major mental health issues.

Now, let’s jump in.

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s mental health.

To tell this story, we’ll be talking about two people who aren’t here to tell their own stories, and one who is.

First, there’s Katie Meyer. She was the goalie on Stanford’s 2019 NCAA Championship-winning women’s soccer team. Thrust into action as a freshman, she was the hero in the penalty shootout of the championship game.

Looking at their roster, I can count at least eight active NWSL players, plus at least three more playing at a high level abroad. There are future stars like US women’s national team goal scorer extraordinaire Sophia Smith and the national team’s defensive anchor Naomi Girma.

Katie Meyer never made it to the pros. In August 2021, she allegedly spilled coffee on a Stanford football player. The player in question allegedly sexually assaulted one of Meyer’s teammates, who was a minor at the time.

The threat of school discipline hung over her. Between that, the pressure of success and her desire to graduate and then attend Stanford Law School, she was dealing with anxiety and depression. It was something Meyer acknowledged as a challenge throughout her career.

On a 2022 edition of her podcast “Be the Mentality,” she said that when she was not chosen for the US team at the U-17 World Cup as a teenager, “I thought my world was ending ... crashing down. ... I’m the biggest failure ... so ashamed and terrified, because my entire identity was being ‘that’ soccer player.”

On the night of February 28^th , Meyer was on the phone with her teammate Girma and got an email. It was a university notice about a disciplinary hearing.

It arrived after business hours. Via email. After six months of near silence from the university. On the last day before the school statute of limitations expired. The punishments, going as far as the school blocking her from graduating, now became real threats. 

The next day, Katie Meyer committed suicide. She was 22.

In the years since, advocacy in Katie’s name has bloomed. Katie’s teammates who made it to the national team launched a mental health initiative, making sure that during the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, US broadcaster Fox Sports set aside time to spotlight mental health.

Katie’s parents launched Katie’s Save, a group advocating for better mental health protections on college campuses and reforms to student disciplinary processes. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing students at the state’s public colleges and universities to have an outside adviser on the process. The bill’s name? Katie Meyer’s Law.

Second, there’s Morgan Rodgers.

Rodgers played for the Duke women’s lacrosse team in 2016, appearing in one game.

In January 2017, just before her sophomore season, she suffered a major knee injury. It knocked her out of action for a year. While she had surgery and worked hard to rehab the injury, she faced some private doubts. She felt she wasn’t meeting the expectations she should be meeting. She felt isolated from the rest of her team.

It wasn’t enough to get back on the field and after that, she stepped away from the team.

In the summer of 2019, just after coming home from a beach vacation with her family and friends, she committed suicide. She was 22.

Like Katie Meyer, Morgan’s death has also led to advocacy. Her family started Morgan’s Message, an advocacy group working to educate young student-athletes in high schools and colleges across the country.

And third, there’s Schuyler DeBree.

Her story hits close to home. Literally.

Schuyler grew up in Fair Haven, New Jersey, just like I did. In fact, although Fair Haven has produced a few Olympic medalists and was at one point the home of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, Schuyler is the only person I could find born or raised in Fair Haven to play in a major North American professional sports league (including MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, WNBA and NWSL.)

We never met or went to school together but I can distinctly remember her being in line in front of me when I was a kid at the town public library. To that point, I had never heard anybody spell the name I had seen as “Skyler” or “Skylar” the way she spelled it for the library clerk.

And while we’re at it, for those of you who read with a voice in your head, it’s pronounced De-BRAY. Leave your debris and any other trash or mispronunciations somewhere else. (Author’s note: Sorry, all those years of telling people it’s HEY-dar, not Hader or Huh-DAAR make name butcherings a sore spot.)

Her family’s outdoor clothing store is not much further than the distance of a long home run ball from my bedroom window. Her childhood home was about a 15-minute walk from mine.

I’m certain I passed it at least once heading over to Fair Haven Fields, our local park combining a small nature reserve with a large collection of football and soccer fields and tennis courts. 

It was there where a young Schuyler realized soccer was the game for her and refined her craft.

It brought her an opportunity, too. A coach of a youth soccer club saw her training by herself and signed her up for his team.

There, she realized that the state the game brought her to a sweet spot mentally and made her happy.

“I think I really got hooked on finding that flow state, when you’re dribbling or passing and it feels right, it’s such a good feeling,” she’d later say.

Schuyler went on to be a soccer phenom. As a player at Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School, she blazed through opponents, scoring 46 years over four seasons. 

Even before she became a key part of the Duke women’s soccer team, she’d make the letterboard on the Fair Haven Fire Department building a few times that I remember for her accomplishments.

She dealt with her share of anxiety and depression in college, including when she tore her ACL in her knee during her junior year, but came back to lead her team to success, including a trip to the final of the 2017 NCAA women’s soccer championship. On an elite defensive team, she helped the team shut out opponents in 18 of 26 games and won Defender of the Year in the highly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC.)

Even as close to today as 2018, pro women’s soccer was not what it is today. So despite being picked 11^th overall in that year’s National Women’s Soccer League Draft, Schuyler stayed in school and then opted to go play abroad for a team in Prague. Unsurprisingly, that club, AC Sparta Prague, won both the league championship as well as the Czech Women’s Cup, the prize for the separate national tournament of teams in the country.

She’d get the opportunity to play on the U.S. U-23 national team, the team of players under the age of 23 that, in effect, serves as a feeder team of players who could later join the top-level national team.

2019 brought the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. She joined Reign FC, the Seattle-area club in the NWSL. US women’s national team legend Megan Rapinoe, someone who young girls like Schuyler would have idolized in the early 2010s, was now a teammate of hers.

But after a few weeks, it became clear Schuyler was, for the first time in her life, overmatched and out of her usual soccer environment.

And that took its toll.

“I was pretty depressed while playing professionally. I think a big source of it was like soccer had become, instead of being this place where I could go and access a flow state and just enjoy myself and kind of get out of my rational brain a little bit, instead I was forced out of my flow state constantly in training and in games and I did not thrive in that,” she said.

In a matter of weeks, things quickly spiraled. Her self-worth plummeted. Without soccer functioning properly, nothing else in life did. Basic tasks, both on and off the field, became nearly impossible. 

“I think one of the biggest differences for me was how much I focused on soccer in the NWSL there, when I was there. And playing I just felt this immense pressure to focus on soccer all the time so even if you were done with training it just sits on your brain in a way that I had never experienced before,” she said. 

“I need to feel like a balanced human that has more, multiple things that make me feel valuable and purposeful and grounded. Because it really did feel like all I had was soccer and I had to commit in that way to it to make it in the NWSL. But then when the soccer itself got shaky, that's my only pillar that I'm leaning on and placing my value in. And so it just really, yeah, I felt like a one-dimensional person that wasn't being good at that one dimension.”

She asked for a leave of absence and entered a months-long period where the overriding thought, every single day, was a desire for death.

Suicidal thoughts hung over her. But with a support network of family and friends, she made it through. 

“I was a shell of myself for about eight months and then finally started to get better, but it took about a year and a half before I was kind of training casually and realized like, ‘oh, I kind of want to try this again.’”

It led to another chance, a call in 2021 from the North Carolina Courage. Not only did they need someone to train with them, but there would be the real potential for playing time with some players away on international duty.

On April 10, 2021, Schuyler DeBree made her NWSL debut in a game against the Washington Spirit. It was in a Challenge Cup match, which isn’t part of the regular league season, so officially, she made zero appearances. But this wasn’t an exhibition or anything like that. This was a real-deal NWSL game. And she was in the starting lineup, no less.

“It feels like you made it to some degree and then, because we’re all competitive athletes, there’s just like, that next goal pops up immediately. So again, you’re then questioning even the achievement as you’re putting on that jersey and walking out onto the field,” she said, before adding, “I think the word that primarily came to mind, though, was ‘surreal.’”

The sum total of her gameplay is available to stream on Paramount+, deep in its NWSL archives. She mostly holds her own, except for on one play. Another rookie making her debut as well comes on as a substitute in the second half. A few minutes later, Spirit forward Trinity Rodman, a regular in this newsletter, blows past her.

You can be so, so good at something that you become a hero, striking awe into the people around you. They send you out into the world as their chosen star. You work your way up, up, and up. And yet, eventually you make it to a level where you get utterly humbled by the absolute best.

I’ve definitely seen it in the trivia and quiz bowl world. I was three-time all-state in high school quiz bowl and went on to be a champ on “Jeopardy!” People fight to have me as the ringer on their trivia team. But there are some folks on the quiz bowl and competitive trivia circuit (in places like the LearnedLeague championship and World Quizzing Championship) who can leave me in the dust.

And in the soccer world, it’s on full display here with Schuyler. By the time the camera cuts over, Rodman is long gone and already has a wide open breakaway to an easy goal.

Rodman has gone on to great fame and success, as one of the NWSL’s highest paid players and a star on the US women’s national team.

Schuyler quickly lost her starting spot and, after a few weeks of joy early on, went back into the darkness. Just like last time, the buzz wore off and the game became a frustrating, all-consuming endeavor.

Pro soccer was not working out. The game wasn’t coming naturally. Again, it wasn’t fun. And again, it made everything fall apart.

At the end of the season, she hung up her cleats, retiring from the game at age 25.

“I think I feel like I never was successful in the NWSL,” she’d later say. “And so that gives me this feeling of, ‘yes I played there.’ However, I don't feel like I was a professional player in the NWSL to a certain degree, which is irrational but yeah, that's my honest feeling that I have in my kind of body about it.”

But despite a second round of anxiety, depression and the same thought patterns that brought her to the brink of suicide, this story ends differently from those of Katie Meyer or Morgan Rodgers.

There are no charities or advocacy groups in Schuyler’s name.

I promised you that one person we’re talking about today would be here.

Schuyler DeBree is here. She is alive and well. And she’s carrying on the fight.

She works with Morgan’s Message, co-hosting their podcast, The Mental Matchup, with another Duke alum, former women’s lacrosse player Kat Zempolich.

Each episode highlights a different student-athlete’s mental health journey, or speaks with someone who has been in their support system.

“In the case that maybe someone is struggling in the way that I was, like, I just remember how dark and heavy and terrifying all of that was and I hope that – I would never wish that on anyone. So if I can do anything to help someone who is in a dark place, whether it’s a really deep, dark, scary thing or whether it’s just having an off day, I want to do that when I can,” she told me.

Schuyler has found a job outside of soccer in public health and has built a life of her own but plays for fun with a rec league team in New York City.

Last year, she joined a team in the first women’s edition of The Soccer Tournament, a 7-on-7 showdown run by the same folks who run The Basketball Tournament, the $1 million 3-on-3 competition that has brought many an old NBA star out of retirement (lookin’ at you, Greg Oden and “White Chocolate” Jason Williams.)

And she even feels good about her professional career, however brief it may have been and however much it didn’t feel like she was truly a pro.

“I’m really, really glad that I did try again,” she told me. “I think that I would have had much more doubt about whether or not I should be done with soccer if I had fully stopped playing.” 

Just last week after our chat, I spotted Schuyler in an Instagram story at an indoor soccer facility training with active NWSL players, including North Carolina Courage goalkeeper Casey Murphy (who we learned back in Edition 18 is now a fan of the classic MLS rundown penalty shootout.)

And as she told me, it makes it a lot easier to play the game the way she did on the back fields in Fair Haven.

“I was so happy to be playing pickup and playing for fun and just to take the contract and the pay and the pressure out of it,” she said. “I have many more days playing soccer now where I’m back in that flow state, just having a good time and enjoying myself and connecting with friends. And that’s what I love most about soccer.” 

You can access all the episodes of The Mental Matchup wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to learn more about Morgan’s Message, take a look here. Schuyler also wrote an essay about her story, which you can read here.

If you need help, don’t hesitate to rely on the resources available to you, including friends, family and anything that brings you happiness. There are also publicly available resources, including the Suicide and Crisis Hotline, available by call or text at 988.

And you can learn more about Schuyler’s journey by listening to our conversation, available below. It’s audio-only so enjoy the picture of Peach that sits on the screen instead.