Hilinskis' powerful message to IU athletes: 'You don't need a tragedy to ask for help'
The Herald-Times
BLOOMINGTON — At his son's memorial service, Mark Hilinski was approached by CJ Dimry, a Washington State wide receiver and his son's roommate and best friend on the team. Dimry had something on his mind, but it took him a while to get to it.
"He said, 'Mr. Hilinski, can I ask you a quick question?'" Hilinski told a crowd of freshman student athletes last month at Indiana's Heinke Hall of Champions in Memorial Stadium. "He said, 'I don't know if you know this, but I don't have a car.' I said, 'I didn't know that, but why are you telling me now?'"
Dimry went on. His mother had died of cancer when he was 5 years old. Since he was 6, he had been seeing a psychologist to deal with trauma. His appointments had become less frequent as he grew older, but he still went from time to time in college. And that's where his lack of a car became relevant to the story.
Mark's son Tyler, then the backup quarterback at Washington State, did have a car, so he always drove Dimry to the psychologist's office for the meetings. He'd usually go get a burger or a burrito somewhere and sit in the parking lot and eat while he waited for Dimry to come back out the door, and often they'd talk about what Dimry was going through and what he talked about in his appointments.
So after Tyler died by suicide on Jan. 16, 2018 at the age of 21, Dimry was haunted by just how close Tyler might have been to getting help that could have saved his life and how many opportunities he had to get it.
"CJ wanted to know why Tyler didn't say, 'Hey dude, I know you're struggling but I'm having some rough thoughts here,'" Mark said, taking pauses to try to deal with the tears he couldn't stop and keep from being overwhelmed with emotion. "CJ described it as, he was 50 feet, 50 feet from that door."
The more Mark thought about the question the more the answer was obvious to him. He knew what Tyler would have said if he asked him why he never would have gone to see a psychologist. Dimry had a tragedy in his past, and he didn't, so he wouldn't think he was qualified to need that kind of help.
Mark and his wife Kym know there are a lot of other young people, particularly young athletes, who would have a similar approach. In their world, perseverance is lionized, and they develop a mindset they should play through all the pain they can bear whether it's physical or mental.
So that's why they started Hilinski's Hope Foundation for student athlete mental health. That's why Mark and Kym have given more than 140 emotionally raw, hour-long speeches to athletes across the country as they did at Indiana last month. It's why they didn't wait until they thought they had any kind of expertise on psychology or a polished presentation to take their message to as many student athletes as would listen.
"If you don't get anything else out of this," Mark told the crowd, "just please, get that you don't need a tragedy to ask for help. If you have no idea why you're struggling, that's all you have to say."
Indiana's Excellence Academy is the brainchild of former athletic director Fred Glass, an institution physically housed in the South End Zone of Memorial Stadium with classes and structures designed to develop IU's student athletes on a personal level, going beyond their physical and even academic development.
The academy's mission is built on eight tenets. It's stated goal is to enable student athletes to "be well in mind, body and spirit; reach their highest potential and become champions; be unselfish leaders and teammates; learn to serve, lead and follow; integrate with the broader university community and be part of something bigger than themselves and grow into confident young men and women prepared to face the world and start their careers."
In the pursuit of that vision, Lisa Winters, the Excellence Academy's director of leadership and life skills, is tasked with finding speakers whose message adheres to those tenets. She runs both the Freshmen Excellence Sessions, eight monthly mandatory meetings for the entire freshman student athlete population and the Excellence Academy Speaker Series, which are open to all student athletes. Hilinski's Hope fit with both programs in pursuit of the first tenet, being well in mind, body and spirit, so it made sense to make it the first speakers the freshmen were required to see in the new school year.
"I kind of think of it as like a toolbox," Winters said. "We're trying to provide them with some of those basic things, those fundamental things we believe as an athletic department will be important for them to be successful here and in life beyond."
To those athletes looking for more fulfillment and a deeper education from their time at IU than their classes and sports, the Excellence Academy's approach and infrastructure stand out.
"I think the resources we have in terms of whole person development is out of the park,'" said Margaret Rogers, a redshirt junior diver on the women's swimming and diving team and the president of IU's Student Athlete Advisory Council. "There are so many opportunities for that kind of development whether it be in mental health or community impact or community service kind of things, diversity and inclusion initiatives. There's a lot of leadership coming from higher up that is pushing those things, and it allows students to be creative and think of ways that we can further those initiatives internally with our athlete community. They give us the ability to do that."
The idea to have Hilinski's Hope as part of the program actually came from an intern.
Maddie White, Indiana's deputy athletic director, senior women's administrator and the head of IU's mental health task force, is also Winters' supervisor and mentor. White asked Winters if IU could bring in a speaker for Suicide Prevention Week with a connection to athletics. Winters asked Alissa Chavez, IU's Big Ten Diversity intern, to come up with a list. She was at Georgetown when the Hilinskis spoke there and knew how big of an impact they had made, so she put them at the top of her list.
"She said, 'I didn't get to hear them speak,'" Winters said, "'but I did get to hear everyone's reaction to their speech. And they were phenomenal.' We reached out from there and you kind of knew from the very first conversation that this is one of those incredibly meaningful opportunities."
The Hilinskis got a similar reaction in Bloomington. The reason why is that they don't claim to be experts on anyone else's tragedy but their own, and they also don't try to hide the degree to which they're still looking for answers, and still very much in pain every day.
Mark takes the microphone first and tells most of Tyler's story, but before he gets going he offers full disclosure.
"Kym and I are not mental health experts," he says. "We're not trained or licensed mental health practitioners."
Kym is an attorney. Mark was in technology retail. They clearly aren't afraid of public speaking, but they obviously never expected to go on nationwide tours together.
There are multi-media elements to the presentation. There are highlight videos of Tyler's time at Washington State and a few PowerPoint slides to create some structure. But there's no script, just a mother and father remembering their son and the last year before he took his own life and piecing together what little they know about why he made that decision.
It is unpolished, and that is intentional. There are tears, sniffles, pauses, waves of emotion that can be contained but not defeated.
"We can't practice this," Mark said. "This isn't a slick PowerPoint, because it hurts too much. Each time we do it, it's a little bit of a s***show in our mind. But we try to be transparent and try to reach whatever Tyler, female, male or other identifier, and look at it as him being there and wish somebody would hear it if they needed it."
Once Mark and Kym decided they should talk to as many student athletes as possible to try to make sure no one else went through what they were going through, there was no point in waiting until they had a professional looking presentation or had gained more classical expertise. They just wanted to reach people.
"I honestly think it goes back to how much we love Tyler," Kym said. "We love our other sons. I have this issue, I fall in love pretty easy. I love our student athletes. I really do. And I look at them and I see Tyler. And I know that if Tyler, my sweet son, who seemingly had it all, was struggling, how many other Tylers were out there? And I don't want to lose another one."
Indeed, what stands out as Mark and Kym tell Tyler's story is there weren't many clues he was troubled and there didn't seem to be much reason he should be. All seemed to be well in his personal life. He had a girlfriend, close friends on the team, and he was the peacekeeper in the Hilinski family dynamic.
And his star as a player was rising. He was a redshirt sophomore that year and was the backup to senior Luke Falk, who was in the midst of re-writing Washington State's passing record book and would be drafted by the Tennessee Titans that spring. Falk had some struggles that season and then-Washington State coach Mike Leach didn't hesitate to throw Hilinski into pressurized situations. He was carried off the field after throwing for 240 yards and three touchdowns, including a game-winner in triple overtime, in a comeback win over Boise State. He threw for 509 yards in a loss to Arizona, and he got the start against Michigan State in the Holiday Bowl and threw for 272 yards and two touchdowns even though the Cougars lost that game. He had every reason to believe he'd be Washington State's starter in 2018.
At the time, Tyler gave off very little reason to suspect that he was dealing with depression or suicidal thoughts. He certainly never mentioned anything to his family. However, he did tell one of his close friends on the team late in the year he felt sad and he wasn't sure why. He knew everything was going well for him and he couldn't connect the sadness to anything in his life.
In retrospect, the Hilinskis could see some signs but very subtle ones. During his speech, Mark showed video of three postgame news conferences from the 2017 season, and he noticed a dramatic difference in his energy level in his answers after the Holiday Bowl. In retrospect, Mark said, that seems to be about the time Tyler decided what he was going to do.
The Hilinskis went on vacation to Mexico after the Holiday Bowl, and neither Mark nor Kym detected anything then. But just a few weeks later, they got a call from a member of the Washington State staff saying Tyler had missed a spring semester workout — something he had never done — and they'd filed a missing persons report. Mark thought of flying to Pullman, but he waited, and within hours he got the word that Tyler had died.
Several days prior, Tyler had gone skeet shooting with new roommates. One of them lost an AR-15. It was found near Tyler's body after he had shot himself. The coroner who worked on Tyler's body made a point to tell Mark that he had clearly done so in a manner that was intended not to hurt anyone but himself. There was no note. Investigators found his laptop and iPad but couldn't find his phone.
In the days after the Hilinskis' presentation, Winters made a point to check in with several athletes to get a sense of how they'd processed it. It was obviously the heaviest of ways to start the new semester.
"There was a lot of emotion going on," Winters said. "There was a part of me that thought, 'Oh man, our poor freshmen. I hope they don't think every one of them is going to be this intense and deep.'"
But she found they appreciated the message and the reality. For years they'd been hearing more and more about mental health and its importance has become more of a public focal point, even for athletic departments and institutions like the Big Ten, but much of what they'd been hearing was abstract.
The Hilinskis' message clarified the stakes.
"They were like, 'Wow, that was intense, but it was really great to hear,'" Winters said. "... To have the Hilinskis come in and share the story that they did, of course we're talking worst case scenario. But I love the things that they really tried to drive home. It doesn't take some giant, traumatic event that grabs everyone's attention that would give you cause to keep an eye out on someone or to check in or follow up."
Six months later the phone was found at the apartment by new tenants, but his passcode had been changed. The Hilinskis were eventually put in touch with a codebreaking company who managed to get into the phone and learned that Tyler had changed his password days before he killed himself, and they found evidence he was researching methods of suicide that would not create collateral damage. Within Tyler's new passcode were numbers that on a telephone keypad spelled out the word "sorry."
The lack of polish, the complete transparency, the fact the Hilinskis were freely sharing their deepest, most sincere emotions all drove home the message.
After Mark finished telling all of Tyler's story, Kym took the microphone to address what athletes could do. There was a recommendation for coaches and athletes to normalize the idea of seeking help and working with psychologists and not seeing that as a sign of weakness. But she also recommended forming what she called "triads," small networks of three friends who could make a covenant among themselves to check in on each other. It was also an homage to Tyler's football number, 3, and when the presentation was over, she asked each of the athletes in attendance to hold up three fingers so they could take a picture.
That recommendation, Winters said, had immediate impact. Within days of the Hilinskis' presentation, student athletes told her they had begun setting up triads, seeing it as the simplest way to monitor and support each other.
The Hilinski's presentation drove home the point of the need for immediate action and change, because it erased the illusion that if anything goes wrong with someone's mental health, there will always be time to adapt and respond.
"What really struck me was there were very few warning signs, it seemed like," Rogers said. "I think that was the scariest thing from it and one of the most important takeaways. The warning signs aren't always going to be the top three symptoms of someone with suicidal ideation. There might be none and it might be entirely an internal battle that no one knows about."
That was always the Hilinskis' purpose: To make others comfortable discussing mental health, they had to make themselves willing to discuss what they had lost.
"We don't want to lose another Tyler," Kym said. "We don't want a family to go through the pain and sadness that we've gone through and experienced every day of our life without him."
