Knight added: “I dropped out of the England Hockey system because it was putting too much pressure on me, negatively impacting my mental health. I am not alone in this. And I am sure there are hundreds of young athletes feeling the same way across all sports nationwide. Young athletes should not feel alone and unable to talk about the pressures they are experiencing.”
England Hockey said in a statement: “We very much welcome Katie’s desire to make a positive change in this area and our Head of Talent Development, Junior Talent Development Manager and Talent Development Officer were all pleased to get the opportunity to speak to her recently, sharing the steps we currently take right across our talent pathway.
“We are fortunate with the level of support that we have in place around the senior programmes and have more recently been recruiting additional performance psychology support into GB EDP to aid the players involved.”
Meanwhile, the English Institute of Sport (EIS) said that it will explore performance lifestyle aided towards junior athletes. In 2018 a Mental Health Strategy for the High Performance System was launched and hockey is one of the sports to invest additional resource into performance lifestyle on top of the EIS allocation.
In response to Knight’s admission that junior athletes are not receiving the full lifestyle support in a stressful environment, an EIS spokesperson said: “We are currently exploring, alongside England Hockey, whether this support could be extended further down the pathway.”
EIS said that performance lifestyle support is currently provided to 60 athletes on the World Class Programme and to those transitioning athletes who have left the centralised programme in the past 12 months.
