Erin Strout knew from years of covering track and field the mental health challenges female athletes face. What she didn’t realize until she was working on a new book on the subject was that those challenges can linger long after athletes’ playing days are over. “One athlete I talked to had a coach that forbade sugar,” says Strout ’97 Com. “When she eats dessert today, she still hears his voice.”

In The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women’s Sports—From the Schoolyard to the Stadium, Katie Steele, a marriage and family therapist who ran track and cross country for the University of Oregon, and Tiffany Brown, a faculty member in the University of Oregon’s Couples and Family Therapy graduate program, examine the trauma women experience in sport—developing eating disorders, enduring sexual abuse, and engaging in self-harm—and ways coaches and parents can help. Strout, a veteran journalist who has written for publications such as SELF, Runner’s World, and Women’s Health, wove those stories and others she had heard from athletes over the years into a narrative that shows how pervasive those issues are across sports. “It doesn’t matter if it’s basketball or swimming or gymnastics,” she says.

The authors explain the outdated mindset that mental health issues make someone less of an athlete and show that when women receive professional help for depression or anxiety, their athletic performance improves as a result. Strout’s hope is that the book generates more of an awareness of mental health among parents and athletic administrators and leads to more mental health resources for both women and men at all levels of sport. “This is sort of a call to all of us to take a look at the next step,” Strout says. “It’s great that we’re all talking about mental health, but now how do we put that into practice and make sure that we’re not just talking about it but doing something about it?”