Now that Sporting Wellness has turned five years old, I thought it would be a good opportunity to provide an update on the impact we’ve made, the challenges we’ve faced and where we intend to go. The purpose of this review is to provide as much transparency as possible to those who have donated and supported us so far, hopefully giving them, and others who may wish to support us in the future, an idea of how donations would be put to work.
Sporting Wellness is a charity that provides free, confidential and professional mental healthcare to UK representative sportspeople aged 16+. The support we provide includes professional counselling sessions, a 24/7/365 support line, an online CBT programme and much more.
The charity was started after a realisation that the vast majority of sportspeople in the UK didn’t have access to this type of support. Whilst those belonging to well-funded professional players associations in mainstream sports were well looked after, there was an invisible majority whose only options were to pay for their own private healthcare or get stuck on an NHS waiting list. A huge inequality of access issue, given that the unique challenges an athlete faces aren’t exclusive to high-level professionals in mainstream sports.
So, there was a need for a support system that could provide free mental health support directly to athletes in all sports, all representative levels. The pressure to perform, injuries, excessive training demands, and social life sacrifices are just some of the reasons why being an athlete, at any representative level, is difficult enough without mental health challenges. Not to mention, all athletes are humans, and anyone can struggle with their mental health and emotional well-being. At Sporting Wellness, we passionately believe that no career or ambition in sport should be affected by a lack of access to mental health support.
Initially, we planned to build a network of practitioners to directly provide mental health support to each individual that enquired. However, we quickly realised that equality of access with this model would be impossible due to the high financial and administrative burdens it would require from day one, and a lack of in-house expertise to assess individual needs. So, we shifted our focus towards facilitating access into an existing support system through a services agreement with an established provider. This model has particularly suited us because of our ability to reach athletes directly via social media. Without us being able to do this, the upfront cost this model requires would be difficult to justify. And so, we were able to support a large number of individuals without incurring significant operational costs or having to compromise on the quality of support we provide.
Since our support system opened in January 2020, we have supported over 2,600 individuals in 117 sports. All of these have come through our direct-to-athlete support system via self-referral on our website and have ranged from representative school athletes all the way up to Olympic medalists and Premier League footballers. We would encourage any sportsperson who feels they need support to reach out to us.
One of the areas we have tried to improve every year is reducing friction within our self-referral process. When someone is ready to reach out for help, the process of receiving it can’t be confusing or hidden away. Increasing the salience of our self-referral form, and reducing the number of obstacles for our beneficiaries will increase the impact Sporting Wellness has by:
Efforts on this in 2024 included design and content tweaks on our website and the simplification of our communications to athletes once a referral had been approved. In 2025 we hope to redesign our self-referral process completely and introduce WhatsApp as a route-of-access option. It’s taken us too long to realise how important it is to focus on this, but it will be a priority from now on. Our support can be free, professional and confidential, but if accessing it feels too much like hard work, we won’t be very useful for our beneficiaries.
Inclusivity and ease of access into our support system would also mean little if the actual support provided had not been effective. Given the nature of mental health, it’s difficult for us to impact this metric directly, but it’s important it’s constantly monitored. So far, we’ve been pleased by the difference our support has made. For example, over the past twelve months, the structured therapy sessions our beneficiaries have received have reduced anxiety symptoms by an average of 46.15% and depression symptoms by 58.33%. We’re proud of this. In 2024, we were also able to add new services into our support system: life-coaching and leadership training sessions. We feel that as preventative support options, these complement the existing services and give our beneficiaries more choice.
It seems many charities make mistakes and face significant challenges in their first few years, and Sporting Wellness has been no exception to this. Funding has been difficult, and I learned far too slowly how competitive the charity sector is. To those who have gone out of their way to fundraise for Sporting Wellness, your support has enabled us to continue to help our beneficiaries, and we couldn’t be more grateful. Whilst we will always be reliant on public fundraising to some degree, we can’t afford to be dependent on it. Being so would make us too fragile. That’s why in 2022 we made a strategical shift. We began selling services to run joint preventative campaigns, increase accessibility to our own support system, and facilitate additional, bespoke services to specific sporting organisations (note – our support is always free for the athletes). These additional services so far include financial well-being education in partnership with Brooks Macdonald, and a bespoke career transition programme through a collaboration with IBM’s athlete network. We will continue to add to these in 2025 and have now welcomed twelve organisations on-board such as schools, independent sports clubs, universities and national governing bodies.
Our goal from these services will be to provide as much value as possible to our partners and their athletes. We’re in a fortunate position not to have to fundraise for any full-time salaries or handle the expectation of returning money to shareholders. This structural advantage, alongside the help of some charitable fundraising, should enable us to offer exceptional value for money that would be extremely difficult to do as a for-profit business. I’m confident that the benefits from this will pour directly to our beneficiaries in two ways. Firstly, our services will remain accessible to any organisation, ensuring equality of access. Awareness and hard-hitting campaigns have their place, but the most important intervention for someone with mental health difficulties is access to medical healthcare. Pricing out organisations with smaller budgets would make no sense. Secondly, our non-profit structure and focus on distributing free services to those in need, instead of growing free cash flows to return to shareholders, will position us brilliantly to share our resources and cross-promote services with other organisations delivering well-being support and education. Over time, any scale efficiencies achieved from this can be shared amongst our partners and their athletes. We’re a charity after all, and we hope this comes as good news to them.
We can’t expect explosive, tech industry-like growth from this, and we certainly won’t chase it. But if Sporting Wellness is to be there for those that need us in 10, 20 years’ time, it’s crucial we build what most durable, sustainable charities have; a funding model based on income-generating services that provide real value to customers. Donations dry up considerably during an economic downturn (especially for a relatively niche cause) and we’ve experienced a taste of this from 2020-2021 and late 2023. Providing real value to organisations can hopefully insulate Sporting Wellness from any bigger economic downturns in the future that we may have to face. Furthermore, having real customers will help us provide the value we aim to deliver. Users of free services may be less likely to complain if standards slip but customers certainly will. They’ll let us know when we’ve gone off course. To reiterate, the private mental healthcare we provide is always completely free for the athlete, whether they access it directly or through one of our partners.
Regardless of how precious funding is (currently very!), as a public charity, operational efficiency will always be a priority. Irrespective of charitable status, operational costs are inevitable for any organisation to stay alive. However, we have constantly sought to cut these wherever we can without it being counterproductive and diluting the quality of our services. In the past our costs have been much higher as we evolved and learned what expenditure was necessary, but I’m confident we now operate as lean as possible. Most notably, in 2023 we automated our entire data entry process. Donors of Sporting Wellness will hopefully agree that we’d prefer for Vikki (the other half of Sporting Wellness’ day-to-day team!) to use her time guiding our beneficiaries through the process of receiving the help they need, where someone with Vikki’s attention to detail and compassion is truly essential. We don’t want her to be stuck in the weeds of backend systems and data entry. Automating the parts that should be automated have significantly improved our operational efficiency and will continue to save the charity considerable labour costs over time. Our attitude towards operational costs will always be unapologetically frugal and we will always look at ways to decrease them.
One of the costs that is always hard to strike a balance with is marketing and advertising. Sporting Wellness is useless if our prospective beneficiaries don’t know we exist and so we’ve always seen our ‘brand’ and marketing as essential. In general, this has been a strength of ours. However, when a charity spends time and money on marketing and advertising, I believe it’s important not to get sucked into the ‘raising awareness’ trap. Awareness is great but it can’t be an objective on its own. There has to be something tangible and specific you’re raising awareness for beyond just ‘mental health’. At Sporting Wellness, we try to raise awareness of our support system so that we can provide more sportspeople with access to private mental healthcare. We also raise awareness of the unique challenges that athletes of all abilities face to highlight why we need to exist, showing that we understand them. We hope awareness raising of this nature will also encourage people, with whom our cause resonates, to fundraise for us. Primarily this is in the form of organic (free) content and a very limited social media advertising spend that’s monitored to ensure a positive return (for us, this means referrals from UK representative sportspeople aged 16+ who want mental health support).
On advertising – spending more and more on social media ads will not be a reliable way for us to support more and more athletes in the future. This type of advertising is great initially because the cost per individual reached starts out so low. Within our first few years, our ad spend had a hugely positive return in terms of self-referrals received. Although this was a great jumpstart, these gains have now been had and the frequency with which our ads have been seen within our target demographic on platforms like Instagram is much higher. As more and more businesses channel their ad-spend towards social media, simple supply and demand will dictate that we have to spend more to reach the same number of athletes. Given our budget restraints and desire to remain a low-cost, high impact organisation, we will simply not be able (or willing) to spend enough on ads to move the needle.
This presents us with a problem to solve as there are countless more sportspeople in the UK who would benefit from knowing Sporting Wellness exists. Figuring out how to keep reaching them will be our biggest challenge in 2025 and beyond (alongside sustainable funding). The lazy approach would be to find a way to justify an increased ad-spend. It will be more difficult to reach athletes through organic media, but a sustainable traffic source would be a significant breakthrough for us, so it’s worth the effort and experimentation. However, I suspect that the best approach over the long term will be to focus on creating the best possible service for those that genuinely need it, rather than obsessing year-to-year over social media tactics and marketing strategies.
Overall, making more people aware of Sporting Wellness will continue to be an important driver of our impact. But we will always ensure that efforts on this will be channeled towards serving our beneficiaries, rather than vanity metrics and awareness for the sake of it. The feeling of momentum that comes with followers and views on social media can become addicting and give off the impression that everything is going amazingly. It’s certainly not a bad thing, but we feel that it’s only useful if it helps us deliver higher quality free services to more sportspeople in need of them.
Earlier, I mentioned Vikki, who is our Head of Operations. At Sporting Wellness, we have a volunteer trustee board of four, as well as a volunteer treasurer (my sister, Hannah!). All have experience and expertise in different areas essential to our operations and have guided with a light hand on the rudder. In terms of the day-to-day work, it is just Vikki and myself. I don’t know where we would be without her, but we certainly wouldn’t be where we are. She plays a part in every single aspect of the charity, helps ensure our safeguarding and governance is watertight, liaises with fundraisers, and handles our entire referral processing procedure. But most importantly, she has been the point of call for our beneficiaries day in and day out. Sometimes these have been very vulnerable young people in a crisis state. The professionalism, thoroughness and care that she shows for those we support is the bedrock upon which our impact to date has been made. In many ways, despite never wanting to take any credit for her work, she has been the architect of Sporting Wellness over these past few years. We have had many fantastic ambassadors, from Lions rugby players to Olympic gold medalists. But our greatest ambassador, by far, has been Vikki.
Lastly, some thoughts on where I see Sporting Wellness for the foreseeable future. Our number one priority is to become better at what we already do. What works for us may not work for other charities, but we believe we can achieve the most public benefit by ‘staying in our lane’. We started Sporting Wellness to create equality of access to free, professional mental health services for UK-representative sportspeople. Five years on, we still believe there is a need for us to keep doing this and become better at it. Chasing trends, announcing new programmes in different areas for the sake of it, and diluting efforts towards our core mission would not mean we were growing faster or staying relevant.
Staying relevant, for us, is purely about the services we provide to our beneficiaries. Looking further ahead, it will be crucial for Sporting Wellness to adapt to how they want to receive support with their mental health. It’s clear that AI will change the way mental health services are delivered very soon. Whilst human interaction and talking therapy will always be needed, conversational agents will likely be revolutionary for early intervention, triage and as a first point of call for those still worried about stigma. There also just aren’t enough mental health practitioners around to cope with demand.
Perhaps the future of mental health isn’t about getting more and more people into clinics but about getting the practical tools that clinicians use into the hands of the people that need them, as early as possible.
In terms of conversational agents for mental health support, generative AI systems (think Chat GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek) could be harmful, and may be likely to say/text the wrong thing from a clinical perspective. That’s clearly a risk we wouldn’t take. But rules-based AI systems could be tightly controlled, predictable and overseen by professionals and the clinics themselves. This would create a safe environment for support as well as accurate identification of when an AI agent has maxed out the support it can provide, prompting the signposting to a professional practitioner at the perfect time. We will make sure we aren’t caught flat footed on all of this.
Whilst we haven’t been a perfect charity by any means, I do think the past five years have been a success. However, we’ve had a good amount of luck that has significantly contributed to getting Sporting Wellness to where it is now. It’s likely that a lot of you reading are responsible for this luck, as we have stumbled across some incredible supporters who have understood us, cared about our cause and stuck with the charity. That has to be acknowledged as it would be very easy (and tempting!) to post-rationalise everything that’s worked well to make it seem as if we planned and executed everything perfectly. On the contrary, there has been an incredible amount of learning on-the-go over the past five years and I suspect there will be a lot more if we are lucky enough to have another five.
However, I hope you can trust that Sporting Wellness will always look outward rather than inward. And, that we will always remember who we work for – representative sportspeople in the UK who are in need of support with their mental health. Unlike a business, Sporting Wellness isn’t for the people who work in it or control it, it belongs in its entirety to its beneficiaries.
Fulfilling your ambition in a chosen sport during your youth should be some of the best years of your life. When poor mental health gets in the way of this, or things don’t work out with sport and a life-transition knocks you off-course, having the ability to access professional mental healthcare for free is absolutely vital and why we exist.
A massive thank you to everyone who has supported Sporting Wellness. Whether you’ve set up a monthly £5 donation or simply told your friends about us, it makes a huge impact and means the world to us and our beneficiaries.
Callum,
Founder.