Manchester Valley High students raise mental health awareness through pickleball fundraiser

Manchester Valley High School students held a pickleball tournament this week to raise money for the charity Morgan’s Message, a nonprofit that helps student-athletes struggling with mental health issues.

Morgan’s Message is named for Morgan Rodgers, a Virginia native and lacrosse player at Duke University who died by suicide July 11, 2019 at the age of 22 following mental health struggles. The nonprofit also functions as a club at many schools, including Manchester Valley High, where Brady Bonney, 17, of Manchester, and Leigh Hoke, 17, of Manchester, serve as student-athlete ambassadors.

“With our love for pickleball and our passion for mental health and Morgan’s message, it just kind of hit us that this is something really cool that we could do,” said Bonney, who helped organize the event.

Sixteen two-person teams raised $640 in participation fees. Bonney said the plan is to donate $500 to Morgan’s Message and spend the rest to install a banner in Manchester Valley High’s stadium, where club members may write a message upon graduating.

Mason Derr and Emily McElwaine, a team dubbed “Em & M,” won first place, Bonney said in an email.

Prizes for first-, second- and third-place winners include a large jar of pickles, school supplies, pickleball gear, and snacks. Each participant received a Morgan’s Message bracelet, snacks and crocheted butterflies. All prizes were donated by members of the community.

Although the fundraiser was not school-sponsored, many participants and organizers knew each other through the the high school, and Manchester Valley athletics boosters helped promote the event on social media, Bonney said.

“Pickleball a sport that you can express that competitive side while still having like fun with friends,” Bonney said, “and it’s actually a great workout.”

The students, both in their junior year, play varsity soccer at the high school. Bonney said he discovered pickleball several years ago by playing with his grandfather, and his love for the sport has grown alongside the game’s meteoric rise in popularity. Bonney tries to play pickleball with his friends at least once a week, and he appreciates that the game is now taught in gym classes.

“[Pickleball is] definitely a good sport for mental health,” Hoke said. “When all of our friends get together, we play music and do little games with each other. We’re able to just have fun, be ourselves, and relax for once.”

Because student athletes are more likely to associate their sense of self-worth with their on-the-field performance, mental health issues impact athletes in a unique way, Bonney said, and too few people are aware of that.

It is ingrained in athletes to be tough, Hoke said, to have a shake-it-off and get-back-up mentality. While these messages may inspire stronger performances on the field, it is also antithetical to some of the best mental health practices.

“In the high school age group and community, you can walk through the hallway and you’ll probably hear the phrase, ‘kill yourself,’ multiple times,” Bonney said. “While it’s easy to laugh it off and take it as a joke, when you are really feeling that way it sticks with you more. With Morgan’s Message, the message is really that we are humans before we are athletes, and we are always going to be important as humans, and represent more than just our statistics on the field.”

Bonney said he has struggled with mental health issues in the past, which lead him to join Morgan’s Message. The athlete had a great childhood and entered high school as a starry-eyed, cheerful student. However, Bonney soon become inundated with responsibilities as a student, an athlete, and a leader in clubs and among his peers, and gradually began to feel worse about himself during his first winter in high school.

“There were so many things that I felt like I just had to do,” Bonney said, “and I was scared that if I said anything to anyone, that they would look at me as less than I really was, or incapable of doing things. I was terrified to lose those things. I didn’t want to have to drop clubs or stop playing sports or take fewer advanced classes, so I kept going and pushing through. Eventually I talked to some friends about it and I found Morgan’s Message.”

Hoke has also struggled with her mental health, she said.

“I grew up with anxiety,” Hoke said, “so I’ve been anxious my entire life. Battling that has definitely been hard, especially going through school always wanting to be the best that I could. When I would get a B on a test, even though that’s not bad, I would perceive it as awful and failing, and I would get in my head about how awful I was.”

For someone who is already a harsh self critic, it is tough to play sports under a coach that is also critical of her performance, Hoke said. The athlete is grateful for support from her family and from teachers at the school like Lauren Stevens, a science teacher who was also named Carroll County’s teacher of the year in 2023. Stevens is known for forming personal connections with students.

“Finding Morgan’s Message for me was a chance to open up and not hide everything I was going through all the time,” Hoke said, “and being able to find people on my team, friends that were also going through things similar to me.”

“The message is really just reminding us that we are people, that we’re going to have bad games, that it’s just a sport, to go and seek help, and that therapy is ok” Bonney said. “These things are OK because every person faces some mental health struggle at some time, and opening the conversation is important because by opening the conversation, you already make it incredibly less likely that someone goes down that same unfortunate path.

“Getting introduced to this club really helped me find that positive light,” Bonney said, “that not everything’s OK, but things also don’t have to be terrible. I don’t need to look for the bad in my life, and I don’t need to be scared, because other people have gone through it, too.”