An Unlikely Team: WP Softball Coach Collaborates with Writing Professor to Bolster Student-Athletes’ Wellness

The William Paterson University softball team participated in a different kind of exercise recently—one meant to challenge and strengthen their minds.

In the name of wellness, the players took part in a team-only journaling session organized by head coach Jessica Jacobson and facilitated by creative writing professor Martha Witt. Dressed in their practice gear, carrying water bottles and bat bags, the players filled a conference room in Ben Shahn Center. Much like their practices on the field, they started with a warm-up—an activity using different adjectives and nouns to create a short poem. What followed, however, was unlike what they typically experience as a team.

After 20 minutes with blank sheets of paper and a charge to “freewrite,” their inner thoughts and feelings came pouring out.

“My mind was going a mile a minute,” one player said in the post-exercise discussion. “My hand had a hard time keeping up with my head,” another said. “Once I got started, I just kept going,” a teammate added.

“It helps to read back what I was feeling; it helps me process it,” offered one Pioneer—among the few there who journals regularly.

Jacobson, who has coached at William Paterson for the past three years, said she focuses “a lot” on gratitude and wellness in the Pioneer softball program. She also practices journaling for wellness personally and encourages her team to try doing the same.

“You practice softball for 20 hours a week, I’m told; that’s a lot of practice,” Witt said to the team. “It’s the same thing with this kind of writing. You need to practice … your brain gets kind of primed to do it if you journal regularly, especially if you do it at the same time each day,” she added, pointing to research on the topic.

In their closing exercise, Witt asked players to write down a word and then write down their associations with that word. Then, she told them to drop a slip of paper with just their word into a bucket. Each player later pulled a slip of paper from the bucket and read it aloud. “Appreciate … control … accomplishments … escape … inspire … empower … love.” Witt charged the players to keep their teammates’ hand-written words somewhere visible, and eventually, write down their own associations with it.

As the players headed out of the conference room, they thanked Witt, one-by-one.

Coach Jacobson and Professor Witt first met and joined forces two years ago. The Provost’s Office had put out a campus-wide survey about topics of interest relative to wellness, in preparation for faculty and staff Wellness Day programming. Jacobson recommended a session on writing for wellness, and coincidentally, so did Professor Witt. The Provost’s Office connected the two, and together, they organized and facilitated such a session for WP employees. Inspired by the experience, they started discussing a model for the softball team. Witt has also since launched a seminar on expressive writing for Honors College students, which she plans to turn into a full course.

The two plan to continue their “across the aisle” collaboration (as Witt refers to it) with additional softball team journaling sessions in the future.

“If you are growing off the field, it will impact you positively on the field,” Jacobson explains of her desire to focus on wellness initiatives with the softball team. “The wellness piece affects players’ ability to show up for themselves and for their team,” she continues, noting that Witt’s “non-sports” approach will translate to her players becoming better overall leaders.

“Part of our mission,” Witt adds, of the University as a whole, “is to break down barriers, such as seeing academics separate from sports. It’s all interconnected.”

04/15/24