It’s no secret that mental health has become a topic evermore top-of-mind in the cultural conversation. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen a nationwide increase in mental health-related challenges by 250% for a subset of one group in particular, the student-athlete. We sat down recently for a truly inspiring conversation with Erik Poldroo, Co-founder & Chief Operating Officer of The Zone, a personalized mental wellness platform for student-athletes and their athletic programs. We spoke about their origins, purpose, fears, frustrations, and pivots.
The Zone is gaining momentum in the market as they bring their solution now to a collection of marquee university athletic programs inside America. Based on our conversation, it’s easy to see the positive impact they are already having.
origin story
I was born and raised in New York City coming from relatively humble beginnings in a single mom household, had a younger sister and from a very young age was “the guy of the house”, if you will. As I got older, I had an opportunity to play baseball in college, that was my gateway to let go of any stress I had at home. When I went to college, however, I started to really feel some of those mental health struggles, from freshman year to the beginning of junior year, I started dealing with a lot of performance anxiety, the pressure I was putting on myself, not only from the perspective of: I need to perform well, to make mom proud, but also because I was on a scholarship that we couldn’t afford to lose, on top of all that I wanted to perform on the field driven by the dream of making it to the pros. Due to all that pressure I put on myself, pressing all the time, it became extremely difficult to manage. I’d get so engrossed in my own thoughts, it really started to take a toll on me not only as an athlete but also as a student. Ultimately, I was able to work my way through it, became an All-Conference outfielder, and even got to play a little bit of professional ball. Then at some point I had that aha moment, we need to create a better way for how we're providing (mental-health) support for student-athletes. I didn't feel comfortable opening-up because I didn't want to be “labeled” in a certain way. Additionally, Ivan our CEO and co-founder, faced his own set of challenges having to overcome both psychological and physical issues from a career ending knee injury. So, The Zone’s origin story transpired from student-athletes who dealt firsthand with these struggles.
Your Why
Our sole purpose is to give more access to care for the student-athletes who might not be feeling comfortable talking about it because of that stigma, we wanted to make sure that they have the tools and the resources in place so they can feel and perform their best. Our impact ultimately, is helping student-athletes avoid getting to that point of needing to see someone and becoming much more proactive about their own mental health journey in a holistic and sustainable way.
“We're really trying to disrupt the stigma of mental health and wellness in college athletics”
Opponent
We're really trying to disrupt the stigma of mental health and wellness in college athletics and the mentality where student-athletes always need to “suck it up”. While that can be noble, oftentimes, it's equally as strong, if not stronger to say look if you're going through something, it's okay, I'm here for you, please, let's talk about it so we can move forward through this journey together. We want to make sure that student-athletes know that they're not alone, that there is a community of former and current student-athletes who are so passionate about this topic.
We also wanted to disrupt how the support system currently looks inside college athletics, when you look at the care continuum, you immediately assume more access to counselors or therapists is the answer. While that's oftentimes very useful, there needs to be more early intervention and proactive measures to help them from getting to that point. The Zone is focused on the early intervention end of the care spectrum, helping athletes create sustainable routines to empower them and really take charge of their mental health
Solution
The Zone is a personalized mental wellness platform designed to empower student-athletes on their mental wellness journey. By providing wellness resources, data insights, and the opportunity to easily access existing, campus resources, we help create efficiency for athletic programs so they can provide more access to care, and help support their athletes in reaching their peak performance.
When you look at the topic of mental wellness in today's age, you think anxiety, you think depression, you think needing to go see a counselor, all these different things, and they all have one thing in common. It's often in the reactive stage. For The Zone, our goal is to help make sure that student athletes don’t get to that point, where they can check in with themselves daily, get the support they need to feel and perform their best, and help take weight off an overwhelmed support staff.
Uniqueness
There are so many mental health platforms in the world today. I think what really makes us unique is we're specifically designed for the student-athlete, our team is made up of former student-athletes, who have actually lived that journey. We've experienced our own bouts of mental health and really understand what that process looks like if you're not opening up, because we’ve suffered in silence.
We also do our best to immerse ourselves in our campus communities, by looking to be an extension of their support services. With other platforms, they are much less integrated with the actual campus lifestyle and what those specific student-athletes might need. You have campus counselors that can share existing campus resources into The Zone’s University Hub,, allowing them to have more touchpoints with their athletes, such as welcoming incoming freshmen for example, or providing follow up information after a mental health workshop has been had. , in addition to much more.
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As soon as a student athlete is on boarded onto The Zone, they personalize their own wellness journey immediately. Whether they want to improve concentration, their sleep habits or just ultimately feel better as a whole. Whatever it is that they're individually going through, they can select it as a goal.
That's where The Zone’s personalization component comes in, we create a tailored wellness routine, based off those respective goals. Additionally, as the student athlete continues to check in with themselves, we really start to derive insights for them. Highlighting, this is how you were feeling over the course of a week…the month…these are the top contributing factors… Now they can be more proactive with their overall mental wellness journey and get some insights and data they haven't been able to have before, because currently a lot of campus counseling centers are just doing manual form check-ins, you're not able to stay on top of how you're feeling unless you're being deliberate (e.g., a journal).
So, through the personalization and the insights, we really help provide more access and more education about how they're feeling and allow them to understand, which things are causing the stress and make changes to their day-to-day.
The routine aspect is designed for a student-athlete, where time is of the essence. Their days are so incredibly busy, it’s important to meet them where they are, by creating tailored routines based off some of those day-to-day events that they might be dealing with.
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We look at three key pillars of a student-athletes’ journey: mind, body, and overall life. With content that’s built in very digestible formats, everything from audio to video, infographics, articles, etc.
MIND: We have a team of medical professionals to help us create this content, we own about 85% of the content in the platform. But we have mindfulness exercises, everything from breathing techniques to box breathing, guided meditation, coping and resiliency training, performance optimization.
BODY: In our nutrition aspect since this correlates with mental health and how you're feeling. It's important to be educated on this because, especially in the cafeterias at these campuses, sometimes student-athletes aren’t making healthy food choices but then their trying to play well. It's important to have that education, because how you eat really does affect how you're feeling.
LIFE: Lastly we look at the holistic student-athlete journey, and some of the top contributing things that might be stressing them out or causing them to feel certain ways. For example, perhaps an upperclassman might be feeling a bit stressed, because their college career is coming to an end, we help them with life skills and transitions by preparing them for life after sports.
Brand Character
The relentless pursuit to move the ball forward is one, we very much have an inclusive, diverse, and eclectic group of individuals on our team with the same mission. There are student-athletes, from all different backgrounds and ethnicities, each bringing their own individual experiences. Having these different perspectives and being able to really lean on each other is something that's so incredibly important to us.
Brand in A Word
The Innovator Inside
Fears
Not knowing where you'll be in the next 12 to 24 months. At the same time, it's incredibly motivating, because you're able to really take charge of your own journey, if you're continuing to be persistent, work hard and do the right things, the opportunities to succeed start to work in your favor.
frustrations
Especially as a first-time founder, everything takes twice as long as initially anticipated, and double the amount of capital than you’d expect.
Brand Mentors
Seeing Nike’s core values has been very influential with us and how we approach scaling the business. They’ve been incredible with not only the culture that they've built internally, but they are always on the offensive, thinking years ahead of the game and if mistakes happen, you learn from them. At The Zone we try to emulate Nike’s approach, continue to grow by investing in our people, give our best selves to our team, make sure they're well taken care of, and feel they have a meaningful purpose. If we can deliver on these things, then we believe we’ll get the best work out of them as we pull on the same rope together. I think, especially in the early stages when Nike was growing, post Blue-Ribbon sports, it was really cool to see Phil Knight do that with his team.
“We learned the importance of trusting your gut and pivoting if it didn't feel right”
Risks & Pivots
Just starting a business in general is a huge risk, because you just don't know if it's going to work out. Originally The Zone was a summer camps company, hosting different sports camps throughout the summer. We took the risk of starting the business, getting it off the ground, trying to host as many summer camps as we could, having a health and wellness component to it, such as mindfulness. As we continued, we realized we had no business being in the summer camp space, it was costly to obtain the different permits, it was very capital intensive to make sure that we're able to not only rent the space, but then also the staff, the logistics, the travel, you name it.
We learned the importance of trusting your gut and pivoting if it didn't feel right, and there was a moment where we realized this is seasonal, we're not able to really position it throughout the entire year, like the other companies. That's when we transition into tech. We realized we could have a much larger impact for our student-athletes and that was the best decision we ever made!
Resources
Leaning on fellow founders and having a founder network who are going through similar experiences has been so incredibly helpful for me. Collaborating and understanding what things they’re dealing with. What are they doing that's been working for them to scale their business? It might be in a different industry, but you can still learn about their processes, how they're motivating their team, remote work, etc…that has honestly been an incredible resource for us. In addition to that, The Zone participated in two notable accelerators that were very helpful: The first one was the Andreessen Horowitz accelerator. We also did the Bank of America breakthrough lab with the entire Bank of America team behind The Zone. Not only did they introduce us to their network, but they also provided access to capital, made intros to investors, gave advice, and continue supporting us to this day.
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