By Coach Oduor Nyang Leeon

For me, working at an intersection of sports, storytelling and mental resilience while using content and community to inspire on and off the field has made me understand the fact that most of the work we do at DBA Africa never makes it to the conference room, it happens on pitches before sunrise, in session where athletes are always fighting fatigue but still push through. In conversations after training when the noise finally dies down and I see young players stop sounding like prospects and start sounding like human beings carrying pressure.

That is the side of sport I have come to understand deeply and so when the Youth Initiative Development Programme (YIDP) invited me to be part of their Virtual Roundtable Series alongside policymakers, researchers, mental health experts, development practitioners and sports stakeholders from across the continent , I knew the biggest responsibility I had was to bring the reality from the ground into the room. Not the polished version of the sport , but the real one because I believe for a long time, conversations around African sport have focused heavily on performance and very little on the person behind it.

Over the course of the YIDP sessions, what I picked that became very clear to me was that the continent is finally beginning to ask harder questions about what it really means to develop young athletes, not just how to produce the talent, but how to protect it as well.

The Reality Young Athletes Carry

A lot of people see sport as an opportunity. For many young African athletes, it is survival. I have witnessed that behind every promising player is often an entire family hoping this works. A scholarship… a contract… a national team callup. Sometimes sport becomes the only visible exit out of poverty and that pressure changes the way young athletes experience the game.

I shared during the session about things many coaches quietly witness every week, players skipping meals but still showing up for training, athletes hiding injuries because they are afraid of losing their spots in the team and teenagers carrying adult responsibilities before they even fully understand themselves. These realities don’t show up on statistics sheets but they shape performances everyday. That is why I keep advocating strongly for conversations around mental health in sport not remaining theoretical. They have to connect to the environments athletes are actually navigating.

Coaching Beyond Instructions 

One thing I kept returning to during the discussions was the role coaches play. I believe in many African sporting setups, we, the coach, become more than a coach. Sometimes we the coaches are the closest thing a young athlete has to a mentor, counselor, role model or support system. That’s why I believe coaching pathways across the continent need to evolve not through fear, not through constant command but through connection. There’s a generation of athletes growing up in environments where silence has become normal. Players are taught to ‘be strong,’ ‘man up,’ or ‘keep going’ even when they are struggling, but athletes don't become mentally stronger because nobody listens to them. I believe they become stronger when they feel safe enough to speak and that is where simple things start to matter.

These can include, creating spaces where players can speak openly in their own language , rotating leadership roles so pressure does not permanently sit on one individual and teaching teams how to process failure collectively instead of just isolating one player. None of these things require a massive budget but they change environments and when environments change ,athletes do too and compete better thus strengthening youth development in the region while making coaching more responsive and human

Why “Gym-Bag Ready” Matters

One phrase that unexpectedly followed me throughout the roundtables was “Gym-Bag Ready.” For me, it came from a very practical place. A lot of mental health conversations in sport become too clinical, too distant from the realities coaches are dealing with daily. Most grassroots coaches are not psychologists, they are teachers, volunteers, former players, community leaders. So if the tools we create are too complicated, too academic, or impossible to apply in training environments, they won’t survive beyond workshops.

That’s why I kept emphasizing the need for practical mental health tools coaches can carry into actual sessions. Not theories that stay inside documents, but approaches that work during warm-ups, after losses, during recovery periods, or even inside ordinary team conversations. That thinking strongly connects with the work we continue building at DBA Africa through youth development programmes, educational initiatives, and coaching pathways that focus on developing a wholesome athlete. Not just performance but the individual as well.

Moving From Awareness to Structure 

The first YIDP roundtable focused heavily on the “why.” Why mental wellbeing matters, why safeguarding matters and why Africa needs to rethink how sports systems are designed. But by the second session, the conversation had already shifted toward infrastructure. How partnerships are built, how programmes become sustainable and how governments, private sector players, educational institutions and community organizations can stop operating separately and start building unified systems.

I felt that transition mattered because African sport has seen many powerful conversations before but the real change still stands as sustainability. The big question that we should be asking ourselves is, how do we move beyond short-term projects? How do we build structures that remain long after campaigns and summit ends? And for me that is why the conversations around the Safe Sports Charter , the Mind Ball Initiative , and cross sector partnerships felt very important. I felt the genuine effort to move beyond awareness and the thought to begin thinking long term.

One of the strongest things about the YIDP discussions was that people in the room were willing to acknowledge that truth openly.The sessions moved beyond surface-level awareness and began asking what real protection structures could look like inside African sport.

More Than a Panel Discussion

For me personally, being part of the YIDP roundtable wasn’t just about sitting on a panel, it was about representing the realities many athletes live through silently across the region and it was encouraging to see that rooms like this are beginning to open up across the continent because the future of African sport cannot only be measured by medals . contracts or trophies, it also has to be measured by how well we protect our young athletes carrying those dreams. 

At DBA Africa, that remains central to the work we strive to do, building systems where athletes are developed through mentorship, coaching, education, wellbeing and opportunity because the truth is simple, you do not build better athletes by ignoring the individual, you build both. And if conversations like this continue moving from policy tables back to the pitch where they belong , then African sport has a real opportunity to grow differently . Not just stronger, but healthier too