“I just couldn’t get out of bed,” Bobby Melley ’16 (CLAS)says about that Sunday morning in his senior year when he’d logged 225 consecutive games as a starter on the UConn baseball team and sought to make it 226.
“I was so anxiety-riddled and isolated,” he says. “I ended up telling my coach that I had a stomach virus, that I must have eaten something wrong the night before. I ended the streak there, but I still didn’t tell anyone why and held up this strong exterior for a very long time.”
Years later, in his second season with the Tampa Bay Rays, on a bus ride through the Appalachian Mountains to a game in West Virginia, Melley says he just stared out the window, wondering what he was doing with his life and thinking about how miserable he was on the field every day.
Baseball — the very thing that had brought him so much joy as a child, the dream of playing professionally that became a reality — was now sucking the life from him. He didn’t pursue a second pro contract, and two years later, his long-stifled emotions erupted.
“I started having thoughts that I never imagined I’d entertain,” he says. “I did attempt to take my life. Luckily, I’m still here, and even though I’m not fully comfortable telling my story, it helps to vocalize it, to get it out.”
Melley believes that six years prior, as a young collegiate player, just talking to someone who understood the rigors of life as a student-athlete would have helped. If he’d just let down that tough competitive exterior and answered truthfully when someone asked how he was doing, it could have saved him so much heartache.
