How Former Notre Dame Basketball Walk-On Anne Weese Became Kansas State’s Mental Wellness Guru

As she watched the Kansas State men’s basketball team play in the NCAA tournament last weekend, Anne Weese felt a mixture of nervousness and excitement. It wasn’t exactly like her time as a Notre Dame basketball walk-on during the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons.

Still, Weese was just happy to have an intimate connection with sports, albeit with a different perspective than her playing days. Weese, who has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology, is the director of mental wellness and sport psychology for Kansas State’s athletics department. She helps athletes address mental health issues, assists coaches on best practices and serves as a liaison to the University’s counseling center and outside clinicians in case athletes need more specialized care in areas such as eating disorders or substance abuse.

Weese cannot discuss specific counseling sessions she’s had with athletes. But she said the men’s basketball team and first-year coach Jerome Tang, in particular, have embraced her and Deja James, Kansas State’s assistant director of mental wellness and sport psychology.

Tang has helped the Wildcats improve from 14-17 last season to 25-9 this season and a berth in the East Regional’s Sweet 16, where they will face Michigan State on Thursday night at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

“From the very beginning, coach Tang said, ‘I want every single one of my guys to at least meet with you once so they know who you are, how to access you, just to start building that relationship,’” Weese said. “And when he introduced me to the team, he introduced me as a member of the coaching staff and set the expectation for his team to treat me as such.”

She added: “We have a really great relationship with this basketball program. (Tang) has been very welcoming and inviting and inclusive on who he considers part of his program. He did really good work in kind of normalizing mental health support.”

Tang is not the only coach paying more attention to players’ mental health. An NCAA survey released in January found that 55% of Division 1 coaches, 50% of Division 2 coaches and 58% of Division 3 coaches said they were “very concerned” with supporting their players’ mental health compared with 45%, 39% and 45% who were “very concerned” with supporting their players’ physical health.

Meanwhile, 86% of head coaches and 82% of assistant/associate coaches said they were spending more time talking about mental health with their players than before the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020.

In addition, the NCAA in 2016 released a document that included four best practices that athletic departments should follow: have licensed practitioners provide mental health services; implement procedures for identifying and referring athletes to qualified practitioners; conduct mental health screening before the season begins; and promote an environment that supports mental well-being and resilience. The NCAA worked with leading mental health organizations on the document and updated it in 2020.

The increased focus on mental health in college athletics is much different than when Weese played.

Weese, a native of Salina, Kan., spent two years at Seward County Community College in Kansas and helped the team to a 71-1 record and a national title in 2002. She then was accepted to Notre Dame as a student with no plans to play basketball, but her junior college coach called Fighting Irish coach Muffet McGraw and told her Weese could be a good practice player. Weese made the team as a walk-on, and her mother began calling her “Ruby,” a nod to the movie “Rudy” that depicted the story of how Rudy Ruettiger made the Notre Dame football team as a walk-on in the 1970s.

During Weese’s two seasons at Notre Dame, she scored nine points and played 54 minutes in 16 games. Still, she was a popular player and student on campus with fans chanting her name, imploring McGraw to put her in the game at the end of blowouts.

“Everybody just kind of wants kids at the end of the bench to have their moment of glory,” Weese said, laughing. “The level of support that Notre Dame women’s program has is just unmatched…Even if I didn’t get that many minutes or points per game I really felt appreciated and important. I have nothing but wonderful things to say about my time there and coach McGraw and her staff. It was a really special time in my life.”

Weese enrolled at Notre Dame as a pre-med major, but that changed after she failed her first organic chemistry exam. She was drawn to psychology after taking an abnormal psychology class with professor Kathleen Gibney.

“She was really inspiring and made the work seem kind of fun about figuring out why people are the way they are and how we need to support mental health and mental illness with a lot of empathy and love,” Weese said. “That was really inspiring to me, so when I found myself in the position where I needed a new major, my mind immediately went to psychology.”

As a student at Notre Dame, Weese helped conduct research with Nicole LaVoi, who worked in the University’s Mendelson Center for Sport & Character. Still, Notre Dame, like most schools, did not have a licensed counselor working specifically with athletes, although the University did have a counseling center for students.

“I didn’t know (about the counseling center), but there was one,” Weese said. “There was nobody with a specialty in working with athletes and no one available to us.”

After graduating from Notre Dame in 2005, Weese accepted a job as a graduate assistant for Oklahoma State’s women’s basketball team and enrolled in the masters program in community counseling. She coached for two seasons before focusing full-time on her graduate studies.

“That was a really difficult (decision) for me,” Weese said. “It was probably a full year before I even could go watch a basketball game. I had that grief process happen pretty hard for me. That’s the first time in my life I hadn’t been around sports in an organized way.”

Weese earned her Ph.D. from Oklahoma State in 2012 and then spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at Kansas State, where she worked in psychotherapy, group therapy and other areas. Weese had her first full-time job as a staff counselor at Virginia Tech from August 2013 to January 2016, splitting her time in the counseling center and the athletics department working with athletes. She left for Oklahoma State as a senior clinical counselor and then accepted her current job in March 2018.

Since arriving at Kansas State five years ago, Weese has seen donors increasing the financial commitment to mental health for athletes. In April 2021, Kansas State alum Charlie Morrison and his wife, Debbie, donated $10.2 million to the school, with $1 million earmarked for mental health treatment for athletes, according to Weese. She added that Kansas State alum Mike Pestinger and his wife, Karen, donated $750,000 for athlete mental health initiatives.

Those donations helped fund the salary of James, whom Kansas State hired as its second full-time mental wellness and sport psychology employee last July. Weese is hoping she can hire more staff in the coming years.

“[The Morrisons and Pestingers] didn’t say, ‘How will this get us wins? How will this get us recruits?,’” Weese said. “They just said, ‘What do athletes need?,’ and so that’s where they wanted to put their money.”

She added: “I get contacted all the time, ‘Do you want to meet with this donor? They’re interested in donating to your department.’ We’ve got some really great momentum and we’re building something pretty special.”

On Thursday, Weese will watch the Kansas State-Michigan State game with her family, including her 5-year-old son who has recently become a huge basketball fan. If the Wildcats win, they will face Tennessee or Florida Atlantic on Saturday with a berth in the Final Four at stake. Kansas State hasn’t made the Final Four since 1964, but no matter how it turns out, Weese will be satisfied with what the team has accomplished.

“Knowing what some of those guys are going through and have to shoulder every day, I get the unique perspective of getting to watch them with just a lot of awe,” Weese said. “Awe that they’re shouldering all their personal things they’re going through and performing really well. I look at it like a real source of pride.”