A companion piece to the North Central College interview with Christina Mondragón Schrader, LCPC, CMPC of Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement
There is a conversation happening in college athletics right now — one that would have been almost unthinkable a generation ago. Coaches, athletic directors, and student-athletes are talking openly about mental health. About performance anxiety and burnout. About what it means to be more than your sport. About asking for help before you're in crisis.
At Grow Wellness Group, we have been part of that conversation for years. And we are proud that one of our own — Christina Mondragón Schrader, LCPC, CMPC, Sport Performance Consultant at Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement — recently sat down with North Central College to bring that conversation directly to Cardinal student-athletes.
You can watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfTUmSNWpjA
This article is a companion to that conversation. It's our way of sharing the context, the work, and the why behind what Christina and the Grow Sport Psychology team bring to North Central College — and to every athlete we have the privilege of working with.
North Central College, a NCAA Division III institution right here in Naperville, Illinois, fields 27 intercollegiate sports programs and has built a remarkable culture of excellence — 40 team national championships and counting. But what makes NCC especially impressive to us is something less visible in the record books: a genuine institutional commitment to the whole student-athlete.
That commitment lives most visibly in the Critical Conversations Series, an initiative led by the NCC Athletics Inclusion Team as the foundation of their Community and Belonging programming. Each semester, the Series brings Cardinal student-athletes together across all sports for frank, facilitated discussions on topics that matter to their real lives — mental health, identity, belonging, and what it actually takes to thrive as a college athlete.
In November 2025, Grow Wellness Group was honored to partner with North Central College and the Dyson Wellness Center to lead the second Critical Conversation of the semester. Nearly 100 student-athletes gathered in Wentz Concert Hall's Madden Theater for an hour-long workshop centered on sport psychology, practical mental health skills and techniques, and — importantly — a clear map of the resources available to support them, both on campus and in the broader Naperville community.
That evening wasn't a lecture. It was a conversation. And that distinction matters to us deeply.
When we think about who is best suited to walk into a room full of college athletes from every sport imaginable and earn their trust in the first five minutes, Christina comes to mind immediately.
She is a licensed clinical therapist and Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) — a credential held by a relatively small number of practitioners nationally and awarded through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. She holds a Master's Degree in Forensic Psychology with a concentration in Child Protection from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, and a Master's-level Certificate in Sports and Performance Psychology from John F. Kennedy University. She gained her clinical experience in genuinely high-pressure environments, including a private psychiatric hospital emergency services department and Cook County Health and Hospital Systems.
But credentials alone don't explain why athletes connect with Christina. What connects them is this: she is one of them.
Christina spent 15 years as a competitive soccer player. She competed in rugby. And most recently, she made news throughout the Naperville community by joining the Chicago Winds as a kicker and punter in the inaugural season of the Women's National Football Conference — taking on a new sport at a professional level, managing performance anxiety in real time, and demonstrating with every practice and every kick that the mental skills she teaches are ones she actually lives.
When she talks to student-athletes about fear of failure, about what happens in your body and mind when the pressure is on, about how to recover from a mistake and stay in the game — they know she isn't reading from a script. She is speaking from a place of genuine, embodied experience.
As Christina has put it herself: she is "huge on practicing what she preaches."
At Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement, we believe that mental performance is a skill set — not a personality trait, not a fixed quality you either have or don't. Every technique and tool we teach is learnable, practicable, and improvable over time. That belief shapes everything we do.
When our team walks into a Critical Conversations session at North Central College, we are not there to give a motivational speech or hand out wellness pamphlets. We come prepared with real content: case studies drawn from the world of sport psychology, applicable mental skills techniques athletes can start using immediately, and an honest framework for understanding the relationship between mental health and athletic performance.
That framework rests on a distinction we find ourselves making often, and that Christina speaks to in her work with college athletes: mental health and mental performance are not the same thing, but they are deeply connected.
Mental performance — focus, confidence, arousal regulation, pre-performance routines, self-talk — is about optimizing what an athlete can do on the field, court, track, or pool. Mental health — managing anxiety and depression, processing stress, building emotional resilience, addressing trauma, navigating identity — is about living well as a human being. Both matter. Both are addressable. And when an athlete is struggling in one domain, it almost always shows up in the other.
This is precisely why the therapist-first foundation of our sport psychology team is not incidental. It is the whole point. Christina, like every member of our sport psychology team, is a licensed clinical professional first. That training means she can meet athletes wherever they actually are — not just where coaches and administrators wish they were — and provide support that goes as deep as the situation requires.
We want to be honest about something: the student-athlete experience today is genuinely harder than it has ever been in certain respects.
The pressure to perform is relentless and highly visible. Analytics have made athletic performance more measurable than ever. Social media means that a bad game, a slump, or a public struggle can feel like it has an audience. The dual demands of rigorous coursework and serious athletic competition leave little margin for the kind of rest and recovery that mental health requires. And for many student-athletes, the college years are also the years in which they are navigating identity, independence, relationships, and an uncertain future — all at once.
The data reflects this reality. NCAA research consistently shows that significant percentages of student-athletes experience anxiety, depression, burnout, and the kind of relentless mental exhaustion that can derail both athletic careers and personal development. "Mental health" has become one of the most commonly cited reasons for transferring institutions.
None of this is meant to be alarming. It is meant to be honest. Because the first step toward building genuine mental resilience is naming what is actually difficult — not pretending it isn't there.
The Critical Conversations Series at North Central College names it. Our work at Grow names it. And that is where real change begins.
Whether or not you were in Wentz Concert Hall's Madden Theater in November, whether or not you watch Christina's interview with North Central College, we want every Cardinal student-athlete to know a few things:
What you are going through is not unusual. The pressure, the doubt, the gap between how you perform in practice and how you perform when it matters — these are among the most common experiences in competitive athletics. You are not broken. You are navigating something genuinely hard.
Your mental game can be trained. Just as you put in work to improve your physical skills, you can put in work to improve your mental ones. Focus, confidence, composure under pressure, mistake recovery — these are all coachable. And you deserve the same quality of coaching for your mental performance as you receive for your physical game.
Mental health support is not a last resort. You don't have to be in crisis to benefit from working with a sport psychologist or therapist. The athletes we work with at Grow are, overwhelmingly, high-achieving people who want to be better — at their sport, in their relationships, and in their lives. That's exactly who this work is for.
You have resources nearby. The Dyson Wellness Center at North Central College is staffed by professionals who understand the student-athlete experience. And our team at Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement is located right here in Naperville, offering individual athlete sessions both in-person and virtually. You don't have to travel far, and you don't have to wait.
Christina's conversation with North Central College is worth your time. It is the kind of discussion that cuts through the noise and speaks directly to what athletes are actually experiencing — with warmth, clinical depth, and the particular credibility that comes from someone who has lived it.
And if it resonates — if something in Christina's words or in this article lands in a way that makes you think maybe this is for me — we hope you'll take the next step and reach out.
Grow Wellness Group 200 East 5th Avenue, Suite 109 | Naperville, IL 60563(331) 457-2020 | info@growwellnessgroup.com
We offer individual athlete sessions (in-person and virtual), team programs, college and club partnerships, coach education, workshops, and presentations. If you are a college athletic department, coach, or athletic administrator interested in bringing Grow Sport Psychology programming to your student-athletes, we would love to hear from you.
Christina Mondragón Schrader, LCPC, CMPC is a therapist and Certified Mental Performance Consultant at Grow Wellness Group's Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement team. Her clinical specialties include performance anxiety, sports injury and identity, athletic retirement and transitions, and LGBTQIA+ athlete support. She is a competitive multi-sport athlete with 15 years in soccer, rugby, and most recently tackle football with the Chicago Winds of the Women's National Football Conference.
Grow Sport Psychology & Performance Improvement is a division of Grow Wellness Group, located at 200 East 5th Avenue, Suite 109, Naperville, IL 60563. Our sport psychology practitioners are licensed clinical therapists first, meaning athletes receive whole-person support — not just performance coaching.
