Ryan and Nina Day were honored for their mental health advocacy on Tuesday.
The Ohio State coach and his wife received the STAR Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Fields of Trauma and Resilience at OSU’s annual Faces of Resilience event, which raises funds for Ohio State’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health. The honor was presented to the Days in recognition of their continued efforts to promote mental health initiatives at Ohio State after donating $1 million to the university to launch the Nina and Ryan Day Resilience Fund in 2022.
“Ohio, Columbus and Ohio State are leading the way in so many ways medically, and our family is extremely proud and honored to be a part of this movement,” Ryan Day said during the Days’ speech at Tuesday’s banquet. “It's clear that the impact that is being made here is not only leading the way nationally, but setting an example for others across the country.”
The Days have been champions for mental health, a cause that’s personal to both of them, since Ryan became Ohio State’s head coach in 2019. Ryan lost his father to suicide when he was just 9 years old, while Nina says she has battled anxiety for most of her life.
Both Days feel as though it is important to use their platform to make a positive impact in the community, and they’ve wanted to help the entire Ohio State community improve its mental health because of their personal experiences.
“I think the first month when Ryan was announced as the head coach, I brought it up to him, I said, ‘What are we going to get behind?’ And I just wanted to make sure that we got behind something that we felt very strongly about, very passionate about, something that we could live,” Nina Day said. “And it just became a natural kind of progression. I've suffered from anxiety my entire life. And I suffered in silence because growing up, nobody really talked about it. So my goal was to make sure my children never suffered in silence or any other child or adult for that matter. And we experienced a loss with Ryan's dad. And we never spoke about it until probably we started to go through this process. So it's been very therapeutic for us as well as the family.”
Mental health has also been a point of emphasis for the Days within the Ohio State football program as they have witnessed the challenges that the Buckeyes’ players deal with. Numerous Ohio State players, such as Harry Miller and TreVeyon Henderson, have spoken publicly about their mental health struggles in recent years, and Ryan Day says he has seen a significant difference over the course of his tenure as head coach in players opening up more about their internal struggles.
“Even in the last five years, I think we're seeing more and more of our guys become comfortable with it,” Ryan Day said. “First off, within the team, they share some of those conversations. We talk about how building balance in your life is building high ground for hard times with faith, family, and friends. When you have faith, family, and friends to lean on to talk about these types of things, and you have trust with those people, but I think also the environment that's been built not only in our program, but at Ohio State, by Gene Smith, by so many people in our university.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who also spoke at the luncheon, said he thinks the Days have made a difference for people throughout Ohio by using their platform to promote mental health.
“When someone is as high-profile and kind of holds all the cache Mr. Day has had, and they come out and say, ‘This is a very important problem,’ and then they put their own money behind it, you just can't calculate how much good that does,” DeWine said. “It makes people more aware. It allows people to talk about this. People in the past have been very reticent about talking about it. So their example just is absolutely huge if you go about dealing with the stigma, but also doing the research and doing all the other things that need to be done.”
