Phoenix Rising players take off on mental health break

It’s midweek in Phoenix, and at 38th & Washington, defender Collin Smith would usually be hard at work on the training field.

But now, he isn’t here. Neither is the rest of the Phoenix Rising squad.

“I’m going back home to my family in Dallas,” Smith said the week prior. “Going back, enjoying the time with my Dad, Mom, sister.”

With over a week between games, Rising’s players are enjoying a four-day break to focus on their mental health. Many of them have left town, heading out of state to see family or relax by the coast.

“It’s the first time I’ve been in a league that’s done it,” Rising assistant coach Vikram Virk said. “I think it’s a good idea. First and foremost, footballers and coaches, you want to keep in a competitive rhythm and you want to keep playing, but also understanding the mental fatigue that these guys are going through at the season’s halfway point. It’s a good time for us to unwind for four days, settle down and attack the last half of the season. I like the idea of it.

“You’ve got guys like [Ihsan] Sacko who’s gone through three preseasons now, he’s been playing. Guys like him could really use this and I think it’ll be beneficial for all the players and it’s important to do.”

Rising is already 16 games into the 2025 league season, as well as playing a further six cup matches. Including preseason, Phoenix has been playing games since late January and, if all goes well, will be playing into late November. Playing at a competitive level over that length of time can take a toll on both physical and mental health.

“Over time, playing as many games as we do, the brain will start to shut down on you, and if it’s not the brain, it’s the body,” Smith said. “Obviously, it’s all connected. That’s the biggest thing, but that’s why I would say it’s good that we have the connections that we do in the locker room.”

That toll is only multiplied thanks to Rising’s extensive travel schedule over the summer. With temperatures hitting highs in the Valley, only one of Phoenix’s last six matches was played at home. Their next four games feature three away games, including trips to Lexington and Tampa Bay.

“There’s some days, you’re travelling the day before a game,” Virk said. “After the game, I bet most players are the same as well, it’s tough. You’re not going back to the hotel and sleeping right away. You have a lot on your mind. You’re so emotionally charged from those games, so you tend not to get the best sleep that night, and then next morning you’re travelling back early and straight back in because you don’t have time to take a day off. You’re back on the training field getting ready for the next one and switching focus to the next one.

“You never get that time to just settle and to be honest, even in this break, for ourselves as coaches, I don’t think we will.”

Still, much more goes into the grind of a season than just the physical toll of playing game after game.

“Today’s generation, not to generalize everybody, but they suffer more than my generation,” Rising coach Pa-Modou Kah said. “My generation, we were out playing. Street lights come on, that’s when you know that it’s time to go home. You punished us by saying that you’re not going out. Right now, the social media, it’s good but also it can kill. What I mean by it can kill, it can kill you emotionally because there are people out there writing stuff about you that you don’t want to read but you read it.”

Even away from the current break, a lot of work goes into maintaining the physical and mental health of the playing staff.

“A lot of protocols in place,” Virk said. “Dev [Manifold], Greg [Spence], our medical team do a great job. Our performance team do a great job at that. We have our player questionnaires, and their wellness that we can track how they’re feeling each day. Obviously we’re monitoring the numbers really closely, what they’re getting on their tests, are they at risk from any physical loading. Do we need to taper them in a session? Can we push them a little bit more? There’s a lot that goes into making sure that these guys are feeling good and able to perform at their best.”

While the coaching staff’s approach may be a lot more formalized, a lot more goes into the daily routine of managing mental health.

“Just making it a family away from home,” Smith said. “There’s not one person around the facility [you can’t talk to]… You could walk in the ticket office and have a conversation with any of them in there. You could walk in our locker room, all the players are there. Wherever you go, there’s just a lot of people you can trust to have these conversations and be vulnerable and just say how you’re feeling and talk about whatever’s on your chest. Being able to do that, it’s important, because not a lot of people are able to have that away from their family members.”

For Smith, already in his third season in USL Championship despite being only 21, that’s something he’s come to expect from professional football, but not always quite to the extent as in Phoenix.

“You see it in most teams, but what we’ve created here, it’s different than any other team I’ve been on,” he said. “I feel like going into preseason, even the first or second game, I felt the camaraderie and that bond that we had early on. It’s that early, you feel like you haven’t quite learned everything about a guy, and we’re going into the preseason matches already fighting for each other, making tackles for each other, motivating each other, hyping each other up.

“Those are all things that were different for me because I didn’t think it was going to click just that soon, and it did. That’s a thing that I feel has carried us this season, and I hope we can continue it.”

Phoenix Rising has an especially young squad, and not just because of regular appearances from 17-year-old Jamison Ping and 18-year-old Braxton Montgomery. But that hasn’t proven too much of a challenge when it comes to managing the team in 2025.

“I think this group’s really good at understanding when they’ve played well, when they haven’t,” Virk said. “They wear that frustration or their excitement, depending on the game, they wear those emotions right on the sleeve. You get what you see with this group, but they do a great job. We do our reviews always that first day back when we’re in, and we make a collective effort to say ‘OK, we learned from our review, and now we start focussing on the next one.’

“I think they’re actually fairly good, even as a young group. I would give them a lot of credit for understanding mistakes they’ve made and what they have to learn from them, and also positives they need to carry forward, and then getting that focus and attention right away to the next game.”

For now, though, the attention isn’t on the next game quite yet, but instead on putting things into perspective off the field.

“Whenever you go back to your family, and you have time to actually enjoy them and spend time with them, once the mental break’s over and you go back to work it kind of resonates with you where you’re like ‘Man, that’s my why. That’s my motivation’,” Smith said

“It’s very important that sometimes you pause a little bit and cherish where you are, and reflect on where you are and what you can improve, and leave a little bit of the negativity out,” Kah said. “There’s a lot of negativity in the world that influences our daily lives, rather than thinking the positives which is you wake up, you can breathe. That’s a gratitude. You can go out, do what we love to do. That’s a gratitude. That’s not something you take for granted, but you’re grateful to have those little ones. It’s very, very important for the players, for them to use it specifically to relax, reflect, get yourself in good shape again.”

Rising’s players will report back to training after their mental health break on Friday. But first, there’s always time to spend a little bit longer with family.

“Just being able to sit at the table with the family and have that good breakfast that my Mom cooks,” Smith said. “Just biscuits, rice, whatever it is, but really the biscuits are the best thing in the world. I’m really excited for those, and just getting a chance to sit at the dinner table with them and talk.”

Top image: Phoenix Rising FC