Hi,

I’m Alexia Inman!

I am a 24 year old recently retired (aka I ran out of eligibility) collegiate beach volleyball athlete. I played all four years of my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley and then transferred to Santa Clara University to play my fifth year and get a Masters in Marketing. I am currently on my second masters degree, this time in Counseling Health Psychology with licensure as an MFT therapist, at Santa Clara University.

When I entered collegiate athletics back in 2017, I thought I was going to play volleyball until the day I died. No literally, I used to tell my coaches before games if I died on the court during the game I’d be okay with that (Don’t worry, my dramatics have simmered down in my old age). However, it wasn’t until the forced shut down brought on by Covid in 2020 that I realized where my true passions lie, and that is as an advocate for mental health. 

I've struggled with mental health issues since I was a child. However, it wasn’t until I got to college that they began to truly and dangerously manifest themselves in my life. Within my first semester as a freshman at Cal, my number one Google search was always “Why is my sport making me so miserable in college?” and “Is playing my college sport making me suicidal?”. I couldn’t find an answer to those questions on Google (shocker, I know), and an even harder pill to swallow was that I couldn’t find resources to help me answer those questions. The student service centers did not have enough staff to get me the frequency of appointments I needed and outside therapy was too expensive. Unfortunately, this was a trend that continued for all of my five years of college. Issues that started out my freshman year as preventable morphed and twisted into full on mental illnesses that I have to work to heal from the ground up. Constantly surrounded by teammates and people who loved me and going through some of the peak moments of my life, I had never felt more alone.

And it’s for this reason I created AIM. No student athlete should ever have to feel alone in his or her suffering, to feel like there are no answers. Because there are always answers and there are always solutions. It doesn’t mean the fix will happen overnight, but we can take the first step towards mental clarity and strength together. I have had life experience with almost any mental health trial you can think of while serving as a collegiate athlete; depression, anxiety, sports performance anxiety, mood and personality disorders, loss and grief, eating disorders, self harm, suicidal ideation, the whole nine yards!

I’ve never let these trials define me and I still don’t. Struggling with these things has simply been a part of what has made me who I am and it has educated me first hand by learning the tools and fighting the battles myself. And this is why I am qualified to help you, because I know how to help you fight battles you feel like you are fighting alone. Because I know what it’s like to be in your shoes and I will always make you feel seen and heard in your struggle and work with you to make life feel more manageable. 

My goal with creating this platform is to help fix what I feel is a broken system. A system where athletes' mental health is talked about now more than ever, but not enough is being done to actively make a change to support the declining mental state of athletes. I know these things to be true, because I lived it. I’m still living it, living in the aftermath of what being a serious collegiate athlete took from me mentally. I’ve watched friends and peers suffer in silence and fear and get to the point where the suffering was too much to bear.

I want to help create a world where we don’t see those news headlines pop up anymore. I want to help create a world where all athletes feel seen, heard and safe regardless of their mental state. So that’s what I’m AIMing to help create. I want to get boots on the ground now by offering services at a rate vastly lower than most life coaches and therapists offer in order to help as many struggling athletes as I possibly can. So come join me, whether that’s working with me one on one or just by listening to a podcast episode, as we AIM to create a new world of college athletics where everyone feels safe, always.

Love ya, mean it