During NBA All-Star week, players from nearly every team gather to celebrate basketball, close endorsement deals, and more. Traditionally, it’s a space where people from the industry amplify their achievements from the past year. However, this year, in a private room just off the Sunset Strip, a different kind of conversation drew attention: one centered on emotional resilience.
Five-time NBA All-Star Kevin Love and filmmaker Tyree Dillihay gathered kids, teens, and adults to discuss the psychological realities behind high athletic performance, including the pressures to excel, the “athlete” identity, and the vulnerability often driving elite competitors. The event accompanied a collaboration between the Kevin Love Fund and Sony Pictures Animation, where a youth-focused emotional resilience curriculum was developed based on the new animated basketball film, GOAT. It was incredible to see not only substantive content in the dialogue but also the setting. Mental health was not a side event; it was part of the main event of the National Basketball Player Association’s official program
This shift matters.
For years, athletes were simply expected to “suck it up” and “move on,” forced to compartmentalize fear, suppress doubt, and equate emotional restraint with strength. Prior ways of defining toughness left no space for things like anxiety, burnout, or uncertainty. Now, though, we understand that emotional suppression is not resilience. In fact, suppressing emotions over time correlates with increased stress and puts people at higher risk of anxiety and mood disorders. What unfolded in the room during Love and Dillihay’s conversation reflected something larger than this single event; it was a cultural correction.
In my clinical work with athletes, executives, and other high-performing professionals, I see a common issue wherein identity becomes intertwined with output. People are defining themselves by their jobs, whether as athletes or as corporate executives. During this All-Star Weekend event, Love spoke about the early pressures that athletes experience, which begin long before their first pro contract when coaches and parents start to shape youth athletes’ identities. Dillihay touched on how storytelling through animated films can make invisible emotional experiences visible, because kids often don’t have the language themselves to describe feelings like anxiety, shame, and self-doubt.
The Kevin Love Fund’s curriculum focuses on concepts like a growth mindset and emotional navigation of the pressures to perform. When professional athletes at an elite level, like Love, talk about feelings and not being afraid to express them, it challenges long-standing norms within sports culture.
From a clinical mental health perspective, this matters tremendously. Avoiding emotions compounds distress over time. This can ultimately cause physical symptoms, impair recovery from injury, and increase the risk of mood disorders. Teaching kids early that emotional awareness is key provides them with protective factors and can change their developmental trajectories for the good. The most striking part of the conversation was the normalization: Kids were sitting in a room with an NBA champion talking about feelings and learning to articulate emotions like fear and self-doubt.
NBA All-Star Week represents a pinnacle of performance culture. So when mental health conversations take center stage within that environment, it signals a broader cultural shift. If the next generation of athletes is raised around the dialogue that emotional awareness is a key component of strength, we will see both healthier competitors and more sustainable careers. This quiet shift is one of the most important advances in modern sports culture.
