Telling a Coach That You Have Diabetes

No matter how discreet you want to be about your diabetes, there are some people that you just have to tell about it. Your closest friends, who may be near you in the event of an emergency, need to know. If you are in middle or high school, your teachers should know. And if you're on a sports team, the coaches need to know. 

I only vaguely remember talking to my high school cross country coach about this topic four years ago; I think it was actually my mom who approached him on the first day of practice with a glucagon kit and instructions for what to do if I ever passed out due to hypoglycemia. My coach never had to use the glucagon, but I tried to make sure that he and my teammates always knew where the glucagon was during practices and races. 

Since diabetes can impact athletic performance, it was good to have my coach understand that I occasionally had to miss practice or modify workouts due to wacky blood sugars. Obviously, I did everything I could to prepare for practice every day, but sometimes things went wrong - one day my infusion set had an occlusion, which I didn't notice until a couple hours before practice, and my blood sugar was in the 400s; you just can't go to practice when your blood sugar is that high. Mild hypoglycemia in the middle of a workout sometimes stopped me short, literally - I would only do two mile repeats while the rest of the team did 3. My coach understood that these things weren't caused by an attitude problem or lack of fitness on my part, but rather a real medical issue that sometimes got the best of me. However, had my training been influenced like this every single day, he probably would have moved me down to the JV squad. There is an expectation that, despite having diabetes, you manage it to an extent and still practice like the rest of the team 99% of the time. 

At the beginning of this school year - my first in college - I joined the college rowing team (crew) and now I have to deal with the same issue. The first week of practice, I avoided telling the coaches about my diabetes because I wasn't sure whether I would stick with the sport or not. Once I signed the NCAA papers and made an official commitment to crew, though, I knew I had to let them know. That didn't really go the way I planned; before I got the chance to pull them aside, one day at practice I suffered a low blood sugar and had no choice but to tell them right then and there!

They responded in an ideal way, and said that there was another girl (an upperclassman) on the team who has diabetes as well, and so they already carry glucagon around and are trained to use it. They also said that I seemed to be in much better control of my condition than that girl was, so they were not worried at all and appreciated that I carried glucose gel around and checked my blood sugar regularly.

Apparently the other girl had had several extreme hypoglycemic episodes, which were very scary for the whole team. My goal is to never let that happen!