"My Voice, My Home" - by Eileen Canney Linnehan

The last week I lived in Evanston, I couldn't sleep. So I ran.

At night, when everything was quiet and I was supposed to be packing boxes and getting ready to move back to California, I'd put on my shoes and go.

I ran past my freshman-year dorm, the same place where my parents had dropped off their 18-year-old daughter years earlier. I ran around the lake and past the spot where Andrew and I had taken our wedding pictures, where we had our first kiss. I ran past the stadium and The J, the field where I had played, where I had later coached.

And eventually, I made my way back to the house where I had brought home my two babies. 

Those runs were basically a highlight reel of the last 20 years of my life, except I was sweaty and crying a little. My heart hurt.

I was saying goodbye to Evanston.

And I realized I wasn't just leaving a place. A place where I stayed longer than I ever thought I would.  I was leaving my home. 

When I was 18, I left California for Northwestern.

I knew I was going to college. I knew I was going to play softball. I knew Northwestern was a really good school.

But I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into.

And the 18-year-old version of me didn’t have her voice yet.

I was quiet. A people pleaser. Always very aware of what other people thought.

I didn't always know how to say what I wanted or what I needed.

I had spent a lot of my life trying to figure out where I fit.

Then I got to Northwestern.

And something started to shift.

I remember thinking at first that I was chosen for who I was on the field: a damn good pitcher, a kind and quiet person who would do anything for her teammates. At the time, I thought the people around me didn't know about the things I struggled with.

But they did. And they still picked me.

They celebrated me for all of who I was, for who I could become, and that was huge for me.

Because I think sometimes, as a freshman, you're trying so hard to convince everyone that you're good enough. You want to show the best version of yourself. You want to say and do all the right things.

But Northwestern was the first place where I felt like I could show up as me, flaws and all. And that’s actually what really made me good. That’s what changed my whole life.  

It’s not like it started out perfectly though. 

The first tournament of our preseason, we were playing at Arizona State, and I completely shit the bed.  

I gave up like 11 runs in one inning. There was a grand slam. I hit a ton of people. It was so bad. The box score was awful. 

I completely freaked out but was trying to keep it together. I remember going into the ASU locker room under the stands. I was throwing my glove and so mad at myself because this was where the front I was putting on, and putting out there for everyone was not matching the competitive drive I knew I had inside. 

I didn’t have that mean-mugging face yet. But it was coming. 

Back on campus I called a meeting with the coaches. And I'm like, ‘I just wanna tell you something.’ 

And they're all like, ‘What?’ 

I said (and I meant it), ‘That's never going to happen again.’ 

Caryl remembers that meeting a little differently. She remembers me saying, ‘I’m gonna be the Big Ten Freshman of the Year.’ 

And both things ended up being true. 

Slow transitions have always been a theme in my life.  

When I was young and first learning how to pitch, the girls around me just picked up on it much faster than me. I was wild at first. 

My Mom was always good at helping me find humor in my imperfections. 

She’d sing Wild Thing to me, like Ricky Vaughn in Major League. 

But I was already six feet tall in eighth grade, so it took me longer to figure out how my body worked. 

I didn’t play travel ball until I was 14. I got cut from a 16U team that said I wasn’t ready. Stanford was my dream school, and I got rejected. 

All these things kept playing out where it was like, you’re not enough. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet...

Then I went on this recruiting trip to Northwestern, and several other recruits were there, and everyone was so good. I was a little weird and more reserved.

But, as quiet as I was on the outside, I always knew there was more of me that wasn’t showing. 

Northwestern saw it, too. 

Back then nobody really talked about the yips. 

They started when I was 13. I could pitch so hard by then, but struggled to make simple overhand throws to first base in games. My whole arm would go numb. 

On the outside, I thought people probably thought I was lazy. Or crazy. 

And when it would happen, I’d go home and think, What is wrong with me? No one will want to talk to me. The pressure was so big because softball was the first place in my life where I felt really seen. 

I couldn’t mess this up.  

But there wasn't a playbook.

There wasn't a person saying, ‘Oh, this is actually a thing that can happen to athletes, to anyone. You're NOT crazy.’

I’d go to bed crying and wake up thinking about it. But I couldn't control it. It kept happening. I compensated by trying to control all the other parts of my life. 

But Northwestern changed the story for me.

I thought I was hiding it. 

Kate. Caryl. Tori. Rivie. They all knew. 

My teammates knew. 

But a beautiful thing happened. Instead of treating me like I was broken, they protected me.

I even made a joke about the yips in a team meeting, and the entire room lost it.

And I remember thinking, Oh my God. We can talk about this.

That was a huge moment for me.

Because suddenly the thing I was most ashamed of didn't have to be a secret anymore.

My Dad would say, ‘Make them regret trying to bunt to you. Your skill and your grit will make up for this thing that doesn’t make any sense.’

And on the field Darcy would whisper to me, ‘I hope they bunt to you and I'm gonna push you out of the way. You better get out of my way.’

That was what I was surrounded with.

It was sweet. It was funny.

But it also meant the world. I felt protected.

And because I'm a very loyal, protective person, I felt like it went both ways.

We all had each other's backs.

That’s Northwestern softball.

My junior and senior year we made back-to-back appearances at the Women’s College World Series. 

The coaches knew we should be there and made us believe. 

They said ‘Let's go to the World Series. We're going to go to the World Series.’ 

And I think it was exactly what we wanted. We wanted someone to tell us that they believed we were the pieces who could get us there. 

We were kind of a hodge-podgey team. Like we had people who were like second in the recruiting line, technically. Some who had gotten rejected by bigger schools. Who had, mistakenly, been overlooked. 

We were all so different. Garland. Ashley. Sheila. Kristen. Tammy. Katie. We couldn’t be more different. But we had these clutch moments that just happen when a team gels like this. 

Darcy hitting a solo homerun off Monica Abbott and Tennessee in the top of the seventh. 

Me and Courtnay coming in for each other when one of us was shitting the bed, having this really good and healthy competitive dynamic. 

Erin Dyer’s seventh-inning, two-out, two-strike homerun off Alabama, the first one Crissy Owens gave up all year.

Magic. 

And my future husband was there in the stands. Wearing purple. Cheering his heart out.

That wasn’t my last game. I had more to do. 

After graduating, I played professionally in National Professional Fastpitch, the Japan Softball League, and was a member of the USA National Team in 2010.

And when my pitching days were done, but I wasn’t ready to step off the field just yet, I started coaching.  

During my years coaching at UIC, I had a player who was dealing with something.

And I remember thinking, Okay. Let's talk about this.

I pulled her aside and I was blunt with her.

I told her about my experience with the yips. I started meeting with sports psychologists again. I researched more about how the brain works. I took everything I'd learned and everything I knew hadn't worked for me and started putting the pieces together for her.

And it worked.

She told me I needed to tell more people.

So I did.

I spoke about the yips at conferences and other athletes kept calling me. For years, I did it for free, because I knew what it felt like to think you were the only person in the world going through something like this.

And eventually, it became my life’s work.

The thing I once experienced as a weakness became part of my purpose.

Now I work with athletes from all kinds of sports: tennis, pickleball, golf, cricket, equestrian, soccer, baseball, basketball, softball. And it’s not just athletes. Business people. Musicians. The yips can show up anywhere. 

I’ve been able to help others, and pretty quickly, too. But it has been the most healing for me.

And it’s still kind of wild to me that something I spent years feeling ashamed about, quiet about, is what I’ve become so vocal about. 

Now I get to be the person who helps pull that out of other people.

I often have clients tell me the tools we worked on help them do what their bodies wouldn’t physically let them do before. 

Getting their happy messages makes me emotional every time.

You see, everyone thinks the yips are about getting out of your head.

But we're always going to be in our heads.

The goal is to learn how to be there.

And once you learn how to be there, you can treat yourself better. And you can express what you want.

You can find your voice.

Eventually I joined my husband in the stands, wearing purple. Not to be a sentimental former player, but to be a voice for the team that helped me find mine. 

And a loud one at that. 

I’d sit right behind the ump, right behind the plate. And I’d watch like a hawk, and if they didn’t get the call right, I’d let them know. It kind of felt like I was a big sister now. I’m fiercely protective of Northwestern.

And, while most players don’t stay after they graduate, I stayed.

Andrew and I got married in 2011, and somehow the years just kept happening.

We built a life there. Our friends became family.

I coached. I mentored. I started a business. I became a Mom. And I lost my own Mom to cancer. It felt like a whole life happened in the last 20 years, and it did. 

At some point, Evanston and Northwestern stopped being the place where I went to college.

It was just home.

The place where I felt like I was the most me.

Where I found the voice I had been missing.

And that's why leaving was so hard.

When Andrew and I finally decided to move back to California so our kids could be closer to their cousins, even my Dad didn't believe we would do it.

I think everyone knows how much we love Evanston.

If there’s one thing I could go back and tell a future player, I’d tell her to be the most vibrant version of herself. 

Not the version you think your college wants.

Not the version you think your teammates want.

Not the version you think you're supposed to be.

Your voice matters.

Your weirdness matters.

Your questions matter.

Your struggles matter.

The things you think make you different might actually become the things that connect you most deeply to other people.

I know that because I lived it.

I thought the yips were going to be something I carried around forever as proof that I wasn't good enough.

Instead, they became a way for me to help other people find their voices.

I thought leaving California meant leaving my family behind.

Instead, I found another family in Evanston.

I thought I was going to Northwestern to play softball.

I didn't know I was going there to find myself.

And maybe that's the best thing about it.

You don't have to arrive knowing exactly who you are. I certainly didn't.

You just have to be willing to listen. To speak. To let people see you.

And somewhere along the way, you’ll look up and realize you've found your voice.

And maybe, just maybe, you've found your home, too.