Rebecca Wang for NPR

March Madness is here. The high-stakes, sudden-death college basketball tournament is a beloved tradition in American sports. For the players, it's a chance to showcase the skills they've developed through years of hard training of the body and mind. In many cases, that push produces incredible feats of athletic performance. But an investigation by reporters Julia Haney and Elizabeth Santos has found instances in which athletes allege that the push from coaches goes too far. Emotional abuse by coaches, some athletes maintain, can cause lasting, even irreparable damage. On this episode of The Sunday Story, we hear from athletes who fought back.

*A warning that today's story includes mentions of sexual and emotional abuse, suicide, bullying and includes explicit language.

This episode was produced by Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Fact-checking by Katie Daugert. It was engineered by Jimmy Keeley. 

We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.

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A special thanks to the Audio Program and Investigative Reporting Program at University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; As well as Shereen Marisol Meraji, who runs the audio program at the school and provided production help with this story.

Reporters for this story participated in the Mental Health Parity Collaborative, a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S. The partners on this project include The Carter Center and newsrooms in select states across the country.