A four-year member of the George Mason women's volleyball team, Ewelina Gacek is clearly a talented athlete, having helped the Patriots this year to their most successful season since 2010, but she's also so much more. While competing at the D1 level, she has been a cadet for the George Mason police force and an advocate for mental health awareness. This is her story.

When she came to George Mason, Gacek entered as a criminal justice major with plans to apply to law school after finishing her undergrad. It was her sophomore year that ended up shaping Gacek's future. She describes it as "probably my lowest point […] nothing brought me happiness."

She took a chance while at her lowest and ended up getting into the police cadet program, which she describes it as the best thing for her. "After that is when I realized I had a worth outside of my sport and I can do things outside my sport that makes me happy," said Gacek.

Though it doesn't seem like it, volleyball and law enforcement intersect in very interesting ways. They both can increase in leadership skills as well as working as a team to do things like winning a game or trying to serve the community. According to Gacek, "I feel like student-athletes are put into a bubble that like that is all that they are."

Gacek is going against that bubble. While being a police cadet she "realized the importance of doing something outside of the one thing that defines you." As time went on with her job as a police cadet, it gave her a thing that she neglected in her freshman and sophomore years: connecting with other people outside of her normal sphere. It helped spread her wings and she was able to branch out in the George Mason community.

One of the benefits of being more connected in the community is that Gacek could used her voice as a volleyball player and a police cadet to try and spread mental health awareness. As an ambassador for the Morgan's Message club on campus, she helped organized a Morgan's Message dedication game this fall, and the police program came out to the event to support her.

According to fellow student and Cadet LT Ellen Hailey, "we try to come out to her games and support her in that way, but also to [Morgan's Message] kiosks and show her that different areas in her life can be supported here."
Having her police program come out to the Morgan's Message dedication game meant a lot to Gacek. She reflected on it, saying, "it's one step toward our goal of getting more training for police departments to raise mental health awareness, training for them to work with people having these mental health crises, and knowing that they have their own outlets to get help themselves so they no longer have to silence their thoughts due to their field."
               

Mental health is a thing that a lot of people struggle with and that is no different with police officers. "They work in a field that asks a lot of them and are the ones that are supposed to be almost like a role model with people looking up to them to the serve the public and not show signs of weakness," said Gacek. "A lot of police departments are talking more about mental health especially for police officers recently. There have been a lot of officers in the past year that have taken their own live due to the stress of the job."

Gacek has seen this and has stepped up to try to raise awareness of mental health in general and to try to find ways to help others with improving it. She recovered from her own struggles with mental health and wants to help people recover from similar struggles. According to Gacek, she's trying to "just show people that it is okay, talk about it, bring the conversation up. I think it has been successful recently."

After graduating from George Mason in the spring, Gacek plans to get her master's in criminal justice and to continue playing beach volleyball next year. With how much outreach she has been able to do as a police cadet, she is "thinking about doing victim advocacy work – working in a police department but not really being a uniform patrol officer."

Ewelina Gacek's story is one of perseverance. Of a student-athlete dealing with mental health issues, to being the one that stepped up to advocate for others. She says she hopes to continue to be impactful and "be the change and shed a light on this issue."