UW-Madison Athletes Train Minds Through Meditation as Performance Preparation

When the Wisconsin men's hockey team faces Dartmouth on March 26, their preparation will include more than film sessions and skate work. Chad McGehee, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Director of Meditation Training, has been working with the squad throughout the lead-up to the NCAA tournament, treating mental conditioning with the same systematic rigor as any strength training block. McGehee's central argument is precise: meditation is "strength and conditioning for the mind," and he backs it with peer-reviewed research rather than intuition.

McGehee joined Wisconsin Athletics in 2020 as what WPR and the Badger Herald describe as the first-ever person to hold that title in a major college sports program. The UW Athletics department goes further, calling its Meditation Training Department "the first of its kind in the world." Those are attributed institutional claims, but the underlying reality is concrete: no comparable university had formalized this role before Madison did.

The Person Behind the Program

McGehee's path to the Wisconsin Athletic Department is anything but a straight line. Described by the Center for Healthy Minds as an "engaging, soft-spoken 40-year-old," he arrived at this role after careers as a college soccer player, a K-12 school teacher, and a world traveler. He co-founded Inner Edge Meditation, a mental performance training operation, and later spent six "amazing" years at UW-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds, where he served as Learning and Program Development Manager for Healthy Minds Innovations. That tenure deepened his fluency in the science of contemplative practice before he transitioned into the athletics department full-time.

He remains an honorary research affiliate of the Center for Healthy Minds, keeping his work tethered to the most current research on mind training. He also presents in clinical and academic settings, including Integrative Health Grand Rounds sessions, positioning himself at the intersection of performance coaching and scientific scholarship.

"This is what I was meant to do," McGehee has said of the role.

His expertise runs well beyond traditional sports settings. Before focusing on athletics, McGehee developed meditation programs for first responders, soldiers, and Fortune 500 companies, building a body of applied knowledge in high-stress, high-stakes environments. Student-athletes, he argues, belong in that same category.

What "Training the Mind" Actually Means

The program's formal mission is to "train, research and collaborate to understand and apply rigorous meditation training in the lives of UW Athletics student athletes and staff." In practice, that translates to a specific set of performance outcomes: competing effectively in high-pressure situations, avoiding distractions, and recovering from losses and injuries.

"What we're doing with meditation centrally is we're training the mind," McGehee told WPR's Rob Ferrett in an interview for the "Wisconsin Today" program. The UW Athletics site articulates the broader ambition: "Meditation is a scientifically based way to train your mind to move more confidently in the direction of your performance and well-being goals."

The expected gains are measurable in athletes' lived experience. According to UW Athletics materials, "the impacts of meditation - concentration, stability, feeling connected, more purposeful, etc. - can show up across your life from athletics to academics and beyond." McGehee trains with individuals, small groups, and entire teams, scaling the approach to fit different contexts within the department.

One thing the program explicitly does not do: replace clinical mental health support. The UW Athletics site states plainly that "Meditation Training is not a replacement for clinical mental health support," a distinction that keeps the department focused on performance and well-being training rather than therapeutic intervention.

Forward360 and the Holistic Wellness Structure

Meditation Training sits within Forward360, UW Athletics' holistic wellness umbrella. The broader program wraps together strength and conditioning, performance nutrition, mental health and sports psychology, academic services, community engagement through Badgers Give Back, career and leadership development, diversity and inclusion programming, sports medicine, and the W Club alumni network. The Badger Herald notes UW employs 11 full-time strength coaches across its 23 sports; strength coach Jim Snider, who works with men's basketball and tennis, trained NHL players and Olympians for 12 years before joining UW in April 2021, illustrating the caliber of expertise the department expects across all its performance disciplines.

McGehee's department collaborates closely with Forward360 peers, particularly clinical sport psychology, strength and conditioning, and sports medicine. Access to meditation training can come through direct contact with McGehee or through referrals from clinical sport psychology, strength and conditioning staff, sports medicine, other Forward360 units, coaches, or administration.

Forward360 also extends its reach beyond the competitive career. Some of its programs are designed to prepare athletes for life after campus, including professional networking events like the Badgers Means Business gatherings held earlier this semester.

Institutional Buy-In: From Coaches to SAAC

The program's credibility within the athletic department reflects a genuine culture shift. Deputy director Chris McIntosh and head football strength and conditioning coach Ross Kolodziej are among the administrators and coaches who have embraced meditation's potential as a performance tool. That support from both the operations and coaching sides of the department matters for a program that requires athletes and staff to take mental training as seriously as physical conditioning.

The student-athlete dimension surfaced in a telling moment involving Dana Rettke, a senior Student-Athlete Advisory Committee representative and, as UW Athletics describes her, one of the best collegiate volleyball players in the world. During a Zoom call where Wisconsin SAAC members were comparing notes with their Big Ten counterparts from Purdue, Rettke introduced the topic of meditation. The reaction, according to Center for Healthy Minds reporting, was immediate and wide-ranging curiosity: "It wasn't her intention, but Dana Rettke caused quite a stir during a recent Zoom call." The episode illustrated how far ahead of the broader college athletics landscape UW's investment in this area already sits.

The Research Foundation

McGehee draws explicitly on peer-reviewed research in designing his programs, a commitment the UW Athletics site reinforces: "The work is grounded in rigorous scientific evidence and we are actively engaged in ongoing scientific research." His honorary affiliation with the Center for Healthy Minds keeps him connected to ongoing work on contemplative science at one of the field's leading research institutions.

That grounding in evidence is central to how the program is sold internally and externally. This is not a wellness add-on or a soft supplement to real training. McGehee's framing positions meditation as a technical discipline with measurable effects on the capacities that determine athletic performance.

Where the Program Stands Now

With the men's hockey team heading into NCAA tournament competition and men's swimming and diving preparing for their own championship meet on the same date of March 26, McGehee's work is at its most visible. The pressure of postseason play is precisely the environment his entire approach is designed for: high stakes, compressed timelines, and outcomes that hinge as much on mental composure as physical execution.

UW Athletics' bet, formalized when they created this role in 2020, is that the next competitive frontier in college sports is interior. The mind, properly trained, becomes "a powerful asset as you go from good to great and great to elite." For the Wisconsin athletes stepping into postseason venues this week, that training is already part of the preparation.