EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on March 7.

BALTIMORE — The shower served as a litmus test of sorts, a daily struggle instead of the footnote it should be. Thirteen-year-old Connor Odom had always been a little slow to get out of the house in the morning, but this was something else. He’d be in the shower for hours, as mornings stretched into afternoons.

“He couldn’t get out,” says Ryan, his father and the basketball at Maryland-Baltimore County coach. “He had a ritual he had to complete. If he didn’t do it the right way, he had to start all over.”

Says his mother, Lucia: “It would take forever. We’d be standing there like, ‘We’re late. We’re late for school. We’re late for church. We’re late, come on.’ And he just couldn’t. You have your child saying, ‘No, I can’t.’ You just want to bang your head against the wall. It was every single day.”

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is defined by the National Institute of Mental Health as a common, chronic and long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over. Connor’s was prompted by his overwhelming fear of germs and contamination.

“I felt like if I touched someone, and then I touched this part (of my arm), I had to wash this part,” he says. “And I had to wash it a certain way. I’d be in the shower for, like, two hours, scrubbing myself but not being able to feel clean.”

Sometimes his hands would even bleed.

The rigidity of OCD is hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it. It started as a series of small habits that eventually compounded. Connor would tap, tap, tap his hands on surfaces. He’d snap his fingers a certain way. He prayed before school not because he wanted to — he felt he had to.

“He had to, he had to, he had to do some things,” Lucia says. “When he was worried, I would try to come up with things for him, not realizing I was creating another habit or something he had to do. I was like, ‘If you’re worried or having some bad thought or fear, just close your eyes and maybe when you blink, it’ll be gone.’ So then he started blinking too much. It wasn’t helping.”

The Odoms took Connor to all kinds of doctors — pediatricians, therapists, psychiatrists who prescribed anti-anxiety medications and a treatment center in Nashville, Tenn. They wanted to try anything and everything to help their son, but they continually faced road blocks. After all, it’s easy to see a kid needs help if he’s got a broken leg, and there’s a clear path to help him. Mental health issues are much more complex.

Connor described it as such: “It’s like my brain was trying to stack a big house of cards. Those were my OCD rituals. It’s like knocking that down but not wanting to. When you knock that down, it doesn’t feel good. That’s how it was. I had to start over.”

The Odoms hope their openness about Connor’s issues can help others. Each day brings new challenges, but it’s become part of their daily life. So is basketball, by the way; Ryan is the second-year coach of UMBC, which is in the midst of the program’s best season in a decade.

Ryan Odom, 43, has led UMBC to a 23-10 record and a No. 2 seed in the America East tournament. The Retrievers play top-seeded Vermont in the final on Saturday with an NCAA Tournament berth on the line.

What Odom is doing to revitalize a program that last reached the Tournament in 2008 is impressive. But what he does just by opening up about his son’s mental health challenges can have a far greater impact. “I don’t know why it’s so taboo,” Odom says.

Connor bottomed out during the spring and summer of 2015. Ryan lost his job at the same time, relieved of his duties along with the rest of the coaching staff at Charlotte. Now home each day, Ryan saw exactly how bad things had gotten.

Connor got to the point where he couldn’t go to school because he couldn’t leave the house. No one could come in. He wouldn’t allow his mother to hug him or even touch him.

Around this time, Lucia buried herself in research, trying to understand as much as she could about OCD. She ended up coming across a book that she believes changed their lives. “Saving Sammy: A Mother’s Fight to Cure Her Son’s OCD” by Beth Alison Maloney is the story of a mother fighting to find a cure for her son, who had OCD and Tourette’s syndrome. As she sought to find a cure, Maloney uncovered research that linked his mental illnesses to a previously unknown strep infection. The book introduced the Odoms to PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections), a diagnosis recognized by some but not all medical bodies.

The light switch went off for Lucia. She wondered if the strep virus had triggered Connor’s OCD. After tests confirmed very elevated levels of streptolysin O in Connor’s blood, he immediately began antibiotics — the first of many and ultimately long-term antibiotics to wipe out the bacteria triggering the symptoms of OCD and anxiety. Coupled with behavioral therapy and two trips over the past two years to an outpatient facility in Nashville to help him cope with the symptoms, Connor feels significantly better.

That’s not to say his OCD has disappeared or ever will; when it comes back, it brings with it new rituals and different anxieties, such as the fear of public speaking. But Connor, now a high school sophomore, gets out of the house in the morning, attends school each day and plays basketball — the sport he loves — despite the risk and fear of germs that comes with all three activities. Earlier this month, he tried out for and made a 16-and-under AAU team.

“There’s still stuff I worry about, but I’m more relaxed,” Connor says. “I’m not fully better, like how I want to be, but it’s a lot better than how it used to be. I took things for granted before, and now I don’t — like leaving the house everyday. I’m happy about that. It is way better than it was. A bad shower for me now is 15 minutes.”

Ryan Odom is part of an America East working group tasked with creating recommendations for the league and its member schools to support and combat student-athlete mental health challenges. Stony Brook athletic director Shawn Heilbron, also a member of the working group, says Odom’s willingness to tell his son’s story has been immeasurably helpful.

“Dealing with mental health requires a certain amount of vulnerability,” Heilbron says. “That’s where the entire conversation needs to be — where there’s an openness. The fact that Ryan has been able to share that and is willing to lend his time to further our conversation, I think it’s tremendous. He has that unique perspective as a parent and a coach that no one else in the group has. I just have such tremendous respect for him.”

The group, formed last fall, has met in person for its initial gathering and has kept in touch by way of conference call since. It includes coaches of various sports, athletic directors and multiple current student-athletes.

So far, conversations have taught Heilbron two important things. First, students seem much more prepared to talk about mental health issues than some of the adults in the room. Also, coaches need to be educated better on the topic so they feel more comfortable talking to and working with players who are dealing with mental health issues.

Education is important, Odom says, but so is making sure there’s a structure in place on each campus where students can go just to talk about what’s going on. “Somewhere they’re not going to be judged,” Odom says. “If you can create those types of environments, within athletics and the university as a whole, then you’ll probably see some of the tragedies that happen with kids decrease.

“They’ve got the academic pressures, they’ve got the athletic pressures, and then you add social media into it, like, it gets blown out of proportion. You mess up one time, and it’s tweeted. Think about that.”

Talking feels like such a small act, but it can be so huge. Even the Odoms speaking candidly and openly about their day-to-day travails helps others realize they can do the same. “It’s still (important) to break the stigma that is associated with it,” Heilbron says. “It’s starting to erode, but it still exists. We’re just making the conversation very, very normal. And we understand that if a student-athlete hurts their knee, they go see a trainer, then perhaps they go to a doctor. Well, here sometimes it’s a little more difficult, and we have to help with that navigation.”

As Lucia Odom notes, “It’s just so much different than other illnesses. People can’t see it, which makes it harder to understand.”

As she and Ryan know best, just because you can’t see something means there isn’t an issue you can help with. Since they’ve shared Connor’s story locally and within the America East community, they’ve received messages and calls from parents who say they’re going through something similar. Lucia and Ryan don’t have a magic wand for these families to wave and make a mental health issue become less challenging. But they have their ears to listen, and their voices to speak up.

And they will use them.

(Top photo of Lucia and Ryan Odom with sons Connor (left) and Owen; all photos courtesy of Odom family)