COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ryan Day can conjure up only a few specific memories of his father. He recalls that Ray Day owned a convenience store in the Manchester, New Hampshire, area and remembers him loving the Red Sox. Recently, Ryan Day was thrilled to see a home movie from the 1980s of the two of them playing baseball on Hampton Beach.

“He was a regular guy,” Ryan Day said. “And then one day in January, he didn’t come home. Life changed forever after that.”

Ray Day died by suicide in 1988. Ryan Day was 9 years old at the time and had two younger brothers, Chris (7) and Tim (5). That singular moment shaped his life more than any other.

Over the years, Ryan Day’s emotions over the suicide of his father evolved through phases of anger, resentment and confusion. He recalls occasional playground teasing and being upset watching his youth basketball teammates run to their fathers at the conclusion of their games. “I’d get pissed,” he said. “How come I can’t have a father? I used to get angry that way about it.”

As the years went on, and the portrait of his father’s struggles with depression became clearer, Ryan Day came to better understand mental health and the stigmas attached to discussing it openly in society. So soon after Day became the full-time head coach at Ohio State in December, he and his wife, Nina, decided they were going to use that powerful philanthropic platform to bring the discussion about mental health — especially in the childhood and adolescent space — to the forefront.

The more Ryan Day came to understand about his father’s life, death and depression, the more it shaped his view on mental health.

“Over the years, what happened was that there was resentment early on,” Day told Yahoo Sports. “Then there was anger. There were these different emotions as we went on. And as I got older, I realized that it’s a sickness.”

Day adds: “You start to see that this is something that's not unique to you, it's gone on everywhere. It's gone on all over the country, and now we're starting to see it happen more and more at the younger age in adolescents and teenagers.”

That’s what Ryan Day and Nina Day want to change.

View photos Ryan Day's father, Ray, died by suicide when Ryan Day was just 9 years old. (Courtesy: Day family) More

‘It needs attention. It needs help.’

Ryan Day was visiting a high school coach in Massillon, Ohio, on a weekday last spring when he asked why school was shut down. The coach told Day there’d been another suicide at the high school, part of a tragic wave in Stark County recently.

A few days later, while driving to work, Day heard an advertisement on the radio for On Our Sleeves, a movement from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus that focuses on transforming the conversation about childhood mental health. Around the same time, Shelley Meyer, the wife of former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, texted Nina Day about the On Our Sleeves movement, which has a motto of “Because We Don’t Wear Our Thoughts On Our Sleeves.” The movement’s goals include destigmatizing talking about the emotional and psychological well-being in American youth.

As Day, 40, approached his first season as Ohio State’s full-time head coach, he and Nina had been approached about numerous charitable partnerships. But the confluence of coincidences tied to On Our Sleeves, combined with Ryan’s own life experience, led to a meeting with officials at Nationwide Children’s Hospital about bringing increased attention, resources and research to the movement.

“Suicide is the second leading killer of adolescents and teenagers,” Ryan Day said. “It needs attention. It needs help. The more we talked about it with people, we realized what an epidemic it is in Ohio and everywhere else around the country. The idea was to shine some light on this.”

On June 5, Ryan Day stepped to a podium at a news conference and did something both brave and vulnerable.

Day said publicly for the first time that his father died of suicide.

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