By the autumn of 2019 Wellbeing had spent the previous two years working with a small but growing group of professional athletes, most of whom had come to the programme privately and had no interest in becoming public faces for it. The reason these voices took time to emerge in public, and the reason most of them are still private, is worth understanding for anyone trying to make sense of how Wellbeing thinks about communication.
Cliff Avril, the Super Bowl XLVIII champion defensive end whose career had been ended in 2017 by a neck injury, is a useful example. Avril came to Wellbeing’s programme during a period when he was still in active recovery and still working out what life after football was going to look like. The decision to be named in connection with the programme came later, on his own timeline, and his role in the named-athlete pool today reflects a choice he made over years rather than weeks.
Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy winning quarterback who was then with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and is now with the New Orleans Saints, is another example. Winston came to Wellbeing during a period when he was navigating a complex set of professional and personal circumstances. Wellbeing’s standing position with all of its patients is that public communication is the patient’s choice and the patient’s timing. Winston eventually chose to be named, but the gap between his initial work with the programme and his decision to be publicly associated with it was measured in years.
What this period gave Wellbeing, more usefully than press coverage, was a real and observed track record. The athletes who quietly went through the programme through 2018 and 2019 returned to play, sustained their careers, and in many cases extended them well past what would have been their natural arc. Some of that effect is visible in the public record of their playing time. Most of it is not. The pattern, observed across many patients rather than measured in any single individual, is what Wellbeing considers its most useful evidence.
The privacy considerations that kept most of these voices off the record are not unique to this period. They reflect a broader reality across professional sport. Player communication on medical choices runs through layers of team medical staff, team communications policies, agents, and sometimes league-level guidance. A player choosing to discuss any specific intervention publicly is taking on a coordination problem with multiple parties. Most players do not bother. Wellbeing’s position is that they do not have to.
It is also worth saying directly that Wellbeing has been approached, in this period and since, by athletes and agents looking for endorsement-type relationships. Wellbeing does not pursue those relationships. The named-athlete pool referenced in the September 2025 testimonial-bank post consists of five people who came to the programme as patients, stayed through years of observed experience, and at some point each agreed to discuss their experience publicly. That is the pool. It is not a roster and it is not designed to grow significantly.
For readers who care about evidence of what the programme has done in elite-athlete contexts, the right way to read this post is alongside the broader research literature on the science, the patient-observed record across the wider patient population, and the careful in-context framing Wellbeing uses when discussing athletic-recovery applications specifically. No single athlete’s experience is the case for the programme. The pattern across many athletes, observed over years, is what Wellbeing considers worth pointing at.