Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Going into my second year at Queen's I was on the women's basketball team and a new coach came in to replace the one from first year. This coach told me I would be a red-shirt/manager on the team after I had spent my entire summer training with the team as directed by the coach to earn my spot.
The coach had made up her mind about who she wanted before she even saw us play and this was reflected in my treatment in this environment even prior to team selection. The environment compromised my mental health to a very serious degree. For one, I was going to practice every day for 3 hours or more where the coach made me feel unwanted and like I was a burden. She would allow me to practice for 20 minutes and then kick me off to the sideline to watch and/or film. On multiple occasions coaches would give me conflicting instruction wherein the assistant coach told me I could participate in a drill and then the head coach would yell at me in front of the entire team to get off the court. I was left out of team building activities, my presence was routinely disregarded, I was humiliated in front of my peers on multiple occasions, was treated differently and worse than everyone else on the team and several incidents made me question the intentions of the coach and led to seriously impact my well-being. When asked for more clarification I was told that the reason I was kicked off the court was because I took away from the training of the more valuable players on the team.

Many, many incidents that were out of my control occurred during my time with the team made me feel incredibly worthless and killed my self-esteem and motivation. I can give examples and/or send the documentation from my report to athletics if necessary, however theses are difficulty emotions for me to bring up again and this document could probably be 5,000 words long. My mental health was negatively impacted as a result of what was occurring and severely compromised my academic performance. As incidents with my involvement with the team began to accumulate, my mental health took a very serious turn for the worse. I told this to the head coach and disclosed how much I was struggling, she told me to see a therapist. Soon after the coach made the choice to kick me off the team (mid-semester) because it wasn't working out. This was after I had committed my time and energy to the team and had also been living with teammates. Much more confrontation had occurred and my parents did get involved. Never in my life had I been in a worse place mentally, I was not sleeping, I developed serious eating disorders, I could not make sense of my thoughts and my relationships with my housemates were disastrous; I was in a toxic living environment. After my removal from the team, other incidents occurred involving one of the senior leaders on the team who sent me hurtful messages in that I have proof of (in relation to incidents involving much more details). This same individual would then come and spend time at my house with my housemates in the evening when I had no other place to go. My mental health had only worsened after this and at times I was suicidal. Given that I wasn't sleeping and was battling to do simple things like get out of bed, eat, and interact, school at the time was very difficult to stay on top of. I did school work and assignments when I had the capacity to do so however this was fluctuating and a battle for me. There are certain courses which I had in person such as COMM 200 in first semester that I was able to complete most of the work over a longer time period because the prof had kindly taken time to speak with me after class and was understanding whilst concerned for my well-being. I am still working with Mr.Douglas now to hand in my final assignment and will be getting a good grade in this course. At this time I felt like I had nothing, was drained and little acts of kindness such as this made the difference in me being able to get small tasks done, even then it was a great struggle.

I continued to use the therapists offered through the school in an attempt to get my mental health back and try to salvage my academics. This took a lot of work and was a process that went up and down over the course of the year. I tried to stay on top of the courses that I could and in second semester I did a better job at this.

By the end of the school year and beginning of summer in a panic of getting enough credits I enrolled in 3 summer courses. At this time I had been doing better but was still struggling. I decided to commit to taking space to really work on my mental health for the summer and change my environment to do so. I got a summer Job and honestly did terrible for the first few months because I was still struggling. During this time, the summer courses I had enrolled in completely slipped my vision. I was almost fired before my boss took the time to really help me get out of the hole I was in. I started to really get better mentally and my boss gave me real responsibility at the company. I was doing better yet, had a fear of being back in the mental state I was in and neglected to look at the summer courses I had enrolled in. I did not want to be reminded. In the back of my mind I had planned to drop them, and I went to drop them when I realized these were things I would eventually need to face. Truthfully I thought I dropped them on time but I didn't because on my record these courses are shown with 3 F's. My parent's paid for them and were disappointed so I paid them back with money I had made in the summer. Not dropping those courses on time when I realized I needed the time to work on my mental health was careless of me and something I will never let happen again. I know this doesn't directly correlate with an extenuating circumstance but these F's were a fallback of the extenuating circumstances that forced me into a hole that I have worked really really hard to get out of. With regards to the courses I am appealing to drop that I took during the fall, reflecting back at the mental state I was in, there was nothing more I could have done. As much as I hold onto the anger of what happened last year it was out of my control and taught me that I need to focus on what I can control in order to stay on top of whats important even when things aren't going well. I am now doing well in all of my current courses and have been working with the profs who understand what I went through last year to bring up my marks which faltered as a result of my mental state last year. I really hope that you can understand my situation and take these F's off of my transcript as I can promise nothing like this will ever happen again. I will only continue to improve from here. I appreciate you taking the time to read this, even tho its longer than it should be.