June is Men's Mental Health Awareness Month, a time set aside to talk openly about something men have been taught to carry silently for generations. But here at Check On Your Teammates®, we want to be honest about something: this movement doesn't take months off. The need to check in on the people around us doesn't arrive on a calendar and it doesn't expire at the end of June. It's relevant in December, in July, on a random Tuesday in October. COYT is for every season, because someone, somewhere, needs to hear from you today, and they'll need to hear from you again next month, too.
Chris Nilan's story is proof of exactly that. It wasn't a single dramatic intervention that saved his life. It was a sequence of small, repeated, ordinary acts of someone refusing to look away.
Sometimes Checking In Looks Like a Business Card
For years, Chris Nilan was known as one of hockey's toughest player. An enforcer for the Montreal Canadiens whose reputation for fearlessness was legendary. Fans saw the fights, the grit, the swagger. What they didn't see was the man underneath, quietly unraveling.
Like so many people wrestling with addiction, Nilan became an expert at hiding it. "People would try, but I wouldn't let them in," he explained in a recent conversation with Check On Your Teammates®. "You try and protect that, because although people know you're messed up, you think they really don't know the degree. They know something's going on."
One person refused to settle for "something's going on." Former Montreal Canadiens captain Bob Gainey, Nilan's own linemate, noticed the signs and did something simple but enormously consequential. He handed Chris a card. On it: the name of NHL interventionist Dan Cronin.
Nilan wasn't looking for help. He wasn't ready to admit how serious things had gotten. But he made the call anyway, not because he thought he needed treatment, but because he thought, just maybe, there might be an opportunity in it for him.
"I wasn't thinking, I'm going to get help for drugs and alcohol," Nilan admitted. "I thought maybe there's an opportunity here somewhere... and it turned out that wasn't it at all. They knew what was up with me."
He sat down with Dan and lied through his teeth, minimizing, deflecting, performing wellness. "I proceeded to lie to him that I wasn't as bad as I was," Nilan said. But Dan, a man in long-term recovery himself, saw straight through it. "I thought I did a good job pulling the wool over," Nilan laughed. "But I didn't."
Dan asked Chris to see a therapist. Chris agreed almost as a formality. By the second day, that therapist had broken through the defenses Nilan had spent a lifetime building. The next day, he was on a plane to treatment for the first time.
One Card. One Phone Call. One Decision to Show Up.
That's the whole chain of events that started Chris Nilan's recovery: a teammate who noticed, a card that got handed over, and a phone call that could have gone unmade.
This is the exact mechanism Check On Your Teammates® exists to protect and replicate. You don't need the perfect words, the clinical training, or a deep understanding of addiction to be the person who hands someone a card literal or figurative. You just need to notice, and to act on what you notice, even if you're not sure it'll matter.
It mattered for Chris. "I love him," Nilan said of Dan Cronin, decades later. "He helped me change my life."
Why Most People Miss the Moment
Here's the part of Chris's story that should make all of us pause: people did try to check on him. His parents knew something was wrong. Friends reached out. But, as Nilan describes it, those check-ins often stopped at the surface.
"It was just really superficial," he said. "It wasn't a deep dive 'Hey, I'm really...' You know, because when you're trying to protect your addiction, you almost go to any length to protect that. You don't want to let people in, and you don't want them to make you uncomfortable with it."
That's why "How are you?" so often gets met with "Fine" and why "Fine" so often ends the conversation. Real checking in requires going one layer deeper. It requires being willing to risk an awkward silence, a defensive answer, or being told to back off.
Nilan put it plainly: "I could back people off me pretty easily. Not everybody's going to do that. But I think it's important to take some risk when you have your antennas up about a loved one, someone at work, a teammate and you think something's going on."
The Lesson for Every Team, Every Season
You don't have to be an NHL captain to make a difference. You can be a teammate, a coworker, a spouse, a coach, a parent, a sibling, a friend. You don't need the perfect words. You need to show up and then show up again, and again, until trust is built and the door finally opens.
For Chris Nilan, one teammate's willingness to step forward changed the entire trajectory of his life. For someone in your world right now, your check-in however small it feels, could be the first card in the chain that leads them somewhere safer.
This June, and every month after, check on your teammates. Because a simple conversation and sometimes just a small piece of cardstock with a phone number on it can change a life.
Check On Your Teammates®. Visit checkonyourteammates.org.