For Patriots player, cleats carry special meaning after friend’s death

“Miller time.”

It’s a nickname Keith Miller III wanted to be called.

His teammates, like Christian Gonzalez, would mess with Miller about it. They didn’t want to use it, they said.

“We all did anyway,” says Gonzalez, a second-year cornerback on the New England Patriots, “because we were like, ‘Okay, that is a pretty cool nickname.’ ”

Everyone just seemed to gravitate toward Miller. Gonzalez remembers him as the loudest person in the room, the one always smiling and cracking jokes.

NFL STATS CENTRAL: The latest NFL scores, schedules, odds, stats and more.

“He’s just one of those guys that everybody had so much love for,” Gonzalez tells USA TODAY Sports.

The two former Texas high school teammates are captured in one of those moments on a cleat Gonzalez is wearing Sunday when the Patriots host the Indianapolis Colts.

“We used to do this little jumping celebration, it was like shooting-a-basketball kind of thing,” Gonzalez says. “It’s one of my favorite pictures of us.”

Gonzalez is participating in the NFL’s “My Cause My Cleats,” an initiative in which more than 1,400 current and former players as well as coaches and staff will spotlight during Weeks 13 and 14 an issue and organization that are important to them.

Mental health awareness, the cause Gonzalez chose, will be heavily represented. It’s one about which the American Academy of Pediatrics declared “a national state of emergency” a few years ago for children and adolescents.

It reached Gonzalez last spring when Miller died after struggling with his mental health.

“As a friend, you try your best to always stay in contact and when things happen, then you always feel like, ‘Oh, I should have done more. I should have done this,’ Gonzalez says. “But at the end of the day, you did as much as you could do.”

He is doing more through KyleCares, which supports high school and college students in New England by promoting “non-judgemental” and “empathetic’ environments to promote positive mental health.

Gonzalez has met with kids himself, and he’s collaborating on efforts to promote the organization’s message with its founders, Sue and Jim Johnson, who lost their 19-year-old son, Kyle, to suicide in 2018.

Gonzalez talked with USA TODAY Sports about it and how youth and adolescent athletes can take care of their mental health and find confidence to seek out help for it.

We feed off good competition, but we can always be good teammates

Gonzalez’s father, Hector, played basketball at Texas-El Paso in the early to mid-1990s, and then semiprofessionally in his native Colombia.

He was hard on his kids, his son remembers, but not too hard.

“He supported us, he pushed us,” Gonzalez says. ‘Just wanted us to be our best, whatever we chose.”

Gonzalez says his father and mother, Temple, who is from the Dallas area, where the family settled, never forced a sport on their kids. His older sisters, Melissa and Samantha, chose track and field, and were collegiate all-Americans at Division 1 schools (Melissa at Texas, Samantha at Miami).

“I learned so much from them, even though we played two different sports,’ Gonzalez says. “At the end of the day, there’s still a competitiveness you learn. Anything we did was competitive. We would play cards, and we would get into it. That’s just how our family is, and you even see it in my little sister (Lily); she’s only 12, just in seventh, grade. And whenever I’m back home and we’re playing games, she’s just as competitive as all of us. She always wants to win.”

There was something else about the family that helped give him an edge: It was everyone knowing when to pull back and offer support. It’s the way his relationship with Miller worked, too.

Gonzalez and Miller met in Little League football played against each from about the age of seven until 12. Facing off helped fuel a friendship.

They stayed in touch through different middle schools and two years of high school. Then Gonzalez transferred to The Colony (Texas) High and they became teammates.

“We were always together, always laughing,” he says.

He has learned through their personal tragedy that we can check on the ones we care about even in what seem like the best of times.

“It’s much easier said than done for somebody, if you’re feeling some type of way, to reach out,” he says. “But I think it’s as simple as talking to somebody, just seeing somebody in high school and middle school, asking how someone’s doing, and actually caring, not just asking about, ‘How’s your day’ because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

“Talk to somebody because you never know what somebody’s going through or what somebody’s thinking. … That person can be like, ‘Okay, I can talk to this person. I can rely on them. They’ll be there for me when I need something.’ So I think a small a thing as that kind of goes a very long way.”

COACH STEVE: A college coach’s tragedy teaches us to see kids’ mental health anxiety

There’s a stigma that goes along with mental health issues. But we can control whether or not it exists.

Kids face unprecedented challenges in the pressure they constantly feel to succeed. When they do well, and when they don’t do well, reminders are all around them in likes, posts and reposts.

According to data from 2013 to 2023 contained on the Centers for Disease Control’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 40% of high school students felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped doing their usual activities.

When Gonzalez met with students and athletes at North Attleboro (Massachusetts) High School in May — an event called “Be Kind to Your Mind” that was part of Mental Health Awareness Month — he saw how talking openly about how they feel can give kids strength.

“There’s still a stigma, definitely, in high school,” Gonzalez says. “It was a great opportunity, I hope, that can empower other high school kids and middle school kids to talk about it.”

Another of his conversations that day came with Jim Johnson, Kyle’s father, who told him about why he started his foundation.

According to KyleCares, suicide is the second-leading cause of death among 15 to 24 year olds.

Kyle Johnson’s family writes on their website that they feel “a strong responsibly to tell his story with candor and honestly. … He encouraged others who struggled with mental illness to seek help and recover; to never stop fighting the disease, and to never feel ashamed for having to admit they need assistance.”

COACH STEVE: Treating athletes’ mental health the same as physical health can save lives

Know that you are never alone

Gonzalez, 22, says he didn’t pay much attention to mental health when he was growing up. But when he was a senior in high school, he went on spring break and never went back. COVID took away his senior year events, too.

“Once I got to college and was on my own the first time it was kind of like, ‘OK, now this is when I’m kind of starting to think about it and understanding it,’” he says. “Being on your own and mental health comes with being a college athlete and being away, having so much pressure and doing all that. So that’s kind of when I started learning about it and paying attention to my mental health.”

The pandemic canceled his freshman season at Colorado, and he found himself at home and not playing football for the first time since he was five.

He had a lot of time to himself and to try and understand the way he was feeling. He also had his parents and sisters around him with whom he could talk.

“I’m a real big family guy, so I know not everybody has the family structure, the family life that I do,” he says. “I’ve been blessed that my parents are still together. Have two older sisters, a younger sister. I have a lot of people in my corner to be able to talk to. So I would just talk to them and spend time with them.”

The NFL also has a mental health clinician to talk to at team facilities at least 8-12 hours per week. Gonzalez also learned to lean on his teammates.

“You come to work with these guys every day, so you build relationships, and if you need to reach out and talk to them, there’s a lot of older guys on the team that have been through a lot more, have seen a lot more in life, so being able to reach out to them definitely helps if you need it,” he says.

If you feel you are struggling with your mental health, reach out to your family or your team. You can also reach out to counselor at your school or ask your parents about getting psychotherapy.

One of goals of KyleCares, and of Gonzalez, is to help you feel you can do all of this “without shame or hesitation.”

“Just from like a change of seven, eight months to a year, professional sports and college athletes (are) prioritizing mental health and actually speaking about it,” he says.

‘Find time for yourself’: Have a stress reducer that’s not your sport

Finding positive people — ones “that will look out for you just as much as you look out for yourself,” Gonzalez says — is also a way to help us succeed as athletes.

But we also need time for ourselves. Growing up playing football, Gonzalez says he made sure to spend moments — a couple of hours a day if you have it — talking with his family or engaging in a hobby outside of his sport.

“If you do your sport 24/7, all the time, I feel like you’re gonna burn out,” he says. “You gotta have a work and life balance.”

It’s advice sports medicine physician Jennifer King, the section chief of Pediatric Sports Medicine at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, gives to her patients.

“There’s always a risk of injury,” she tells USA TODAY Sports. “They’re not in their sport again. And then what is their stress reduction tactic at that point? We really try to encourage them to practice something, because if you try to do a stress reduction technique when you’re stressed for the first time, it’s not going to work. It’s gonna to make you more stressed.

“I want you to have something else that you can go to, and you only need to practice it for a few minutes a day, and that can be your go to for whenever your stress levels start to get high, because I expect everyone to have some anxiety at some point, because it’s normal.”

Gonzalez mentioned playing video games or watching movies as tactics. Meditation apps such as Calm or Headspace, music and books can also work.

“Being able to find what brings you peace, I feel like that goes a very long way to help somebody get to the highest level,” Gonzalez says.

Gonzalez was a first-round draft pick in 2023 out of Oregon, where he transferred to after two seasons at Colorado, where he also played with Miller. Images of them from their high school days — and that celebration they had — are commemorated on two of the four sides of the cleats he is wearing Sunday.

So are the words “Kyle Cares” and “Mental Health Matters.”

“There’s a lot more people talking about it, but there’s also so much that it can grow and get even more attention,” Gonzalez says of mental health awareness.

One way is through the memory of his friend, who is mentioned by name on a side of a cleat, as is a message about the way he made everyone feel: “Miller Time 4L.’

It’s meaning?

“Miller Time for life,” Gonzalez says.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.