Zoé Domitrović has taken a lot of hits on and off the ice, but she says the ones that hurt the most weren’t physical.

The 19-year-old had played on several Ottawa-area teams, including the Lady Sens and Kanata Rangers in the midget division. She was on a gold-medal-winning team at the 2010 Ontario Winter Games. But she says trash talking started to shake her confidence.

Now she is taking her life experiences to young teams, delivering the message that, when insults are thrown around, it’s important that players don’t take them to heart.

“That’s the biggest thing I could tell them,” says Domitrović. “Because I know that myself — I took everything to heart, and that was detrimental to my well-being.”

Trash talking is prevalent in many sports. Domitrović is from Aylmer, but at a young age moved with her family to Winnipeg, where she played hockey before a move to Ottawa at age 11. She said she had never experienced the level of insults during games that she did after the move back to the national capital area.

“For some reason when I moved to Ottawa I had a target over me.”

Those problems spread to her own dressing room where the line between trash talking and bullying began to blur.

“I remember there was one time when I was in the shower and (her teammates) turned the lights off on me,” she said. “And they are all laughing and thought it was so funny, and I was just crying.”

Sports psychology consultant Brenley Shapiro says trash talking — boasting or yelling insults to get under the opposition’s skin — can come from players, parents and coaches.

“It’s throwing people off of their game, and that is why people are doing it,” says Shapiro.

“(Talking) can help initially just to be a stress reliever,” says Shapiro. “Because people respond right away, and if you start to understand it, it takes on a little bit of a different life for you.”

Shapiro tells she tells players to look at it as a matter of character.

“I will talk about it in two aspects: What do you want to bring to the table (and) is that the way you want to represent yourself (on the ice)?” she says.

Domitrović first experienced depression at the age of 10 when she lost her grandfather. The following years were like a ride on an emotional roller coaster that brought her to deep lows that led her to write a suicide note. She said she was “ready at any given day to let go.”

Everything changed, though, when 14-year-old player Daron Richardson took her own life in 2010. Richardson was one of the first players Domitrović met when she moved to Ottawa, and she was someone she admired. Her death was a wake-up call.

“The impact of that changed everything for me,” said Domitrović. “That’s when I decided I was going to help myself; I was going to find help.”

From the Richardson tragedy came a movement known as Do It For Daron, which encourages young people to talk openly about mental illness.

Domitrović spoke to her school’s social worker, who suggested she go to the Youth Services Bureau, where she found a psychologist to help her. However, she suffered a setback a few years later when she was hit in the head by a flying puck while sitting on the bench. The injury caused major head trauma that compounded her anxiety, and she decided to give up hockey.

Eventually, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. While she has been able to get her life on track with the proper medication and therapy, she now channels her energy into her work, music and motivational speeches to help hockey players handle on-ice politics.

When she spoke to the Smiths Falls Cubs a few months ago, she asked the group of mostly 10-year-old girls if they had ever experienced trash talking, and most put up their hands.

“I emphasize thinking before you speak,” says Domitrović. “If that’s a word you are going to say to them that would hurt you, then maybe you should not say it to them.”

A mother of one of the players was at the talk.

Melanie Collins said hearing Domitrović’s story helped to open up a dialogue between her and her daughter.

“Now she’ll even let me know if a girl from another team says something to her while she is lined up on the ice,” says Collins. “So it just opened up the conversation floodgate.”

pmccooey@ottawacitizen.com