‘I walk away better’: the mental health retreat helping top footballers

“I grew up in a club where verbal and sexual violence was widespread and even known. That was all I knew,” said Gotham FC goalkeeper Michelle Betos. “So when I reached the professional ranks and those things existed, I was almost immune to them. I think that was the biggest problem in this league for a long time. From youth to professional, that’s all we knew.

“To be in a room with coaches who talked about that, who understood it, who recognized how important the mental side of this game is to the development of those kids as people, no matter what they were going to do, was emotional. ”

Betos is among a group of professional players, youth coaches and facilitators who are taking a moment to step away from last week’s extraordinary four-day mental health retreat in San Diego to talk to the Observer.

It was the brainchild of San Diego Wave defenseman Naomi Girma. A year ago, motivated by the loss of Katie Meyer, her best friend and Stanford University teammate, who died by suicide in March 2022, Girma wrote in her diary: “Set up a mental health clinic with Common Goal.”

Common Goal is an organization where players, managers and clubs pledge 1% of their income to put back into the game.

Girma says: ‘I really wanted to do something in her honour, something that I thought could have helped a younger Katie. I didn’t want anyone else’s family, friends or community to have to experience something like this.”

That led to Fox Sports committing to devoting 1% of their 2023 Women’s World Cup coverage to discussing mental health — it ended up being 6% — and a viral campaign with the U.S. women’s national team. Now there’s the Create the Space retreat, which brought together 20 players, one from each National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) off-season club, and 25 local youth coaches to discuss a multitude of mental health-related topics.

Girma first contacted Common Goal’s US executive director Lilli Barrett-O’Keefe, who says of the 23-year-old: “To have an idea, write it in your diary, be so intentional, and bring it comes to life a bit. years later speaks volumes about what the next wave of NWSL players will do.

“They are regaining power and taking back control. They no longer just point fingers at corrupt systems or a lack of policy, but say, ‘We can create the culture we want and we have the ability to go back to our communities, our clubs and our systems and create better and demand better standards. ask differently. ”

A group of 20 players from NWSL clubs and 25 youth coaches attended the first Create the Space retreat in San Diego. Photo: Common Goal

The effect on everyone involved in the retreat was profound. “I already know that I will walk away better, better rested and lighter than when I came in,” says Betos. “There’s not much else you can ask for.

“My hope is that we can all take this feeling that we have experienced into our environment and open it up to a group, so that we can create changing rooms that feel safe – where they don’t need to be. a choice between prioritizing our mental performance and our sports performance, where the two can coexist. It’s been ‘pick one’ for so long, but the sweet spot is both.”

Becky Sauerbrunn, the US women’s captain, received a message from Girma on Christmas Eve asking if she wanted to participate. “Naomi is such an amazing woman and it’s so beautiful to start something like this with such a tragedy,” she says. “It’s beautiful because it is also very heavy, there is a lot of sadness here.

“To have Katie’s name associated with something like that and keep her memory alive and know that her story is going to help so many people, it’s really something special that she’s done.”

Myra Sack, one of the retreat’s facilitators, says the event is a “testament to Naomi’s ability to focus on something so painful.” She adds: “Creating opportunities and space for coaches and professional athletes to be better for ourselves and others, in honor of Katie, speaks to the power of what happens when we pay attention to our pain, rather than to turn away from it.”

Sack’s organization, e-motionwas born from the life and death of her daughter, Havi, who died in 2021 from a neurodegenerative disease. Sack played college football and worked in sports-based youth development for more than a decade and felt not enough was being done to deal with grief in these spaces.

“There are constant losses that all these players experience,” she says. “It could be related to death, it could be personal or emotional, it could be related to losing a home, moving dorms, being benched, being traded or an injury.

“We don’t have to enter the Olympic Games losing, we don’t have to compare or minimize each other’s losses. We can just connect at the level of pain in any of our humanities and it doesn’t have to be so scary.”

Sauerbrunn worried that sharing her own vulnerabilities would make her feel uncomfortable, but those walls are falling quickly. “It was completely consensual. If you want to share, you can share. Nothing is forced.

“What I really hoped to achieve during this retreat is that I wouldn’t have to feel so controlled in my thoughts and be so diplomatic, that I could really speak to the feelings in my soul and I really have can do here.”

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Sinead Farrelly retired from football for eight years, but returned to play for Gotham FC last year after exposing coercive sexual behavior from her former head coach Paul Riley. Riley denied the allegations, but they led to a reckoning in the NWSL.

“I know firsthand that my choice to be vulnerable and my choice to be supported in something that brought me so much shame, and was traumatic for me, changed my life,” she says. “Before that, I was dying inside. I couldn’t come back and play football. I wouldn’t feel the fulfillment I feel now in other parts of my life.

“These conversations and these safe spaces save lives. There were so many times I didn’t want to live, but it was more that I didn’t want to live the life I was living. Opening up gave me the opportunity to alchemize my past in a way where I could exist in the future and exist happily and in a fulfilled way.

Girma’s inclusion of youth coaches alongside NWSL players in Create the Space has had a profound impact on everyone involved. She wanted to do that because of “the profound impact a coach has on a child’s life, far beyond their football career.”

Naomi Girma
Naomi Girma was motivated to create the Create the Space retreat by the death of her best friend, Katie Meyer. Photo: John Cowpland/AP

South Bronx United director of football Andy Jenkins believes that not enough emphasis is placed on mental health in coaching badges, especially considering that few people affected will go on to become professional players. “Coaching badges teach you content, knowledge, tactics and how to develop players. They don’t teach you how to develop people, they don’t tell you how to work with people, how to motivate people, how to be a role model, how to advocate for them, how to be a supporter, how to be approachable – all the qualities that are the real qualities that make someone an excellent coach,” he says.

“The emphasis within our system is wrong, both here in the US and in Britain, that in order to build great footballers we need to teach them technical skills rather than such important transferable life skills that will serve them in the football and at school. and life beyond.”

Goalkeeper Carly Nelson, who is excited about the prospect of shaping the environment at new NWSL club Utah Royals, highlights the impact these coaches have at both the top and bottom levels of the game. “Mental health in football has been neglected for so long. As professional athletes it is not new, it has influenced us since childhood,” she says. “It is incredibly inspiring to see youth coaches taking this conversation into their own hands and being given the tools and resources to start conversations and work to empower children to feel safe.”

Create the Space will continue to provide opportunities for people to talk, including setting up webinars and workshops for those who couldn’t attend, and working with the 45 people at the retreat throughout the year. They plan to expand the project.

What would the players like to see? Sauerbrunn says in the NWSL, which has “felt such trauma,” that in terms of mental health they are “only just beginning to scratch the surface” when it comes to “training for staff and those in charge, but also training for the players. Our hope is that we can make that progress faster so that we can make sure that the youth have all the tools, but also that players like me, at 38 years old, have these tools because these are lifelong things that we can use.

Betos would like to see the goals of the retreat extend beyond just the players. “I’ve been playing for almost thirteen years and I don’t think I’ve been to a club that’s done well,” she says. “I would like to see head coaches do something like that.

“Mental health is also very important and an issue for people in their shoes, but it is also important that they understand the impact they can and do have on us.”

Sauerbrunn agrees: “It would be helpful for everyone to have a space like this, learn these tools and be able to apply them in whatever workspace or lifespace they are in. What if that then starts with coaches and people having direct control over some people’s livelihoods? That is amazing.”