“I grew up in a club where verbal and sexual abuse was prevalent, and even known. That was all I knew,” says the Gotham FC goalkeeper Michelle Betos. “So when I got to the professional ranks and those things existed, I was almost immune to them. I think that was the biggest issue in this league for so long. From youth to professional, that’s all we knew.
“To be in a room of coaches that were talking about that, that were understanding it, that were recognising how important the mental side of this game is for the development of those kids as humans, whatever they go on to do, was emotional.”
Betos is among a group of professional players, youth coaches and facilitators to take 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 Naomi Girma, a defender for San Diego Wave. 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 thing with Common Goal.”
Common Goal is an organisation whereby players, managers and clubs pledge 1% of their income to be put back into the game.
Girma says: “I was really wanting to do something in her honour, something I thought could have helped a younger Katie. I didn’t want anyone else’s family, friends or community to have to go through something like this.”
That led to Fox Sports committing to making 1% of their 2023 Women’s World Cup coverage to discussing mental health – it ended up being 6% – and a viral campaign with the US women’s national team. Now there is the Create the Space retreat, which brought together 20 players, one from each National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) club in their off-season, 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 journal, be that intentional, and then be bringing it to life a year later just speaks volumes to what the next wave of NWSL players are going to do.
“They’re reclaiming power, taking back control. They’re no longer pointing fingers at corrupt systems or a lack of policies alone but are saying: ‘We can create the culture that we want and we have the ability to go back into our communities and our clubs and our systems and demand better and demand different.’”
The effect on all involved in the retreat has been profound. “I already know I’m walking away better, more equipped and lighter than when I walked in,” says Betos. “There’s not much else you could ask for.
“My hope is that we all take this feeling that we’ve been able to experience and bring it to our environments and open this up to a group, so we can create locker rooms that feel safe – where it doesn’t have to be a choice between prioritising our mental performance and our sports performance, where the two can coexist. For so long it’s been ‘choose one’, 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 take part. “Naomi’s such an amazing woman and to have such tragedy start something like this is so beautiful,” she says. “It’s beautiful because it’s also very heavy, there’s a lot of grief here.
“To have Katie’s name attached to something like this and to keep her memory alive and knowing that her story is going to help so many people, it really is a special thing that she’s done.”
Myra Sack, one of the retreat’s facilitators, says the event is a “testament to Naomi’s ability to turn towards something that’s so painful”. She adds: “To create opportunity and space for coaches and professional athletes to be better for ourselves and others in Katie’s honour speaks to the power of what happens when we pay attention to our pain as opposed to turning away from it.”
Sack’s organisation, e-motion, was born out of the life and death of her daughter, Havi, who died of a neurodegenerative disease in 2021. Sack played college soccer and had worked in sports-based youth development for more than a decade and thought not enough was being done to engage with grief in these spaces.
“There are accumulated losses all the time that all of these players are experiencing,” she says. “It could be death-related, it could be personal or emotional, it could be related to a loss of a home, moving dorms, being benched, being traded or an injury.
“We don’t need to get into the loss Olympics, we don’t need to compare or minimise each other’s losses. We can just connect at the level of pain in each of our humanities and it doesn’t have to be so scary.”
Sauerbrunn was worried she would feel uncomfortable sharing her own vulnerabilities but those walls fall rapidly. “It’s been completely consensual. If you want to share, you can share. Nothing is forced.
“Going into this retreat, what I was really hoping to get from it is that I wouldn’t have to feel so curated in my thoughts and be so diplomatic, that I could really speak to the feelings in my soul and I’ve really been able to do that here.”
Sinead Farrelly retired from the game for eight years but returned to play for Gotham FC last year after exposing the sexually coercive behaviour of her former head coach Paul Riley. Riley denied the accusations but they led to a reckoning in the NWSL.
“I know first-hand that my choice to be vulnerable and my choice to be supported in something that used to bring me so much shame, and that was traumatic to me, has changed my life,” she says. “Before that, I was dying inside. I wouldn’t have been able to come back and play soccer. I wouldn’t feel the fulfilment 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 alchemise my past into a way that 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 profoundly affected all involved. She wanted to do that because of “how big of an impact a coach has on a kid’s life, far beyond their soccer careers”.
South Bronx United’s director of football, Andy Jenkins, believes not enough emphasis is placed on mental health in coaching badges, especially given how few that are affected will go on to be professional players. “Coaching badges teach you content, knowledge, tactics, how to develop players. They don’t teach you how to develop human beings, they don’t tell you how to work with human beings, how to motivate human beings, how to be a role model, how to be an advocate for them, how to be a supporter, how to be approachable – all the qualities that are the true qualities that make someone an excellent coach,” he says.
“The emphasis within our system is wrong, both here in the US and in the UK, that in order to build great soccer players we have to teach them technical skills rather than such important transferable life skills which will serve them in soccer and in school and life beyond that.”
Goalkeeper Carly Nelson, who is excited by the prospect of helping shape the environment at the new NWSL club Utah Royals, highlights the effect these coaches have on the top of the game as much as the bottom. “Mental health in soccer has been neglected for so long. As professional athletes it’s not new, it’s affected us since youth levels,” she says. “Seeing youth coaches take this conversation in their own hands and get the tools and the resources to start conversations and work on empowering kids to feel safe has been incredibly inspiring.”
Create the Space will continue to provide avenues for people to talk, including setting up webinars and workshops for those who could not attend, and work with the 45 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”, they are “only beginning to scratch the surface mental health-wise” when it comes to “training for staff and those in charge, but also training for the players as well. Our hope is that we can have that progress quicker so that we are making sure 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 retreat’s aims broaden beyond the players. “I’ve been playing almost 13 years and I don’t think I’ve been in a club yet that’s doing it all right,” she says. “I would love to see head coaches doing something like this.
“Mental health is also very important and an issue for people in their shoes, but it’s also important they understand the impact they can and do have on us.”
Sauerbrunn agrees: “It would be beneficial for everyone to be able to have a space like this, to learn these tools and be able to apply them into whatever workspace or life space they’re in. If that starts next with coaches and people that are in direct control of some people’s livelihoods? That’s wonderful.”
