E-Motion Featured in The Guardian

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

Published by The Guardian, January 22, 2024, excerpt and link to full piece below

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 honor speaks to the power of what happens when we pay attention to our pain as opposed to turning away from it.”

Sack’s organization, 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 minimize 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.”