Inside the Cowboys’ quiet comeback: how Solomon Thomas is turning heartbreak into healing.QQ

FRISCO, Texas – Everyone grieves the loss of a loved one in different ways.

For Solomon Thomas and some of his Cowboys teammates, giving back to the community together was one of their ways to grieve the loss of their teammate, Marshawn Kneeland.

On Monday, Osa Odighizuwa, Donovan Ezeiruaku, Perrion Winfrey, James Houston, Payton Turner, Jay Toia, Earnest Brown, Dayo Odeleye and Isaiah Land joined Thomas and his foundation, The Defensive Line, at Metrocrest Services, a non-profit social services organization that specializes in helping individuals, families and seniors navigate through crisis situations and work to stabilize their lives for a brighter future, to pack food packages for the homeless and those in need. It came on the heels of an emotional first day back together, but that didn’t matter to Thomas and his teammates.

“I think the bye week, being away from each other has been hard,” Thomas said. “So I think coming into the building together meant a lot and then also having this and the guys, I even told them, ‘Hey, I understand if you don’t want to come,’ and all of them wanted to come.”

“So the fact that they all wanted to come and just be around each other, I think that’s all we wanted. We just wanted to be around each other because we’re all hurting, we feel the absence and so we just want to be there to love on each other.”

Earlier in the day, the Cowboys held a team meeting, the first one in-person following Kneeland’s tragic passing. It was led by head coach Brian Schottenheimer, team independent psychologist Heather Twedell and director of team security Cable Johnson. It was a meeting that Thomas felt he and the players needed, and Schottenheimer gave them everything they needed and then some.

“Extremely impactful, extremely emotional,” Thomas said of the meeting. “Extremely proud of coach [Brian Schottenheimer] for how he conducted today, just bringing therapists in the building, bringing people who we needed in the building and just letting us be our true emotions. Giving us a safe place to let everyone know what’s going on inside.”

“I haven’t been around a program that’s done something like that before, and [it’s] a testament to [Schottenheimer] and his love for us because we needed that today. We needed a day just to be human and to cry and to let everyone know how we felt. Extremely draining and hard day, hard for everyone involved, hard for everyone who loved Marshawn. So it just meant a lot for [Schottenheimer] to conduct the day like that.”

In a virtual team meeting held last week immediately after the news of Kneeland’s passing came out, several leaders like Dak Prescott spoke to the team. Thomas was one of them.

“I was just letting guys know that I loved them, that I’m there for them, and that whatever they’re going through, there’s people that can help them, and there’s hope and that there’s a light in the storm they’re going through,” Thomas said of his message to the team. “Just letting them know that there’s definitely things that Marshawn was going through that we’ll never know about. It’s a tragedy, it’s terrible, and our hearts are there for Catalina, for his family and all his loved ones. The way to get through this is just love and being together.”

The events of the past few days hit close to home for Thomas, who lost his sister Ella to suicide in January of 2018. Three years after, he started his foundation, The Defensive Line, a non-profit organization in Ella’s honor with the mission of ending the epidemic of youth suicide, specifically for young people of color. Both of his parents, Chris and Martha, are heavily involved in the organization, and Thomas’ mother volunteered alongside him on Monday as well.

It’s the experiences he’s been through in his past that have give him a sense of duty to pass one what he’s learned about the importance of mental health in the past to his teammates now, and going forward.

“It’s definitely hard because it’s very triggering for me having lost a sister to suicide,” Thomas said. “And then losing Marshawn is just hard in its own way, hard for losing a teammate, a brother. Hard for the feelings that are brought back up from my sister, but definitely have a responsibility to be here for my teammates to let them know that there’s help available, that there’s love out there, and that there’s a way to move through this together in a way of honoring Marshawn and honoring our own feelings at the same time.”

What may be most difficult yet is getting back to football, which even four days after Kneeland’s passing still seems like a tall task. What’s helping get Thomas and his teammates ready to be back on the field in seven days against the Raiders is the goal of playing like Marshawn played, with a love for the game and his teammates.

“It’s super hard because you really feel the effects of life,” Thomas said of getting back to football. “It’s just like, ‘How much does this really even matter right now when we’re feeling all this pain and this tragedy is going on?’ But one of our ways that we want to move forward with this is we want to honor Marshawn with how he played. He loved the game of football, he played extremely hard, he was always smiling on and off the field.

“So we want to find a way to honor him, then we can do that on the field, but we can also do that just how we live every day life and take the lessons and the qualities we loved about him and apply them to our lives every day. So that’s what we’re going to do, and we’re going to keep his memory as strong and his spirit as strong as long as we live.”