I set up a West Yorkshire Sands United team in March 2020, and we played our first game in February a week after my son, Toby, our rainbow baby, was born. Two weeks after that we went into lockdown!  

 

Sands United is passion project for me. It’s been a way for me to deal with my three losses, process what’s gone on and become more resilient around dealing with things. It's given me a space to remember my children, and it’s been a way for me to give back and create a legacy for them which has helped other people. 

 

I’ve won awards for the work I’ve done with Sands United and I‘m really proud of it. I'm proud of what we've done, I'm proud of how many people I've helped and I'm proud of every conversation I've had where somebody's told me that they've got something from it. I’m happy that I can turn such a tragedy into something that does so much good. 

I think it's so important that we don’t have a silence around baby loss and it's up to every single person to enable those conversations, whether you're enabling it from the perspective of starting it, like Sands United teams are doing, or you're the person that's receiving that conversation and enabling it to happen in a productive way. 

 

It’s so important that we talk about pregnancy and baby loss because it's only going to get better for people to deal with through conversations.  

 

At the heart of it, there’s a child that's been lost and if we don't talk about it, it's like you're forgetting them. People talk about when they lose their mum or their dad, the memories and pictures they have with them, but when you lose a baby, typically you've not had any or much time with them so it’s almost like people can’t see that was still a life as well, a life that’s not even been lived. There’s no level of what is or what isn't more tragic, but how tragic that there's a life there that never got any experiences in any time. By talking about that baby, you keep them alive. It’s not a pity party; it’s just allowing someone to tell you what they've been through. 

 

Sands United works for me because I need something to be around. I went to a Sands support group, but I can't just sit in a room and talk, and football is the event that breaks down the awkwardness around me speaking.  

 

We've currently got about 50 people on the team, and I want it to be a team where anybody who has been touched by pregnancy or baby loss can come along for support. We've got dads, my brother and my nephew play and work friends that I was working with at the time of my losses. I've got people that have brought their best men from their wedding along and people that have brought their father-in-laws and brother-in-laws. I've got one player that lost his baby in the 90s who has only just started his journey of healing from it because he's started with the team. At one point we had a male nurse in the team too because he was supporting people that had been through baby loss at work and wanted to see it from the other side.  

All sorts of people are part of the team. My 12-year-old stepson Issac is mad about football, and he comes along on a Wednesday night when he's on school holidays. He's been at tournaments with us, he's got his own kit, and he’s even played on the pitch. We had a friendly once and the team we played against were lovely. They knew about our journey, and they knew Isaac had lost his brothers and sisters. We concocted it that somebody was going to go down in the box and Issac would take the penalty for our team. We subbed him on, and he took a penalty and scored against this team of older blokes. 

 

It’s nice that people can get their children involved, the children that they might have had before or after their loss because they are their siblings at the end of the day, so you know any loss is going to be an important part of their life as well. 

 

It's really good being with a bunch of people that understand what you've been through. You don't have to explain what baby loss feels like to a man or what kind of things you go through. We've all been in the same situation but different, and it's that camaraderie and that bond that's instantly created. It’s an understanding you don't have to force, and you don't have to rationalise everything that you're feeling because you know people are already there with you. 

When you’re stood shoulder to shoulder next to somebody on the football pitch, you know they’re going to play that extra 10% because they've got their baby's name on their chest or a star on their chest that represents their child. They’re going to play as hard as you are because they know how much of a legacy they want to create for their baby or babies as well.

But you don't have to be amazing at football, and you don't have to be super fit to take part – we’re there with dad bods and beer bellies. It's a welcoming environment, and it’s not like a typical football team that might have been created because a couple of guys had a few beers and thought they're going to try and smash the league. 

 

These football teams have been created because they want to support men that have lost babies. It’s a community, a brotherhood.  

 

We’ve not been able to do it for a couple of years, but we ran a tournament between West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Grimsby and Hull and at one of the tournaments we had a minute silence at the start where people took the children that they have with them. We just had Toby, our rainbow baby, and I was late for the silence because I didn't get told about it but everyone was lined up and as the referee blew the whistle I was like oh no! I grabbed Toby and walked across the pitch with him in my arms. It was such a poignant moment. 

 

Without Sands United I think my mental health would be suffering a lot more and I think I’d still be struggling to deal with what's gone on. I feel a lot more confident talking about my children now and I don’t feel like I have to hide their losses away or it’s something that I can't talk about. 

 

Sands and Sands United makes me feel like it's important that I lost a child, whereas typically I think society doesn't think it's important that I lost a child. Sands makes me feel like I’m validated in feeling my losses and struggling with that over time. 

If anyone is considering joining a Sands United team, I’d say take your time. I've had people that have tried to rush their journey of healing or grieving from baby loss and they've struggled, so just take your time with it and understand that it's alright to feel the way you're feeling, but if you do want to reach out and to get involved with any Sands team, then everybody who runs a team has typically been where you are and knows exactly what you're going through, or roughly what you're going through, and will be ready to support you.