FRISCO, Texas – The 2025 offseason has been a good time for Solomon Thomas. He signed a one-year deal with the Cowboys in March and gets to play in his hometown in front of his family. He recently got engaged to his girlfriend Kaylie in Italy and is heading into his ninth NFL season.
"It's just meant the world being home, growing up here, growing up in Coppell, going to Cowboys games growing up and now getting to play in front of my hometown crowd," Thomas said. "In front of coaches that I played for, my family, my fiancé, my friends. I loved Dallas, I've spent all my off seasons here."
The journey to get to this point hasn't been an easy one, and Thomas' past experiences make him appreciate the good times all that much more.
"I don't take anything for granted in this league," Thomas said. "I've been blessed and lucky enough to go into my ninth year and I've been through all you can be in the NFL season, my own personal ups and downs, and then starting off with a team who was 0 and 14 the first 14 weeks of the season, and then losing head coaches in the middle of the season, going to the Super Bowl, losing, I've seen it all."
For most NFL players, the day they get drafted is forever enshrined in their minds as the day their lives changed forever. For Thomas, who was the third overall pick in 2017, everything changed about nine months after the 49ers selected him on January 23, 2018.
"That was to this day, the worst day of my life," Thomas said. "Woke up thinking it was going to be a regular day, go to training, my mindset's like, 'Hey, I'm going to come back and have a stellar second season and prove to everyone why I was a third pick, prove myself right,' type of mentality.
"I get a phone call from my dad later that day and realize that my sister had died by suicide. Completely shocked my world. Flipped my world upside down."
Ella Thomas was 24 years old at the time of her death, three years older than Solomon.
Thomas has earned plenty of titles over the course of his career, from third overall pick to Walter Payton Man of the Year award nominee, but it's one that he got earlier in his life that means more: Ella's little brother.
"My big sister was my everything growing up," Thomas said. "She was the person who taught me how to be myself, how to love myself and how to be vulnerable. Ella was just this person who could take control of a room. She had this laugh and this smile that would encapsulate a room."
"One of her best friends would call her 'the human narrator' because she could get a group of jocks, the band team, the debate team, she could make everyone in the room feel okay being themselves and she's just something she taught me."
Losing Ella hit Thomas and his family hard. It came on the heels of a rookie season where Thomas felt like he needed to prove himself and live up to the billing of being the third overall pick in his second season, which made things all the more difficult and took Thomas to a dark place mentally.
"In a time where fans would use that as, 'Oh, he's using that as an excuse for not playing well,' I just resulted to the darkness. I stayed in the darkness," Thomas said. "Anytime these feelings came up of anxiety, grief, depression, confusion, anger, I would just push them down because I was like, 'I'm a man, I can't feel that, I have to take care of my parents, I have to hold everything down.'"
"But things would keep bubbling up and festering. It got to a point where my whole world was dark and I didn't want to be here anymore. I didn't want to wake up, I didn't want to go to sleep. I was just constantly stuck in suicide ideation where the thought wouldn't go away."
The culture of locker rooms in sports, especially in the NFL, is a daunting space to share and have conversations about deep emotions. Mental health wasn't something that was talked about as much back then as it is now, which left Thomas feeling lost.
"People talked about Ella dying, but they wouldn't talk about how she died or why she died or what was the reason for this or how to even include mental health or suicide in the conversation," Thomas said.
"It just made me and my family feel very alone and felt like it wasn't something you were, okay to talk about, especially as man in the locker room who grew up in the locker room where we don't talk about feelings, we don't cry, we make fun of these things. It's not something that's comfortable or welcome."
During his time with the 49ers before Ella passed, Thomas recalls a psychologist being available in the team cafeteria. Thomas hadn't spoken to one before, but was interested and got ready to sit down and have a conversation until a teammate stopped him.
"I was about to go sit down with her and he said, 'Hey, you can't sit with her. People are going to think you're crazy,'" Thomas recalled. "I just was so confused in that moment and sat down with him and I was like, I didn't understand why he said that. That didn't really make sense to me."
"And then my sister dies, and then I am now in the space where I'm struggling, but I don't know how to ask for help and I'm just trying to figure out how to get my life back on track."
Thomas credits his mother, Martha, and 49ers general manager John Lynch being the ones to push him to go to therapy after Ella's death. Because of it, finally, Thomas was able to find purpose again.
"From [therapy], just learned how to deal with my grief, how to deal with my depression, how to bring my grief with me every day," Thomas said. "Bring my sister with me every day, how to honor her through crying, how to honor her through talking about my feelings and being vulnerable just like she taught me. I found myself again. I found the light again"
Thomas also felt the support of his teammates, even though the culture of locker rooms may have made it seem difficult to have those conversations. Players like Arik Armstead, DeForest Buckner, Joe Staley and D.J. Jones were among those Thomas mentioned that helped him feel comfortable in his time of grief.
Slowly but surely after Ella passed, with support from therapy, family and teammates, Thomas began to open up about he and his family's experience. Teammates would come up and compliment him after writing articles and letters for ESPN and The Players Tribune. And as that happened, Thomas noticed that his preconceived definition of locker room culture was beginning to change.
"After I'd spoken out a few times and I started being vulnerable and living a new lifestyle and talking about us publicly, I would have guys in the locker room quietly come up to me and ask: 'Hey man, how do I get into therapy?'" Thomas said. "Or 'Hey man, how was therapy?' Or 'Hey, I'm having a loved one struggling, how do I get them help?' And that was the beginning of it."
That trend continued at Thomas' next stop with the Las Vegas Raiders, and mental health conversations became a normal part of meetings in his previous stint with the New York Jets. Thomas knows he wasn't the only one who helped spark the change in culture in locker rooms, but has made a point to be open about his experiences so that he can help others take care of themselves.
"We all go through these things, it's normal to go through them actually, we're all going to go through them at some point in our life," Thomas said. "So if we go through them and talk about them vulnerably, it lets others know that 'Hey, it's okay. I'm not the only one going through it.' And you feel more human and then you can live a full human experience."
Motivated to do more in order to spread awareness and help others, Thomas and his parents, Martha and Chris Thomas, launched “The Defensive Line” in 2021, a nonprofit organization in Ella's honor with the mission of ending the epidemic of youth suicide, specifically for young people of color.
"We wanted to make sure no one felt like Ella. We wanted to make sure no one felt like me and my mom and dad feel from losing someone to suicide…" Thomas said. "And we started going into schools, businesses, collegiate sports programs, and just teaching those how to have the conversation about mental health."
In June, Thomas hosted his sixth annual free youth football camp at his alma mater Coppell High School. Usually at these kinds of camps, the campers participate in drills, testing, competition, and get to take pictures and get autographs from NFL players they look up to.
They all got to do that, but Thomas has added a unique part to the camp in the last three years: Opening things up with a conversation about mental health and a meditation session.
"When you look at the statistics of mental health and when kids start dying by suicide or start struggling with mental health, they start ages as early as late elementary school, fifth, sixth grade. These are the age groups that are coming to my camp…" Thomas said. "Some of them might be high anxiety kids, high stress kids, they may feel like life can never calm down. So teaching them how to meditate and be centered is something that I want to do for them…."
"It's always been my favorite part just to see kids try it for the first time and try to breathe and close their eyes. And it may be a little weird or awkward the first time, but you get more of a hang of it and it can be a really useful tool. I just try to pass on tools and resources to them just like I was given later in my life, just so they can get it earlier."
Before he signed with the Cowboys this past offseason, Thomas had worked in the past with quarterback Dak Prescott and his Faith, Fight, Finish Foundation. The two share similar stories of tragedy, as Prescott lost his brother, Jace, to suicide in 2020. Now teammates in Dallas, Thomas is excited for the future of their partnership and what they can do for local kids to spread the message.
"I'm super thankful for them," Thomas said of Prescott and his foundation. "They've lifted us on a pedestal because we're a smaller nonprofit and they've donated to us, they've helped us run our programs, they've helped fund them and they've given us a light that we have needed and I'm super thankful for that."
"I'm just excited to do more work with them. We're already in talks of that and they're helping us get into more schools and more school districts in Dallas, and they're just helping our light shine."
At the end of the day, you only have so much time in the NFL as a player. Thomas knows that full and well, and wants to capitalize on using his platform of being an NFL player as much as he can during the course of his career in order to help as many people as he can.
"You have a small window to impact others on this pedestal of being an NFL player," Thomas said. "I understand what comes with that. I understand the gravitational pull that comes with being that pro football player, and I want to use it for good. I want to take advantage of every second I have of it to give back to the community, give back to kids, make people's life better."
Heading into his first year with the Cowboys, Thomas is trying to better his own play as well. His best seasons have come over the last four years in New York with the Jets, but there's still another level he wants to reach.
"Every day I wake up with a mentality like, 'Hey, I'm working to be an All-Pro, never done in my career, never been close, but I'm going to work for it every day and I'm going to go try to be the best Solomon Thomas, best All-Pro football player I can be.'" Thomas said. "Being the All-Pro player, I want to help my team win a Super Bowl. That's my total goal. I want to be the best Solomon. I want to win a Super Bowl."
With the Cowboys, Thomas is reunited with a man he loves and respects: defensive line coach Aaron Whitecotton, who he has spent a lot of time with over the course of his career. So far, Thomas is seeing his teammates gain the same admiration that he's gained over the years for his coach.
"He's a guy who is going to demand every ounce of energy out of his guys. He's going to push it out of you, he's going to yell in your face. He's going to make you feel angry at times, but it's all because he loves you," Thomas said.
"That's what I've seen here at the Cowboys. I've seen the guys love him because if he loves them, a lot of coaches who would get in your face and yell or get angry or be high intensity sometimes you stray away from, but with him, because you can tell he actually cares about you as a human being and as a player, and he wants the best for you guys buy into that."
Thomas has also grown close to his teammates quickly through the course of the offseason, and the group have established high standards ahead of a big 2025 season.
"It's been awesome to see us grow and to see us grind some of the hardest workers on the field," Thomas said. "And we're setting the standard of raising that defense to be one of the defense, one of the best defense in the league. And it's going to be fun."
Regardless of whether or not Thomas earns the title of Super Bowl champion, All-Pro, Pro Bowler or Walter Payton Man of the Year in the rest of his career, none will mean more than the first title he received:
Ella's little brother.
