Sharks to honour life of Kai Eardley in inaugural Kai-Fella Game

East Fremantle’s inaugural Kai-Fella Game against Claremont at The Good Grocer Park on Saturday afternoon will have an extra special meaning for Sharks veteran Cam Eardley.

A decade on from losing his brother Kai to suicide, the Sharks will step out in special journeys to honour Kai’s life and raise awareness for the Kai-Fella Foundation.

The Foundation was started in the wake of the tragic loss of Kai, delivering impactful and engaging early intervention mental health workshops for adolescents across WA.

Learn more about the Kai-Fella Foundation here

“We started that 10 years ago, primarily by my mum (Claire), after we lost Kai to suicide,” Eardley told the official WAFL podcast Seven Point Play.

“We thought ‘how could we help in this space?’ because out of our loss, we saw this hole where kids weren’t getting this, in particularly men and we started up this Foundation.

“Instead of asking those at the funeral for flowers, we asked them to donate money to Beyond Blue and I think that surpassed $70,000 in a weekend.

“Then we thought about how we could narrow this down and make sure it’s going into the grassroots, so it became the Kai-Fella Fund and it grew into the Kai-Fella Foundation.

“Now we’re delivering workshops all over WA and we’ve got full-time facilitators.”

Eardley thanked former East Fremantle Marketing Manager Nick Jackson for coming up with the idea of the Kai-Fella Game which will be the centrepiece of the WAFL’s Think Mental Health Round this weekend.

The one-off jerseys, which includes the Kai-Fella logo and names of players and all the people who have purchased the jerseys, will be auctioned off to raise funds for the Foundation.

“The match this week, a big thank you to Nick Jackson who was at East Freo (as Marketing Manager) and has now jumped ship to South Freo, he approached me at the start of the year and said ‘we’ve got Think Mental Health Round, how about we do something directly with Kai-Fella’ so we created guernseys for the game,” Eardley said.

“It’s been awesome and hopefully it’s something that continues even after I’ve left.

“All of the money raised goes directly to funding facilitators to head out to schools and deliver those workshops and speak to young men and women.

“As little as coming down and watching and having a beer does go a long way to help.”

Football clubs across the State are being encouraged to support a range of activities during the ‘Think Mental Health’ Round, an initiative of Healthway.