Naomi Osaka’s Coach to Discuss Mental Endurance at Equinox Event
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
WELLNESS MATTERS: With tennis being a summer pastime and pickleball gaining steam, the social sports platform Break the Love has partnered with Equinox to provide access to Break the Love courts for both sports to Equinox x Hamptons members.
Break the Love is an online platform that helps people learn, play and compete in tennis by connecting them with courts, coaches and other essentials. Given the zeal for pickleball nationwide, Equinox is looking to open a pickleball court in Los Angeles this year. While everyone has a different reason as to why the sport is so popular, Equinox’s vice president of strategic partnerships Julia Klim noted that it is easy on the body, easy to learn and requires less physical space than tennis does. “From personal experience, I find it more social and less competitive. Experiential activation is at the core of Equinox on both a local and a brand level,” she said.
More from WWD
Last year, the sport racked up 4.8 million players in the U.S. — a 14.8 percent increase compared to 2020, according to the 2022 Sports & Fitness Industry Association.
To celebrate the alliance, Equinox and Break the Love invited Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka’s tennis coach Wim Fissette and Break the Love founder Trisha Goyal will take part in a conversation about mental and physical endurance on Saturday in Bridgehampton. Sixty people are expected at the event, where guests can try out their ping-pong skills, have a few cocktails and chat with Fissette. A pre-recorded interview with Fissette will be accessible to all members of Equinox’s 100-plus clubs via its app.
Osaka has publicly discussed her struggles with mental wellness and while some athletic and fashion brands have embraced mental wellness as much as a marketing tool as a way to connect with consumers, that has not been the case with Equinox. Long committed to mental health, “A lot of people join [our clubs] to work out to look better but often they stay because of how it makes them feel. This is our core product. Everything we do in our clubs and outside of our clubs, as we activate experiences whether digital or physical, this is a component,” Klim said. “We have a meditation app. With anything that we do, this [mental wellness] is part of our DNA.”
That said, brain health and emotional health are woven into Equinox as the company believes that physical health is equally reliant on emotional health in order to live a high-performance life. Klim said, “The fact that we are talking about mental health at large is such an amazing thing for our society. The need was there pre-pandemic and it is more important in a post-pandemic world. If you look at the number of people who are Googling or asking for mental health support and the participation at a younger level, that is ever-growing. It’s amazing that we as our society are giving them more accessible tools to help themselves.”
Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
