For Rams coach Sean McVay, what’s happening in Ukraine is personal.
McVay’s fiancée, Veronika Khomyn, is Ukrainian, and much of her family is in the country that has been under invasion by Russia for the past week.
Before discussing football in a virtual press conference Wednesday, McVay sent “thoughts and prayers” to Ukraine and talked about Khomyn and her family.
“Just watching the grace with which she’s handled this, how strong her family’s been in the midst of this, I’m just so proud to be associated with that culture,” McVay said. “President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy’s leadership has been incredible.”
McVay, 36, often talks about gaining perspective from non-football news, including the 2020 protests of police misconduct and the COVID-19 pandemic.
McVay said events have made him “more empathetic to different experiences that other people go through from a bunch of different backgrounds that maybe I wasn’t exposed to.”
But rarely this dramatically.
“I think about so many things that I get worked up about,” McVay said. “And then you see real-life examples of what it’s like to experience real adversity, what it’s like to really unify and show real resilience and toughness, all the things you want your teams to embody but in the midst of real-life experiences and examples.
“As terrible as this thing (is) that’s going on, there’s been a lot of things I’ve seen that are inspiring and give you perspective.”
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He said Khomyn’s family in Ukraine watches Rams games in the middle of the night.
“They want to talk about us winning the Super Bowl, and they’re in the midst of all these things going on,” McVay, who plans to marry Khomyn this summer, said of his future in-laws. “They’re an incredible, graceful example of exactly what you’d want your family to be.”