OUR STORY
Why we ‘Play With Heart’
Our co-founder, Nicole Mossmer, was an elite tennis player and the formerly #1 ranked junior tennis player in the United States, was going into her freshman year at Stanford when she was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome.
Nicole was told that she would need to undergo heart surgery to be able to compete in her sport due to the high risk of cardiac arrest from her condition. Not long after receiving this shocking news, Nicole underwent surgery to fix her WPW. The next two years of her collegiate career Nicole would spend in and out of the hospital, desperate to find an effective treatment so that she could get back out on the court.
During one of her routine EKGs at Stanford’s Sports Medicine Clinic, Nicole wondered why such a standard procedure had only been performed when she reached college when she had lived her whole life without knowing that she was living and playing tennis every day with a life-threatening heart condition. After inquiring with the cardiologists at Stanford Hospital and doing extensive research Nicole learned about the lack of cardiac health screenings nationwide, particularly with one of the most at-risk populations for heart conditions: athletes.
Nicole learned how lucky she had been that the doctors at Stanford had caught her condition before a more serious incident occurred. After further investigation, it soon became clear to Nicole that there might be a silver lining to all of this. Not too long after, Nicole confided in her childhood friends about her desire to make meaningful change and prevent her personal experience from becoming the reality for other young athletes. Nicole, alongside her childhood friends and fellow co-founders Amy Huang, Ian Dickinson, and Johnik Moores, launched Play With Heart Foundation in June of 2022, a non-profit organization with a vision to provide free heart health screenings for all youth athletes on a national level.
