Adam Gordon Sachs
Adam Gordon Sachs is a mental health therapist living in Charleston, SC, counseling individuals, couples and families in our angst-driven, technologically-saturated era. Counseling is Sachs’ third career, following tenures in journalism and public relations (and brief forays into inner city teaching and electoral politics).
Sachs started his professional career as a newspaper sports reporter on Florida’s Gulf Coast. His experiences covering intense, marathon seasons of high school football in towns where Friday night football drove the heartbeat of the communities inspired Sachs’ first novel, Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet, more than 25 years after first setting foot on a Florida high school football field. The coming-of-age novel follows the travails of a rookie sports reporter who goes head-to-head with the intense, powerful coach of a backwater Florida town’s dominant high school football team, threatening to bring the march to the state title down by uncovering a coach-masterminded conspiracy.
His sportswriting adventures began while Sachs was an undergraduate at Colgate University, with an internship at NFL Properties, where he wrote articles on players for NFL-licensed publications. After several years covering high school, college and professional sports in Florida, Sachs moved to the news side for The Baltimore Sun, writing about government, cities, and business. A newspaper downsizing led to a stint covering health care issues for Washington, DC-based trade publications, but Sachs found nosing around Congress and federal agencies to be stifling, so he returned to community journalism to focus on feature writing before relinquishing the reporting life altogether to try what many lapsed journalists do – public relations.
Sachs worked in communications for disability, health care, and education nonprofits, and a health insurance giant, before deciding to pursue a third act to make a more direct impact: counseling. So in midlife, Sachs went back to school to start the arduous journey toward becoming a licensed professional counselor, requiring coursework, internships and clinical supervision stretching over nearly eight years. Sachs has run for political office twice, with his attempt to win a seat in the Maryland General Assembly becoming the inspiration for his second book, the candidate memoir, Don’t Knock, He’s Dead: A Longshot Candidate Gets Schooled in the Unseemly Underbelly of American Campaign Politics.
Sachs is creator and author of a blog on midlife issues, essays compiled into the book, All That’s Gone and Still Remains. An avid tennis player, Sachs competed in tournaments and high school; played collegiately at Colgate University; and taught as a side gig and for two summers at a Delaware coast resort while completing his counseling degree.
He holds a bachelor's degree in international relations from Colgate; and master’s degrees in journalism from Boston University and clinical mental health counseling from Loyola University-Maryland. He has two adult children, a daughter who teaches in France and a son working in high tech.
