4 Tips for Athletes Facing Retirement
Athlete retirement identity crisis is real, and I work with athletes all the time who experience it. Having gone through it myself, I have both a touch of empathy and understanding as well as solutions. Being an athlete is a whole career, no matter what level of competition, but especially when it is paying the bills or for your education. It is truly all consuming; we think, live, breathe, eat, train, and sacrifice for it. It takes up most of our time and energy so much that people only know us for being an athlete and not for anything else. And sometimes…we don’t even know who we are outside of our athlete identity. Even many coaches preach you’re an athlete and a teammate first before an individual. So, imagine no longer being competitive, part of a team, or having the one thing that has brought you some level of success and income. Who the hell are you? If you don’t even know, then how could anyone else?
Unfortunately, for many athletes, our career is cut short. Sometimes due to injury, not being drafted or signing a contract, not getting recruited, getting cut from a team, or interpersonal concerns that affect our mental health and ability to perform consistently at a high level. When sport is taken from us, we do not get the privilege of choosing our retirement, it is robbed. We feel so out of control and depressed but try to hide it. We scramble for solutions or sit in existential crises. We feel we MUST be strong. That’s what sport (and society) taught us to do. It consistently worked before, so it needs to work now more than ever. Sadly, it sometimes doesn’t. We are left trying to figure out what to do with our life and checking our own ego, grieving the career we once had.
As someone whose career ended sooner than expected, I can attest to the challenges of checking one’s ego and shifting gears to find new purposes and passions. Although it wasn’t an easy road, I found with my supports, my personal strengths, and a recalculation of my values, I was able to have the career of my dreams (not without a lot of time and hard work), help others, and give back to my fellow athletes who struggle in and out of sport. During my time recovering from injury and illness, I used these 4 tips to help transition myself out of sport and into running three businesses.
4 Tips For When You Retire From Sport:
Engage in regular self-care strategies
Hit the gym, court, field, etc.
Fuel your body
Don’t skip on stretching and recovery
Hydrate
Do something competitive
Rec leagues
Game nights with friends/family
Video games, etc.
Check-in and rediscover your value systems
What drives you, give you purpose and motivate you to make decisions?
Discover (or rediscover) hobbies and interests you never had time for before
Something relaxing or competitive
A side hustle
Going back to school
Getting back in sport (coaching, training, etc.)
Fortunately, not every retirement is traumatic or sudden. It becomes an opportunity to reevaluate one’s life and purpose. However, just because we choose our retirement, doesn’t mean we are exempt from tough transitions and lifestyle changes.
I had the pleasure interviewing Keionta Davis, retired Super Bowl Champion with the New England Patriots; now podcast host for The Cookbook and family man, who is the prime example of what it means to use values and patience to accelerate one’s life post-sport.
“It’s always tough because it’s a whole new journey that a lot of people in regular life have had a head start on because they weren’t athletes. The way athletes live, especially at the professional level, there’s a lot of things that don’t transition into regular life.”
— Keionta Davis
Davis went on to explain how he is still rediscovering himself post-football.
“I haven’t fully got myself back into a new form. You kind of lose that identity…day to day training, disciplines, having something to do, and being somebody. When you transition out of it, it’s a lot of unlearning and relearning yourself and habits. It’s a lot that goes into it.”
— Keionta Davis
After taking time to reflect, Davis decided to retire from football to focus on different values and purposes.
“I wanted to take a step back to reevaluate where I am at in my life and what I really wanted to do…because football was the easiest route to get things I needed, but not necessarily what I wanted to do.”
It is through Davis’ story we see the importance of those value systems to redefine our life and purpose.
So, whether you chose retirement or retirement chose you, please remember your values, seek out support, and sit with the unknown for a while. Yes, of course, we must pay the bills, but we also have to consider our life tasks and where we want to belong. Retirement does not reflect the end of work, but simply the end of a book chapter. The chapters to follow will contain massive adjustments and lifestyle changes to help us move forward.
Retirement will happen for all athletes eventually (even Tom Brady), that’s a fact we cannot ignore. However, with these tips and support from a therapist/sport psychologist you can leave your sport feeling positive and be on track for another successful journey.
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