How to help athletes adapt to retirement | Andrea Powell | TEDxSioux Falls

Sports are a huge part of a lot of our lives. It is not uncommon for people to spend their Friday nights, Saturday afternoons, and Sundays just watching football. Sports are often how we connect with others, bond with each other, spend time together, whether that be through the shared love of the same team, the same athlete, going to sporting events, traveling together to sporting events, watching them together, or playing sports together. Sports can also be something we do to stay active, whether that be leisure sports, recreational leagues, jogging, fitness classes, you name it. For my family growing up, we spent a lot of weekends traveling to sporting events, whether that be softball for my sister, cheer competitions, or track meets, a lot of track meets for myself. And in our free time, we played a lot of rounds of golf together. My entire life has revolved around sports in some way, playing many sports as a kid, being a Division I track athlete, working at a golf course in the summer as a sports performance coach, and now as a professor of exercise science and strength and conditioning. I now also spend quite a bit of time on the golf course because it is a sport that allows my husband and I to spend four uninterrupted hours alone, but also a sport we can bring our two young kids along to play. My life has been so involved with sports, and especially golf, that my husband actually proposed to me at the Wells Fargo Championships with the help of none other than Justin Thomas. Yes, it was pretty wild, it went viral, it was on commercials, so sports, I tell you. I love that my life has been so closely tied to sports because I know that there is value in sports, and I'm sure a lot of you can agree with that. Maybe you've spent a lot of time yourself on sports, or money on sports, and when we think about sports and we're willing to spend so much time, effort, money on them because we know that sports also give us something, especially when you think about the time that you've spent with your kids. We know that being part of a team and being an athlete has many benefits. It provides community, connection. It teaches teamwork, teaches leadership skills, time management skills, perseverance, grit, and if nothing else, sports give us purpose. I know these benefits because I've experienced them as an athlete, and also as a sports performance coach. My career in higher ed began about 10 years ago, and before that I coached high school athletes, Olympians, college athletes, active adults, NFL players, and athletes preparing for the NFL Combine. Having coached and seen athletes of literally all levels, I have seen the highest highs of sports and the lowest lows. And after seeing college athletics from the academic side, I became a little more interested in what happens after the game, and how do athletes adjust to that big change in their life. Over the years, I observed a little bit of a disconnect between the athletic side, the right now, the eligibility, the championships, and what we have to do to win, and the academic side, the long term, the career plans, and how we can take those skills from sports and apply them to our careers. And not that athletics isn't concerned about the long term, I think they definitely are, but sometimes the right now takes precedence. So all of these experiences led me to dive into the process of sport retirement. So before I go too far into my research path, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of an athlete. Maybe your former shoes if you were an athlete, maybe your favorite athlete's shoes. Imagine spending years, maybe even decades, honing your craft and reaching the pinnacle of success in your sport. Maybe that's a state championship, a conference title, a grand slam, a hole in one at Augusta, an Olympic medal, what about a Super Bowl? That would feel pretty incredible, right? I think many of us can only dream of those things, but maybe some of us have experienced that. And you go to bed that night, a champion, and what if you wake up the next morning and it's over? Who are you and what are you supposed to be doing now? That sport has been your entire life. I'm going to tell you the short story of one athlete, her name was Alex. She was born into a family of athletes, her parents were college athletes, her siblings were college athletes, and it was pretty much ingrained in her that she would play sports and expected that she would also be probably pretty good at those sports. She told me that she put her ice skates on at age two and never took them off. She fell in love with the sport of hockey, and Alex and hockey became pretty synonymous. She went on to play Division I hockey, they had a great time with her seasons there, and then played professionally in a Canadian league for two years. Unexpectedly, the league folded and went under. She was forced to hang up the skates and face retirement head on. This life transition that she experienced was extremely difficult for a couple of reasons. Number one, it was completely unexpected. She had no idea she had just played her last season, and she viewed this as a major loss in her life, partially because it was unexpected, but also because she was hockey, that was her entire identity. We see this also, and unfortunately, with injury with athletes. She also lost her primary support group and her teammates because they all went back to where they were from, and she moved across the country from her family, so she wasn't geographically close to her family anymore. Because of all of these things, she suffered extreme identity crisis. I had talked to Alex about two years after the league folded, and she was still in the trenches of trying to figure out what she was supposed to be doing. She had an awesome job, but wasn't really sure what was next to tie her identity to. Retirement from sports is a life transition, and there are many life transitions that we will experience in a lifetime. This is just one of them, but it's often one that's experienced a little bit earlier in life than some of the others. A life transition is an event, something that happens to you, or a non-event, something that doesn't happen, when maybe you think it's supposed to happen, that changes your roles, routines, relationships, and your view of the world and yourself in it. Thanks to Nancy Schlossberg, this is transition theory. The goal after any of these life events is to adapt to the new roles, relationships, routines, and identities, and bring that into your own person. When someone fails to adapt, they're said to be in a deficit situation. We don't want to operate in the red. That's not good. We want to operate in the black. When I think about student-athletes, they have pretty regimented schedules and not a lot of control over those schedules. They're told when to be at lift, class, meetings, film, practice, basically when to eat lunch because it's the only time that would fit in their busy schedule, volunteering, other activities. Even youth athletes these days have pretty rigorous training and practice schedules that are somewhat unrealistic and exhausting for them and the parents. When all of that is over, and it can be really exciting, sports are great and we know that, but athletes tend to experience feelings of grief, loss, depression, anxiety, numerous physical changes because it's not quite normal to be working out and training for three plus hours a day, and a lot of identity crisis. So athletic identity is what I've spent most of my time looking at and researching. So to give you that definition, it is the degree to which an individual identifies with an athlete role. Pretty simple definition, but important to know for this talk. When an athlete has a strong athletic identity, sometimes they experience a less successful adaptation or have more difficulties in the retirement process. So now I'm going to get a little academic on you, tell you a little bit about my research, and really my question was, obviously we want these student athletes to adapt to the change, but how do we know if they've done that? And so we had to figure out how can we measure adaptation, which is a pretty vague and abstract thing to measure. So after diving into a lot of occupational retirement literature, so age of 65 retirement, we figured out that we can use life satisfaction to measure successful adaptation to this change. And research can't be that simple, so we had to make it a mediation model. So we also needed to see if the search for or presence of meaning in life influenced this relationship between athletic identity and life satisfaction. And we found out that athletic identity does influence these things. So a high athletic identity can influence or lead to a lower life satisfaction post-retirement. It's exacerbated when the search for meaning in life is present. So what does that tell us? It tells me three things. One, athletes with stronger athletic identities may need more support finding that meaning, searching for the meaning, outside of athletics. Two, diversifying identity prior to retirement can ease that transitional process and promote adjustment. And three, that athletes may benefit from support programming throughout the entire retirement process. I say throughout with a little bit of emphasis because research also shows us another important piece that is the negative emotions of retirement tend to happen at about six months post-retirement. It's a little bit of a roller coaster. Often they're pretty excited, maybe relieved that the season's over. They're excited for what's next. And then around six months, there's a big dip, more distressing feelings, negative emotions. They're not sure what to be doing. Maybe their teammates are starting practice again and they're not. And then at about a year, it tends to come back up to normal. This is in, we found this in my study, in other sport retirement literature, and it's common in occupational retirement literature too. So this is a pretty common up-down phenomenon. And so at a time when athletes are at their lowest or maybe their most vulnerable, they may feel like they don't have anybody to turn to. Or rather, the way I think about it is that their phenomenal support systems that they had in athletics, their teammates, coaches, athletic trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, academic advisors, aren't there anymore because they're not part of that team anymore and they're not on campus. So student-athletes need the support throughout, not just before, but throughout the entire process, and they need to be provided some independence and autonomy and empowerment to go beyond athletics, even while they're still wearing their jerseys. Now it's not all doomsday, and I'm not here to say that it is. Sometimes those people that are excited and relieved to be over, sometimes that just stays that way. So I'll tell you one more story about Annalisa. She grew up on a farm in a small Midwest town, and she played all sorts of sports. She spent time helping on the farm, and in her free time, she taught herself how to play guitar and sing. Pretty talented. So she ended up earning herself a Division I track scholarship, and she went on to have a great career by breaking all sorts of records and earning pretty much every award she could. But throughout her entire track experience, she still continued to play her guitar, play at local venues, and refine those skills. So when her senior year was on the horizon, it was really bittersweet, rather than this unexpected sadness that Alex experienced. She was excited for what was next. She had a great job lined up. She was getting married that summer, and lots to look forward to. So a very different experience. It was an expected experience. She knew it was coming. Her eligibility was over. She knew it was her senior year. Graduation was on the horizon. She had a lot more freedom to explore her other interests, and so she viewed it as a really big gain in her life, rather than a loss. Her support group didn't change very much. She stayed close to the town where she ran track at, and she married a teammate. So she still stayed with the same people quite a bit. And the biggest piece was that she diversified her identity throughout her college experience, or maintained her multiple identities throughout, with playing guitar and continuing her roles as a student and everything. So I will say, a diverse identity doesn't have to be another amazing skill that you have to learn, or another talent. It can just be your other roles as a student, a daughter, a sibling, a friend. All of these things can and should shape our identity, not just the one identity of being an athlete. So there are many athletes that have this experience, a more easier experience than a tougher one. And many that enjoyed it and are totally okay with moving on from it. So it is important that we can honor those experiences while still being okay with moving on from them. But it is going to be always part of your person, even if it's not your entire person right now, or moving forward. With the direction of college athletics right now, and the amount of emphasis placed on athletic identity, I'm a little concerned that a lot of athletes, a lot more athletes will have Alex's tougher experience rather than Annalisa's relatively easier experience. Athletes are accustomed to physically stressing their bodies every single day, but in multiple ways. They must train in multiple ways, multiple directions, a lot of different movement patterns. In the off-season, a lot of general movement patterns to very sport-specific movement patterns, but never just completing one exercise or one routine every single day repeatedly. Completing the same exercise every single day creates injury. And we see this pretty often with runners and other endurance athletes. But when they do something different, they tend to stay a little healthier. We can apply these same training principles to our identity. Honing in on one thing repeatedly for a really long period of time can create injury, or in this case, identity crisis and often burnout. It is important to diversify to become more resilient in sports, in competition, and most importantly, in life. So everyone here has permission to explore other sports, activities, interests, maybe even career paths, and not be solely defined by the position you play or the job title that you have. So here's the challenge for all of us. Whether you're an athlete, an executive, a student, start building your identity beyond what you do. Because most likely, one day, you won't be doing it anymore. When that day comes, will you be lost or will you be ready?