The day it ended
Mine didn’t end on a field. It ended in a series of appointments, with a body that had more to give and kept letting me down. My Achilles had vertical tears, and the top sports doctors told me, more or less, that they were waiting for it to get weak enough to snap. Then my head coach and our athletic trainer sat down with me to talk about my “quality of life” after college. I medically retired at the end of my junior season, which is a strange thing to be at 21.
I stayed on as a volunteer assistant coach at Santa Clara University because I couldn’t imagine not being around it. It hurt too much. Watching your team run drills you can’t run is its own kind of injury. Not getting my senior day almost broke me. More than the pain, I felt powerless and useless to my team, and I hated that feeling more than anything.
If your ending was cleaner than mine, a last game and a banquet, the feeling after might still be familiar: the Tuesday with no practice. The body that doesn’t know what it’s for.
What the research calls it
Sport psychologists have a name for how much of “who I am” runs through “I’m an athlete”: athletic identity. A 2025 study of former college athletes in the Journal of Intercollegiate Sport calls the moment you realize your playing days are over “the athletic reckoning”. And researchers who followed Olympic athletes into motherhood treat having a baby as an athletic career transition in its own right: the same identity question, asked a second time.
What the studies describe, former athletes describe in plainer words: “I don’t know who I am if I’m not training.”
Motherhood reopens the question
Then you become a mom, and the question comes back wearing different clothes. Now you’re not just missing the athlete; you’re wondering if she was ever real, because the person you are now can’t find 40 minutes, flinches at the word “goals,” and gets through the day on the leftover nuggets.
Mine came back at a pickup game after my first daughter was born. My body hadn’t fully healed from childbirth, and I peed myself with every pass of the ball. The player in my head and the body on the field were not on speaking terms.
Here’s what I’d say to her, because I’ve been her. The athlete didn’t go anywhere. The season changed. Everything you loved about competing is still in you: the passion to learn, execute, and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment after hard work. What’s gone is the structure that let you express it, and structure can be rebuilt. Identity can’t be waited for.
Keeping the athlete while you retire the old schedule
This is the part that took me years and a graduate degree to learn, so let me save you some time.
The best advice I got came early, from Dr. Plante, my health psychology professor: now that soccer was gone, I had to find an outlet to replace it. I didn’t fully appreciate how brilliant that was until I studied human behavior in grad school. A replacement behavior works because it serves the same function the old one did. You don’t turn off that part of your brain. You find a healthy alternative that matches those values. It just looks different.
Keep the identity; retire the schedule. You don’t have to train like a college athlete to be one at heart. You have to train like a mom who was a college athlete, which is a different sport with its own rules: shorter blocks, honest recovery, a plan that bends on sick days instead of breaking.
It took me years after that Achilles to be able to jump rope again. When I finally could, I was so proud of myself. Nobody gave me a trophy for it, and it still counts. Wins like that are the ones you build on now.
Keep the competitor; change the opponent. The opponent is no longer a number or another team. It’s the version of you that quits on herself at 8:40 p.m. because the day went sideways. You know how to compete. Compete for her.
I love the Olympics. Whenever I watch any competition, even the opening ceremonies, the same thought plays on repeat in my head: I’m not done competing. I hope I never lose that.
Keep the teammate; find the team. My teammates called me “Mama Crum” (Crum is my maiden name) because I looked out for my people. Moms do this instinctively for everyone except themselves. Let someone look out for you. A coach, a friend who trains, a group text. The structure you lost was mostly people.
Before we started dating, my husband and I trained together. He was the first person since I retired to call me out when I said I wasn’t an athlete anymore, and I love him for that. Find the people who won’t let you say it either.
And let the new identity be bigger than the old one, not a smaller copy of it. I’m an athlete, a coach, a mom and a person who still wants everyone to hike to the top of the mountain with me. All of those are true at once, and the mom is my favorite.
If any of this sounds like you, the Who it’s for page is written for you.
