Elite sport moves fast.

Athletes can be central figures in their sport one season and largely absent from the competitive conversation only a few years later. This episode explores what happens not just after sport ends, but what is quietly happening during an athlete’s prime that shapes how difficult the transition becomes.

Using a recent doctoral dissertation by Amanda Workman-Vickers (2025, West Texas A&M University), this episode examines how collegiate athletes experience the transition from being an athlete to becoming something else — and why that transition is often destabilizing without being pathological.

• The fleeting nature of status in elite sport

• Why performance often becomes a primary source of self-worth before retirement

• The concept of identity limbo

• Why sadness and gratitude frequently coexist during transition

• The importance of natural vs abrupt career endings

• How simple exit meetings can provide meaningful closure

• Study type: Qualitative, phenomenological doctoral dissertation

• Participants: 10 NCAA Division II athletes

• Sports represented: Football, basketball, baseball/softball, track & field

• Career endpoint: All athletes exhausted eligibility or graduated

Rather than framing retirement as a mental health crisis, this study highlights how identity destabilization often reflects a mismatch between the speed of high-performance systems and the slower pace of human identity adaptation.

Most athletes don’t break when sport ends.
But when performance has been doing identity work for years, the sudden loss of feedback, structure, and role clarity can leave athletes temporarily unanchored.

This episode is not a critique of sport systems — it’s an examination of how they function, and how athletes experience the transition when the system inevitably moves on.

Host: Evan Kurylo
Podcast: Coretex Athletic Review
Release Schedule: Weekly — Thursdays at 6:00 AM MST