Abstract

Each year, over 99 percent of collegiate athletes within North America will end their sporting career. This major life transition usually involves changes in identity, routine, and social support, and athletes report struggling with feelings of loss, sadness, and anxiety during their transition to retirement. Given this, what strategies do athletes themselves engage within to ease the distress of transition? Through qualitative methods, over 120 retirement stories were collected and analyzed with athlete’s play spanning the 1960s–2010s. This article will shed light on the experiences of athletes during their transition and present possible ways of support from athlete’s own narratives–gratitude and prosociality. This research has the potential to assist the lives of many current collegiate athletes who will embark on the transition to retirement and inform institutional programming.