Stop Telling Former Athletes to Move On
When your career ends, the advice comes fast. Move on. Find your next thing. Figure out who you are without sport. It's well meant, and some of it is right. But the "leave sport behind" part is where the research disagrees. It's gotten more specific in the last few years, too.
The identity isn't the problem
Start with the thing everyone worries about: athletic identity. Most of the transition research treats it as the risk factor, and in my last post I got into why losing it hurts. But when Erin Reifsteck, Diane Gill and Jeffrey Labban surveyed former NCAA Division I athletes, both exercise identity and athletic identity were positively related to physical activity. Former athletes who still saw themselves as athletes tended to be more active.
To be fair, not every study likes a big athletic identity. Patricia Lally found that athletes who shrank theirs before retiring had an easier landing, and a study of German, Lithuanian and Russian athletes found that high athletic identity meant more problems adapting. So which is it?
The newer research answers that pretty clearly. It isn't how much you identify with being an athlete. It's whether that identity has somewhere to go. Zhang and colleagues followed recently retired elite athletes for a year. The ones who adjusted found what the researchers call identity continuity, through "strengthening connection with past group identity" and "forming new identities related to previous ones." A 2024 study of 21 retired elite athletes described the same move as "actively repurposing identity." And a 2026 study of 240 adults playing alumni football found athletic identity alone had no direct link to wellbeing. It mattered through social connectedness.
The identity isn't the problem. Having nowhere to put it is.
Where you put it matters
Rochelle Eime and colleagues reviewed the research on the psychological and social benefits of sport for adults. The benefits reported most often were wellbeing and less distress and stress, and club-based or team-based sport seemed to be associated with better outcomes than individual activities, because of the social side. It was a small pool of studies, but the biggest dataset we have points the same way. When Chekroud and colleagues looked at 1.2 million Americans, every kind of exercise was associated with fewer bad mental health days, and "the largest associations were seen for popular team sports," at 22.3% lower.
That matters for us, because the default after you retire is the solo version: a gym membership, a treadmill, headphones in. And a lot of former athletes don't even keep that up. A study at a Division I university found that alumni athletes exercised far less than current athletes and were no more active than people who never played at all. The rec league is doing something the treadmill isn't. It gives you a reason to show up that isn't willpower.
Giving back
Then there's giving back. Caroline Jenkinson and colleagues reviewed the studies on volunteering and health. Cohort studies showed volunteering had favorable effects on depression, life satisfaction and wellbeing, though not on physical health, and a meta-analysis of five cohort studies found volunteers had a lower risk of mortality. I'll be straight about the caveat: that evidence is observational, and the experimental studies didn't confirm it.
But the retirement research gives a reason to take it seriously. In a study of 171 retirees, Niklas Steffens and colleagues found that people with more group memberships were more satisfied with retirement and healthier, and the path ran "through greater provision, but not receipt, of social support to others." Giving support did the work, not getting it. Retired athletes say the same thing. In interviews with former British Olympic-sport athletes, providing support to others "was just as effective as receiving support."
Former athletes already seem to know this. In the Aspen Institute's National Coach Survey of more than 10,000 youth coaches, 79% said wanting to stay involved in sport was a big reason they started coaching, and 78% pointed to playing sports as a kid. Only 14% said money. And ask anyone who has coached a youth team whether they got something out of it.
Underneath all of it is people
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy Smith and Bradley Layton pooled 148 studies and found "a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships." You spent years inside a built-in community of teammates and coaches. Walking away from all of it can mean giving up one of the few things the research says protects you.
That doesn't mean every athlete should stay close to the game right away. Some step away because sport hurt them, and distance can be the right call. The point is that leaving sport behind shouldn't be the default advice.
Better advice
So here's better advice. Don't leave sport. Change your role in it. Coach a youth team. Officiate. Run a clinic. Join a rec league with people who played. Take a board seat at the club you grew up in. Every one of those keeps the identity, the team and a reason to show up, and none of them asks you to pretend you're still competing.
And sport needs you to do it. The average age of the officials who answered the biggest national officiating survey is nearly 57, and 80% of youth coaches say their community needs more coaches. More on that in The Answer to the Officiating Shortage Just Played Its Last Game.
Where we fit
That's what Next Game at The NOVA Foundation is built for. We connect former athletes of any age with volunteer, playing and social opportunities in their city. Volunteers join through each partner organization's own volunteer process, and the hangouts come naturally after the games.
If you're a former athlete, join the Next Game community. If you run a league, a youth program or a parks department and need volunteers who know the game, email us at partner@thenovafoundation.org.
Sources
Alfermann, D., Stambulova, N., & Zemaityte, A. (2004). Reactions to sport career termination: A cross-national comparison of German, Lithuanian, and Russian athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 5(1), 61-75. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1469-0292(02)00050-X
Anderson-Butcher, D., & Bates, S. (2022). National Coach Survey: Final report. Aspen Institute. https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/11.14.22-Anderson-Butcher-Bates.-2022.-National-Coach-Survey-Final-Report_.pdf
Brown, C. J., Webb, T. L., Robinson, M. A., & Cotgreave, R. (2018). Athletes' experiences of social support during their transition out of elite sport: An interpretive phenomenological analysis. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 36, 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2018.01.003
Chekroud, S. R., Gueorguieva, R., Zheutlin, A. B., Paulus, M., Krumholz, H. M., Krystal, J. H., & Chekroud, A. M. (2018). Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1.2 million individuals in the USA between 2011 and 2015: A cross-sectional study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 5(9), 739-746. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(18)30227-X
Eime, R. M., Young, J. A., Harvey, J. T., Charity, M. J., & Payne, W. R. (2013). A systematic review of the psychological and social benefits of participation in sport for adults: Informing development of a conceptual model of health through sport. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 10, 135. https://doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-10-135
Haslam, C., et al. (2024). "I'm more than my sport": Exploring the dynamic processes of identity change in athletic retirement. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 73, 102640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2024.102640
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Jenkinson, C. E., et al. (2013). Is volunteering a public health intervention? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the health and survival of volunteers. BMC Public Health, 13, 773. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-773
Lally, P. (2007). Identity and athletic retirement: A prospective study. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 8(1), 85-99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2006.03.003
Reifsteck, E. J., Gill, D. L., & Labban, J. D. (2016). "Athletes" and "exercisers": Understanding identity, motivation, and physical activity participation in former college athletes. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, 5(1), 25-38. https://doi.org/10.1037/spy0000046
Sorenson, S. C., Romano, R., Azen, S. P., Schroeder, E. T., & Salem, G. J. (2015). Life span exercise among elite intercollegiate student athletes. Sports Health, 7(1), 80-86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1941738114534813
Steffens, N. K., Jetten, J., Haslam, C., Cruwys, T., & Haslam, S. A. (2016). Multiple social identities enhance health post-retirement because they are a basis for giving social support. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1519. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01519
Wang, J. (2026). The impact of alumni football on adult mental wellbeing: A serial mediation analysis of athletic identity and social connectedness. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1780689. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1780689
Zhang, Y., Haslam, S. A., Haslam, C., & Steffens, N. K. (2025). A badge, a part of my history and also a root: A longitudinal qualitative exploration of the social identity model of identity change in retired elite athletes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 64(3), e70005. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.70005
