The Resume Workshop Is Only Half the Job

Every athlete retires. Some get a senior night, some get hurt, some get cut. Either way, one day you're on a team and the next day you're not, and nobody hands you a playbook for that part.

That day comes for almost everyone, and it comes early. More than eight million kids play high school sports. According to the NCAA, only about 550,000 of them will ever compete at an NCAA school, and in football and basketball, only about 1 percent of those get drafted. Nearly everyone else is done by their early twenties.

When schools and leagues try to help, it usually looks like a resume workshop. Maybe a networking night, a panel, a LinkedIn headshot. I'm not against any of that. A good resume matters, and athletes ask for it, too. In the NCAA's April 2026 survey of Division I athletes, finding career opportunities and the cost of living after college were the top two worries.

But if you read the research on how athletes actually adjust after they leave, the workshop only solves part of the problem, and not the part that hurts most. The hardest part of retiring isn't finding a job. It's losing your team.

Here's the case.

What goes missing

Start with what the problem is. In 1993, Britton Brewer, Judy Van Raalte and Darwyn Linder gave it a name: athletic identity, the degree to which you identify with being an athlete. A strong one is part of what makes you good. It's also what makes the exit hurt, because when the role goes away, a big part of you goes with it.

This isn't a niche problem. Sunghee Park, David Lavallee and David Tod reviewed 126 studies on athletes' career transition out of sport, going back to 1968. What predicted how well athletes adjusted fell into two buckets: things about the transition itself, like identity, and the resources around them, like social support. Their recommendation was proactive support, not the kind that waits for someone to ask. The stakes are real, too. A 2019 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine put the prevalence of mental health symptoms and disorders among former elite athletes between 16% for distress and 26% for anxiety and depression.

How you leave matters as much as when. In a study of professional national team athletes, Pia-Maria Wippert and her co-author found that the ones who were dismissed unexpectedly had "a stronger initial reaction, a more severe crisis, and longer transition periods" than a comparison group who weren't. In an earlier study of the German national ski team, athletes whose exit involved a real conversation with their coaches reported fewer symptoms than the ones who were simply cut loose. Nearly 20% showed clinically relevant levels of traumatic stress three and eight months later. The same exit, handled with people or without them, lands very differently.

What protects you

So what actually helps? The best answer I've found is a 2021 study by Catherine Haslam and colleagues. They surveyed retired athletes in two samples, one from Western countries and one from Eastern countries. In both, losing athletic identity hurt adjustment by reducing meaning in life and a sense of control. But in their words, "both maintained and gained social group memberships counteracted the negative effects of athletic identity loss on adjustment." Athletes who held on to their groups, or joined new ones, were protected.

Newer work keeps landing in the same place. A 2026 study of 240 adults playing alumni football found that athletic identity on its own had no significant direct link to mental wellbeing. What carried the effect was social connectedness, which the author called the "core mediator." It's one city and one point in time, so I wouldn't hang everything on it. But it points the same direction as everything else.

When Brown and colleagues interviewed retired British Olympic-sport athletes about who actually helped them, the most effective supporters were family and other retired athletes. And one finding stuck with me: "Providing support to others was just as effective as receiving support." The athletes didn't just need a group to lean on. They needed a group to be useful to.

This isn't wishful thinking about friendship, either. Haslam's team built a program called Groups 4 Health that helps people build and strengthen group memberships on purpose. In a randomized controlled trial with adults in psychological distress, it cut loneliness more than usual care did. In a later trial with young people, it held its own against cognitive behavioral therapy for depression and did slightly better on loneliness. Groups aren't a nice extra. You can build them deliberately, and it works.

Notice what's not in any of this. No job skills. No resume. Groups.

When to start

Patricia Lally adds the timing. She followed university athletes through their last season and into retirement. It was a small study, six athletes, but she followed them closely. The ones who had already started loosening how much of themselves rested on sport didn't hit a major identity crisis afterward. Her takeaway, basically: start redefining yourself before the career ends, not after.

Planning helps, to be fair. A study of German, Lithuanian and Russian athletes found that planning for retirement led to better adjustment across the board. So the question isn't whether to plan. It's what you plan for. Right now, most of the planning we do is about the job.

Why workshops aren't enough on their own

Careers are what athletes say they worry about, and they're right to. But on their own, workshops aren't landing. In the NCAA's 2026 career planning report, a survey of more than 20,000 athletes, only 42% said they were satisfied with the career counseling services they had.

Even the big policy fixes point at the degree and the body. The Protect College Sports Act, which passed the Senate in September, would guarantee scholarships for ten years after eligibility so athletes can finish their degrees, and require Division I schools to cover sports-related injury costs for five years. Good. Athletes should have both. But none of that is about the team.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness says the mortality impact of being socially disconnected "is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day," and that about half of American adults report loneliness, "with some of the highest rates among young adults." That's the exact age most athletes retire.

What it would look like instead

Put the research together and the prescription is pretty simple. Start early. Keep your people. Find new ones. A workshop can't do any of that. A team can. Here's what could sit alongside what athletic departments already do, and none of it is expensive:

Start in the final season, not after the banquet. Lally and the planning research both say the work starts before the last game. Build it into senior year.

Hand athletes off, don't just check them out. Replace the exit interview with a warm introduction to an actual group: a rec league, an alumni team, a youth program that needs a coach, a local officials' association that needs a crew.

Put retired athletes in the room. Other former athletes were the most effective supporters in Brown's study, and giving support helped as much as getting it. Recent grads mentoring this year's seniors helps both sides.

Count groups, not just placements. Schools track job placement. A year out, also ask: are you part of a team of any kind? If the answer is no, that's the number to fix.

Where we fit

That's the bet we're making with Next Game at The NOVA Foundation. We connect former athletes of any age with ways to coach, officiate, play and hang out in their city, so the thing that goes missing when the season ends is still there: a group that gets it. At our rec softball games, nobody shows up to work on their resume.

If you want the other half of this argument, read Stop Telling Former Athletes to Move On.

If you're a former athlete, join the Next Game community. If you work with college athletes and want to bring this conversation to your team, email us at info@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

Brewer, B. W., Van Raalte, J. L., & Linder, D. E. (1993). Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel? International Journal of Sport Psychology, 24(2), 237-254.

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

Cruwys, T., Haslam, C., Rathbone, J. A., Williams, E., Haslam, S. A., & Walter, Z. C. (2022). Groups 4 Health versus cognitive-behavioural therapy for depression and loneliness in young people: Randomised phase 3 non-inferiority trial with 12-month follow-up. British Journal of Psychiatry, 220(3), 140-147. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2021.128

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NCAA. (2026). NCAA SNAP study, April 2026 survey: Executive summary. https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/snap/2026RES_SNAP-AprilExecSummary.pdf

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