Braydon Runion distinctly remembers the day his 7th grade teacher pulled him aside to ask him the classic question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” His response without hesitation “a professional athlete.” His teacher in response laughed at him, following up with a “yea good luck with that.” Twelve-year-old Runion was devastated and remembers thinking, who is she to say that? She doesn’t even know me. The truth is she did barely know him, and probably would never have expected him, the late bloomer that he was, to become a highly accomplished Division 1 baseball player.
This isn’t the lead up to an inspirational story you might see on ESPN 30 for 30. Runion’s story is one of the other stories, the ones you don’t hear about; the other 98% who didn’t ‘make it.’ In Runion’s words, “Looking back, ya know she might have known a thing or two because it’s a lot tougher than it seems.” While those were harsh words to hear as a 7th grader, Braydon probably wishes someone would have had the same talk with him again at 20; before he swapped his long desired Business degree for one in Liberal Studies, in order to devote more time to baseball. Maybe a talk like that might have gotten him back the two months he lost in numbness, as he adjusted to the reality that his athletic career was over. Had his coach been in on this kind of conversation, he might have let Braydon take a summer off to intern so he wouldn’t have had to start at the entry level position at his current car sales job.
This isn’t a sole occurrence; Runion is just one of thousands of former college student athletes who have had to face the tough reality of trying to pick up the pieces of their lives after their athletic careers come to what feels like an abrupt end; people whose identities and lives for the last 15 plus years have revolved around the sole objective of getting better at their sport. One Sunday they are chasing a national title, on top of the world; Monday morning they wake up to the reality that the only life they’ve ever known is now over. A reality that many of them never saw coming. Maddy Gonzalez, a former soccer player described the moment it hit her, “like hitting a brick wall.”
“It felt like it was going to be forever and always”
- Maddy Gonzalez
While everyone knows there is a finite timeline in sports as you can’t physically play forever, these are athletes in their twenties, their athletic prime. Athletes who have been conditioned to believe that they have long sustainable professional careers ahead of them. When Gonzalez started to realize a year into her professional career abroad that it was time to move on she had to face the question she had been dodging for 3 years prior, “What will my life be like without soccer?” This wasn’t something she had really ever thought about before because in her words, “It felt like it was going to be forever and always.” Until it wasn’t.
The dream of playing professional sports is a common one among children in this country. While there has never been an official Gallup poll on the issue, Gonzalez and Runion are far from being outliers. Kuony Deng’s family moved to the United States from South Sudan in the 90’s, relatively unfamiliar with American culture or sports, yet some years later, 6 year old Deng was already telling everyone, “I’m trying to go to the league.” Deng reflects on it now, “Obviously, you know, millions of kids say that. It's America, we love football. So I think a lot of us grew up, you know, either wanting to play football, basketball, baseball, whatever.” Some variation of the traditional “American Dream” starts for many like Deng on the field or the court. Ask any kid playing sports at a local rec park what he or she wants to be when they grow up and you’re likely to hear some variation of 'professional athlete’ more often than not.
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Reality Check
From an outside perspective, it would be easy to label athletes like Braydon or Maddy as delusional. Still chasing dreams they had when they were just a child. The numbers don’t lie; a simple Google search can tell you the statistical likelihood of making it as a professional athlete, and the odds aren’t good. Of all NCAA college athletes only 2% of them will go on to compete professionally. To put it in perspective the NCAA reported that there were 523,662 student athletes participating in the 2022-2023 school year. The truth is the odds of making it are extremely low. Making it to the collegiate level alone is no easy feat so why then do “59% of high school football and basketball players believe they will get a college scholarship?” The reality is that in men’s basketball only 3.6% of athletes will even compete at any NCAA collegiate level and for football the odds are only a little better at 7.5%. The odds of playing either of these sports professionally are even smaller: less than 1.6% for either.
Statistically speaking, baseball has one of the highest probabilities of professional participation with 5.1% making it to the major pros. This might seem high compared to the others but the 444 collegiate athletes drafted last year seems like a much smaller number after considering that there were over 8,000 additional draft eligible collegiate baseball players not selected, one of these being Runion. So how does this explain Runion’s estimate that about 90% of his University of New Mexico baseball teammates seriously considered professional baseball as a career post-graduation? With these kinds of responses it seems clear that this is more than a fluke occurrence. What led all these athletes to be so easily deceived?
“All in” Mentality of Sports Culture
It's challenging to assign blame here, because so many have had a hand in creating the lure of sporting celebrity status and financial security that represents the end of the rainbow for many aspiring athletes. And it starts so young: From the extra attention granted to the athletic child in a family, the guaranteed status and popularity in school that athletic kids have traditionally enjoyed, the expanded opportunities offered by club team participation, and of course, the all important goal of getting recruited for a scholarship to college. As athletes progress through each level of participation they are influenced by this ideology that Stanford sports psychologist Dr. Sonali Wason describes as being part of a larger “sports culture”; one that has its own expectations and norms which shape their outlooks. Wason highlighted that, “Sport, especially elite sport takes up a lot of our resources, a lot of our time, a lot of our energy, our motivation, these aren't things that just don't exist in this infinite kind of a way” and because of this it is not uncommon to see athletes become hyper fixated on their athletic identities. Dr. Wason also noted that a part of the intensified athlete identity that can be observed in some athletes is not just a result of the physical time dedicated, but also has a big mental component. Likely “a result of the high performance, pressure and expectations” of elite sports.
Neveah DeSouza, a former All American gymnast at the University of California Berkeley, has been in the gym since she was a young child. Like many she was put in the sport by her parents. Before long, life became this “very controlled environment, practice four to five hours a day, five days a week. So growing up, you're in the gym constantly, which is a lot as a kid. You didn't really have time to do anything besides gymnastics. And then outside of the gym, people are like, eat healthy, ice, do all that stuff that's good for your body.” By the time she hit college she had already dedicated so much of her life to the sport it only made sense to her to dedicate everything she could to the sport for her last four years. Former football player Kuony Deng got hooked on the sport watching it on television as a child. Over time this evolved into a relationship with football that “kind of required one of those all-in mentalities.” As he started to get closer to his original dream of playing in the NFL his focus on football only increased more.
Sam Stout, a former pitcher at Texas Christian University describes being a college athlete as “A full time job, essentially, you got school, you got practice, weights, flights, trips. And then for baseball, you just get shipped off in the middle of somewhere in the middle of the summer, you really have no choice of where you go and you just gotta go spend a summer with some random guys and live with a family you've never met.” Runion echoed similar sentiments about the extreme time demands he faced playing collegiate baseball but added that although NCAA has a cap on mandated hours at 20 per week Runion said between the extra “optional” practices, rehab, and individual meetings he was dedicating “more than 40 hours a week” to baseball related activities adding that if, “You weren’t doing more than forty hours a week you were hardly at the field.”
Who's to Blame
All the athletes involved in this piece were first introduced to sports through their parents whether they signed them up for a team or brought them to a game they all traced their sporting origins back to their parents. While they all made it clear that no one forced them to play competitive sports as they were eager to pursue their athletic dreams, this didn’t mean a lack of constant pressure. For many like Maddy Gonzalez it started with her parents urging both their daughters to compete and do well as they started dedicating their weekends driving them to games all across Northern California.
From there it evolved to include youth coaches putting expectations on them. Runion still remembers the day his youth trainer brought up the idea of him having a future in baseball. He told Runion, "You're one of the best players I've seen here since yada yada yada. He's a major leaguer. So that puts that in your head. It's like oh my gosh, I could be just as good as he is. He's a legend. It's almost like they set them high expectations. And then you're you just continually trying to chase 'em.”
When asked if he blames people like this for creating these almost unrealistic expectations Runion said that in a way he does. He feels like these kinds of expectations that he started experiencing at a young age from both his youth coaches and parents to make it are part of the reason he felt like a failure for not making it to the MLB. Both he and Gonzalez talked about feeling the weight of letting everybody down by not continuing to play. The dreaded conversation of telling their parents that it was over was one of the hardest parts of the whole process for each of them.When athletes reach elite levels of college and beyond, they not only carry the expectations of their family and youth coaches, but now also bear part of the weight of the new organizations they represent. The NCAA, universities and other elite sporting leagues are massive money making institutions. NCAA athletics generated roughly 1.3 billion dollars last year alone. Universities rely on the high performance of athletes to create revenue that helps keep their schools afloat. In Maddy’s experience it is because of this that the incentive to push the pro path increases, “Once you're in a college sport or professional, they don't want you thinking that way [that the end is in sight] because that's their mentality. There's always going to be a next for them, but for you, it always could be your last, and that's a really harsh thing to think about.”
Something that Somali felt was important to realize is that, “Speaking to that performance prssure and pressure around expectations. Coaches feel that too, you know, administration feels that as well . . . the culture of sport isn't really one that encourages or always emphasizes the importance of other things outside of sport. And that trickles down, from coaches to athletes so I think some of it is just like the nature of athletics you know, elite athletics just kind of demands.”
Coaches' livelihoods are also on the line and they have to do everything in their power to turn out winning teams or they risk losing their jobs. Would it be possible to maintain the fierce competition of March Madness if they actually preached the truth to players that of the entire team, statistically only one player will make it? This is not to say it can not be done, or that playing at the collegiate level alone isn’t the goal of many athletes but it must be acknowledged that many of them still nurture the dream of one day signing on the dotted line.PHD in Sports
“In college, it's always 'student athlete' but, it's really athlete student”
- Jonathan McGill
Whether intended or not, sports often hold a higher value than most other aspects of a student athlete’s life, coming before both school and career preparation. Despite the NCAA’s heavy usage of the term “student athlete”, Stanford graduate and current football player at Southern Methodist University, Jonathan McGill was quick to set the record straight in conversation, “As an athlete, especially in college, high school, it's always student athlete. But, it's really like athlete student, right? Like you're devoting so much time to something. It's very easy for your identity to be caught up in what you do.” He’s far from the only one whose experience in college sports has led them to identify less as a student. Sam Stout spoke about how on every collegiate baseball team he’s played, “The first day you show up, the coach tells you like, ‘Hey, you're not here to do school like, you need to take care of your school, because you're here to play baseball’; for them all they care is that it’s just not an issue.”
While college athletics provides an opportunity for many athletes to receive a higher education, some walk away with little more than a piece of paper. That’s how Runion felt leaving the University of Mexico with a liberal studies degree that he was barely present for, especially Spring semesters when he played games four days a week. “Like, let's be honest, if I knew that I wasn't gonna be going pro, my degree would not have been Liberal Studies” said Runion, who watched countless other teammates be coaxed into the same degree by the coaches and auxiliary staff at New Mexico. In Runion’s opinion it's a tough ask for athletes in many ways because with limited time on their hands and athletic scholarships often paying tuition, baseball was his job and it had to be his priority given that it was the reason he was at this university in the first place.
Getting through college and braving the mental challenge of transitioning to life post sports is just the beginning of the struggle for many athletes; getting established in the workforce offers an entirely new dimension. For Stout just landing a job was much harder than expected despite a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley. He said that what was most difficult for him was that he “never had job experience because I was always playing baseball. So people were very hesitant to jump on board and hire me because of this.” For Gonzalez, while she was able to land a job post soccer she felt totally unprepared to excel at it. “I actually don't know how I got this job, but I'm here.” Her coworkers were using “Google sheets and Word and all these things I feel like I'd barely touched. I'd never felt behind in my life. It was a really rude awakening.”
Now on the other side of the transition, working as a football coach at Oregon State University Kuony Deng has had to challenge his previous outlook to make sure he’s not failing his players. The issue he’s faced is that he still feels athletes have to be fully bought in to be truly successful but while he encourages his players to “be 100% super streamlined, locked in on football”, he has tried to highlight “whenever those opportunities come along,” such as networking events, etc you must have the mentality of, “I'm going to say yes, to the best of my ability. That's the mentality that I would want guys to have.”
While many college athletic departments have instituted programs intended to create more well rounded student athletes they haven’t necessarily been embraced by those who would benefit from it. While it's convenient to blame the athletes for not prioritizing school and career building, Dr. Wason highlights that although opportunities exist for athletes, sometimes after a full day of strenuous workouts and class, athletes may just not “always have the energy to be at those spaces to do a networking event or go to office hours.”
The Athlete Indentity Crisis
Before athletes can really move into the next phase of life they have to get through the transition of not being an athlete anymore, one that can trigger depression and a sense of despair. Over the years Dr. Wason has worked with hundreds of athletes who go through this transition and something that she’s noticed is that, “For athletes who maybe are very, very bought into, to the athlete pieces, piece of their identity, transition out of that role can feel a little bit tougher for those folks, because it's something that they felt so attached to, that not having it in the same way can feel like a real loss.” Unfortunately Stout was one of those athletes. After playing baseball for the past 20 years coming off the best season of his life where he helped lead his team to a College World Series the drop off was heart wrenching. “Nothing can prepare you for it. It's like a stab to the heart. It was a really hard transition, I struggled heavily with it for the first couple months. I felt like I didn't know who I was for a sec. I was like, I've been Sam the baseball player this whole time.”
The couple months spent in mourning by Stout and Runion may have felt like years, but they could be viewed as fortunate when compared to others. It might not have been obvious to those around her that Gonzalez’s moving on process was a long one, “I might be one of the people who maybe it's taken a longer time, but I feel like I couldn't fully move on until honestly, maybe a year ago, and that's three years out from when I was playing professionally. It was such a big part of my life. It was really hard to let go. There were tears for a couple of years after I was done playing.”
In her own experience Dr. Wason has seen various reactions in athletes to this transition ranging from tears shed, to finding a new hobby as a distraction to more serious cases of substance abuse, depression and suicidal thoughts. Wason felt it was important to acknowledge that everyone processes this transition differently but regardless of how they do it the transition is difficult for most athletes and it's something not often talked about, even in her space. “I think there's a lot of work around like the performance piece. And I think like helping athletes adjust to the pressure that comes with competition and performance. I don't think that retirement is always at the top of folks' minds when they're thinking about work that's really important to do with athletes”, which is part of the reason Wason herself has been so vocal about this issue.
Life After Sports
In recent years athletes with big platforms such as Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Michael Phelps have come forward to shine a light on athlete mental health, opening a conversation that has been a long time coming. Dr. Wason has been very adamant about the need to provide safe spaces for athletes to talk through, “The grief, like can we just sit in how heavy it feels that you were really hoping, praying, wanting this to be the next step of your life? And it's not. And we can acknowledge that there's a lot of pain that comes with that.” She feels this is critical in helping athletes heal and move on. That's why she is in support of efforts by some universities to include a mental health check up as part of the Post Participation Medical Examinations (PPME) athletes are required to do upon finishing college athletics. Almost all of the athletes spoken to for this story agreed this is something that they would have found very helpful. For Runion and Gonzalez they felt that something like this could have potentially sped up their healing process.
Aside from providing opportunities to help athletes struggling with the transition, the next step for those working in athletics is what can be done from a preventative standpoint. While some universities have implemented career building and networking programs for student athlete specifically these aren't always serving their full purpose as in Gonzalez's case. During her time at Santa Clara University she felt “lucky to have a lot of resources, a lot of alumni who were willing to help out, programs that could set you up for success, but because I had never really pictured myself not playing soccer, I didn't really take advantage of those resources.”
That’s why professors Tarik Glen and Kasra Sotudeh at University of California, Berkeley are two of the people who are hoping to solve this problem by integrating these kinds of activities into coursework. That way student athletes can simultaneously improve their futures while obtaining credit towards their degrees and keeping themselves eligible to participate in college athletics. Their class called UGBA 199: Scholar-Athlete First-Year Transition, Exploration, & Discovery Seminar is recommended to all first year and transfer students. The course is described by Sotudeh as focused on “enhancing the development of identity and core values; academic mindset competencies; and authentic engagement strategies. These foundational pillars will allow class participants to gain a richer understanding of their own journey on campus as they draw upon the common theme of balancing their versatility as scholars and athletes.”
“Getting student athletes out of that mind frame that all I am is an athlete”
- Glen Tarik
Glen, a former NFL lineman turned teacher, highlighted that in order to make change at the fundamental level they felt it was critical to have this class during student’s first semester as a primer for their experience to encourage the formation of an identity outside of sports. From there they’ve expanded to career exploration classes as well but their core framework remains the same. Aligning to their goals of “getting student athletes out of that mind frame that all I am is an athlete” and instead helping them realize “they’re a whole person” so that “they're able to walk away from here, fully developed, realizing their full potential.”