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Everything that is going on in my life just goes away for that moment.

Daniele Burnell

Sports After-Life

by Jordan Wood

Being an athlete comes with only one guarantee: there are no guarantees. You are not guaranteed to win or lose. You’re not guaranteed to make a shot or get a hit. You’re not even guaranteed tomorrow. One day you could wake up, head to your game or practice and BOOM! It’s over. Or you could have a long, successful career that ends with your own decision. Whichever the case, time is not guaranteed and sports don’t last forever.

Senior baseball player Robert Fagg experienced the unfortunate risk of sports as he blew out his knee in the beginning of his senior baseball season, tearing his anterior cruciate ligament and medial meniscus, putting an abrupt halt to his Blackburn baseball career.

Even if an athlete is fortunate enough to avoid serious injury, it’s still inevitable. Their career will end. No matter how successful of a career they have, eventually time will run out and suddenly their world is flipped upside down when they realize that the biggest part of their life is over.

When the game ends, many struggle with a sense of identity and become lost and overwhelmed by all of the extra time on their hands with no practices or games. Others realize that just because they can no longer play doesn’t mean that it has to be gone from their lives and begin coaching.

It’s easy for people to look at sports and think “it’s just a game” and they have trouble seeing just how important that “game” can be. It’s not uncommon to hear comments about sports not being “real life” but to many it is. It’s impossible for someone who has never felt the seams under their fingers or heard the swish of the net and felt their heart skip a beat, to truly understand the feeling an athlete gets. To an athlete, it is just as much real life as any other job would be. To an athlete, their sport can be as much a part of them as breathing.

Junior softball player Daniele Burnell described the game she loves as a “stress reliever. Everything that is going on in my life just goes away for that moment.” It’s not just some “silly little game.” It can teach a person more life lessons than they could ever imagine: responsibility, accountability, hard work, the importance of a good attitude and teamwork. The list goes on and on. And while there are many athletes who refuse to learn those skills, the ones who do are set up to succeed later on in life. They learn that you can’t always win, that you will fail and the most important thing is getting back up.

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