High school and college athletes face a daunting schedule every day. Between practice, homework, friends, tutoring and games, the common theme among athletes is “the grind never stops.”
Some athletes go on to make their name known on the professional stage, but some do not get as lucky and have to let go of the sport that defined who they were for so much of their life.
For the athletes who have to give up athletics, the road to finding their new lives can be loaded with obstacles: finding a new sense of self, learning new skills from a beginner level or finding friends outside of sports.
Olivia Dedels, was once a regular starter for Auburn University’s soccer team.
She went from being a common name among Auburn soccer fans, to a bench player and then to a former player.
Dedels spent her childhood playing soccer. In high school, soccer consumed her life everyday. She decided to play for her high school team and for a club team because she wanted to pursue a college career in soccer.
“Around 13 or 14 years old is when you have to start to make the bigger decisions of whether or not you want to pursue college soccer,” Dedels said. “That sounds really early, but that’s when you have to start putting in that extra time and investing in the training, conditioning, pickups — things like that.”
Between the club team and the high school team, soccer engrossed Dedels daily, making it a part of her. Her club team practiced and played over an hour away from her home, taking away personal time. Her friends were her teammates and her free time was limited to a couple of hours every week.
“I was playing maybe four games a week, and then training everyday except for Fridays,” she said.
When Dedels finally got to college, the struggle and time crunch did not end — though it did become easier to handle for her. She said she would sometimes work up to 10 hours a day on soccer-related activities.
After working herself to a regular starter in her first two seasons at Auburn, Dedels lost her starting spot in her junior year and started to see less time. The loss of a starting position forced her to analyze who she was outside of the sport for the first time.
“At that moment, my whole view of myself had changed because I didn’t know how I was contributing to the team anymore.” Dedels said. “That was a really strange thing to go through, because for the first time ever, I had to think about who I was outside of soccer.”
Dedels came to the realization that there would eventually be a time where Auburn soccer would not be her identity anymore.
This realization helped her prepare for her last season with the Tigers her senior year and what was to follow.
“I tried to find all the positives of what soccer can bring, and because I went through that adversity — it was able to prepare me for my senior year,” Dedels said. “I was able to finish on a high note, and I feel it made the transition into retirement easier.”
After retiring, Dedels said she felt an initial relief of no longer having exams, practices and games anymore, but she began to lose that relief when she realized how much of her former self was no longer in her life anymore.
She continued to live with her former teammates after retiring, which was hard for her.
Dedels no longer spent all her time with her friends who remained on the team after she left. Their schedules never seemed to line up, and not being around them as much took a toll on her.
”The second time it actually hits you is when the next season starts and you’re not there and your whole house is empty because your roommates are at soccer practice,” Dedels said. “You have this FOMO because you see Snapchats of everyone laughing in the locker room and them coming home and having inside jokes that you missed out on.”
Now, Dedels has found her new passion through the struggles she went through. She returned to Auburn for graduate school and now studies clinical mental health counseling and uses her experience to drive herself to become better at her new interest.
Dedels struggled at first, finding her way through her new passion. Starting something new from ground level was something she had not done since she first started playing soccer as a child. Despite being in new territory, she has found comfort in taking on a new challenge.
“You’ve been at this elite level of something that you’ve poured everything into for over 20 years,” she said. “It’s okay to not be a division one, elite-level person at it, it’s okay to have new hobbies and not be awesome at them.”
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Chris Mendoza is a senior from Huntsville, Ala. majoring in journalism and minoring in sports coaching. He started with The Plainsman in fall 2022.
Twitter: @chris_mendoza20
