Your cleats begin to feel tighter, your jersey starts making your skin crawl, the field you once loved feels foreign and the game that once brought you joy now seems dull.
This is the reality for many athletes as they slowly lose their connection with the sport they once loved. Pressure, toxic environments and injuries can lead athletes to question why they ever played at all. While some athletes are able to push through the challenging obstacles and avoid losing their love of a sport, others decide to walk away entirely, leaving behind not just a sport, but an identity.
Athletes all over the world are quietly losing the passion they once had for their sport. Endless hours of practice, expectations from parents and social media, and the weight of scholarships can make the game feel like a burden. For some, the feel that the only way out of the stress and misery is to quit.
“From my experience, a lot of athletes quit because they have a lot of pressure on them,” athletic trainer Maggie Walker said. “Whether it is from coaches, parents or just society, I feel travel sports has made it very hard for athletes to play sports, but also stay committed to their high school sport. There are just too many expectations on them.”
For senior Adriana Warrington, her enjoyment for soccer began to fade during eighth grade and continued into her freshman year. Warrington has played soccer since she was five, and her life seemed shaped around the sport. When Warrington joined a club with a toxic environment, her love for the sport quickly diminished.
“At the end of eighth grade and early freshman year, soccer stopped feeling fun,” Warrington said. “I genuinely cried after every practice. [My teammates] were really rude, and my coaches didn’t believe in me at all.”
Athletes are often faced with pressure from their parents and coaches to stick with their sport. Having to keep playing a sport that’s no longer rewarding can raise lots of anxiety and foster even more burnout in athletes.
“You want to be able to make your own decisions,” Warrington said. “If my parents would’ve told me to ‘suck it up and deal with it’, that would have probably made me more upset and made me hate [soccer] more.”
After battling injuries, club drama and a lack of passion towards volleyball last year, junior Ava DeWig ultimately made the decision to quit volleyball. For a while, volleyball was her outlet, where she let her anger out and coped with her struggles. But when her love for volleyball ran out, she was faced with the option of quitting or persisting. DeWig quit, but she feels at peace with her decision.
“[Quitting] made me realize I was so much more than my sport,” DeWig said.
Warrington also decided to leave her club, but she chose to stick with soccer. She soon started her high school soccer season, and soccer started to feel like home again. She enjoyed her teammates, her coaches believed in her again and she made varsity. Just as Warrington started to settle back into soccer, a new problem arose. She broke her ankle. Breaking her ankle in the middle of her freshman season shifted her perspective towards soccer yet again.
“[Breaking my ankle] solidified me,” Warrington said. “I realized I did like soccer, and I was very upset that I couldn’t play.”
After the final whistle blew in the last game of the 2023 soccer season, Warrington cried with her teammates. Not for the same reason as her teammates, though. As the seniors cried because it was many of their last games, Warrington welled with tears because she was frustrated she couldn’t play her sport.
Although injuries can be physically and mentally debilitating, for Warrington, her injury altered her perspective in a positive way. It reminded her she couldn’t live without soccer. And for DeWig, her injury was one of the deciding factors in quitting volleyball.
Breaking a bone or pulling a muscle aren’t the only driving factors behind athletes’ loss of interest in sports. Sometimes it’s the coaches and overall environment, like DeWig and Warrington expressed. Unfortunately, it is common for a coach to be the reason an athlete falls out of love with their game.
“I was at a practice one time and my coach told me that I would never go far,” DeWig said. “I was like, ‘Why would I keep putting myself in that situation?’ There are way more things I can go far in that aren’t volleyball.”
Athletes are often faced with a difficult decision of either sticking with a sport or heading down a new path. There is no right or wrong answer; it depends on the athlete, their mental health and their future goals.
“If you’re really, really starting to hate your sport and don’t think it’s good for you, you don’t have to force yourself to keep going,” Warrington said. “If it’s not what you want anymore, it’s okay to move on and leave that sport.”
If you’re sticking with the right crowd and know you’ve made the right decision either way, the right people will support you. There is no need to feel guilty about quitting a sport you once loved. It happens to the best of us.
“I’ve never seen anybody not empathetic or compassionate for that athlete who did step away,” Walker said.
