When the Season Changes: How Sports Teach Us About Grief
Whether you’re an athlete or someone who just loves the game, you’ve probably felt it — that sting when something meaningful ends. A season. A dream. A relationship. A version of yourself you weren’t quite ready to let go of.
As a therapist who works with athletes, I’ve always been struck by how similar the emotional journey of sports is to the emotional journey of grief. And if I’m being honest, I’ve been guilty of using sports as a way to avoid my own grief at times. It’s easier to focus on training, strategy, or the next performance than it is to sit with the pain of something you’ve lost.
But grief has a way of finding us, and sports — more than many people realize — can help us understand it.
Sports Are Full of Loss, But We Don’t Talk About It That Way
Athletes experience grief constantly, but we tend to call it something else:
“I’m in a slump.”
“I didn’t perform the way I wanted.”
“I’m just not the same after the injury.”
“The season’s over — now what?”
These moments may not look like “traditional grief,” but the feelings are strikingly similar: sadness, anger, denial, fear, numbness, hope, confusion, or all of them at the same time.
If you’ve ever been benched, cut from a team, injured, or simply reached a chapter-ending moment in your athletic life, you’ve experienced a form of grief.
Grief isn’t always about death — it’s about losing something that mattered.
Athletes Are Taught to Push Through — But Grief Doesn’t Work Like That
In sports culture, the message is often:
Work harder. Don’t show weakness. Shake it off.
But grief doesn’t respond to grit.
You can’t out-train it, out-run it, or compete your way through it.
It demands to be felt — not conquered.
And here’s the surprising part:
The same qualities that make athletes strong on the field can help them heal off of it.
Not the toughness.
Not the “just push through” mentality.
But the discipline, routine, resilience, and ability to sit with discomfort.
Grief is another form of training — internal, emotional, often invisible, but equally demanding.
Grief Shows Up Like a Bad Practice Day
One of the metaphors I use in therapy with athletes is this:
Grief is like showing up to practice and discovering you don’t have the skillset that was working yesterday.
Some days you feel motivated and functional.
Other days you can barely get through the warm-up.
That doesn’t mean you’re failing.
It means you’re grieving.
Just like athletics, grief comes in waves.
There’s progress, setbacks, breakthroughs, and days where the only win is showing up.
The Locker Room Effect: Why Community Matters When We’re Grieving
One of the biggest protective factors in sports is the team environment — the sense of belonging, shared purpose, and being surrounded by people who understand the grind.
Grief isolates.
Sports connect.
And I often tell my clients:
You don’t need a team to have a support system — you just need one person who sees you.
If your season of life feels heavy, you don’t have to go through it alone. Even individual athletes have coaches, trainers, and teammates who keep them grounded. Therapy can be part of that support system too — a place to process the losses you didn’t have words for.
What Grief and Sports Ultimately Share: Identity
Athletes often say, “I feel like I’ve lost myself.”
People in grief say the exact same thing.
Both experiences force you to reevaluate:
Who am I without what I lost?
Who am I becoming now?
What parts of me still feel true?
Sports can give us structure during that upheaval. Therapy gives us language. And grief — though painful — gives us transformation.
If You’re grieving, You’re Not Weak — You’re Human
And if you’re an athlete grieving?
You might feel out of your comfort zone — because this is a different kind of endurance.
But you’re not starting from scratch.
You’re carrying the mental strength you’ve already built.
A Final Thought
The thing about sports is that every ending eventually leads to a new season.
Grief works the same way — slowly, quietly, and at its own pace.
And if you’re walking through a season of loss, I hope you remember:
You don’t have to get over it.
You just have to get through it — one practice, one breath, one moment at a time.
If you’d like support in navigating grief, identity, or the mental side of performance, therapy can help you build a space where both the athlete and the human inside you feel seen.
Warmly,
Abbey Vince, AMFT
