Balling Onward: Athlete To Successful Business Person

I was thinking about some of my hardest times when transitioning from sports and I came up with a long list of challenges that I faced. When I looked at the list, I realized that the larger issue may not have been one or two or three situations that defined my experience with transition but rather how those one, two, or three small situations all added up to me finding who I wanted to be after sports. Before I get too many years away from playing sports at a high and intense level, I think it is important to reflect on where I have had to come from with hopes that I will be able to help someone else realize that finding a new identity and feeling worried about if you can do it, is completely normal.

My Story

The first thing that I did after I was done playing sports was panic. How am I going to get the money that I want to make sure that I am not living like a college student anymore after college? And when I say, “when I was done playing sports,” I don’t mean like after my last game of the season of my senior year or the last time class of my senior year, or even the last time I walked across the stage for graduation. I mean when you go through the feeling of like, “Oh-my-gosh, what the heck am I going to do without sports.” You know when you get that text from all your coaches saying something along the lines of, “I know you will do big things. I am going to miss you kid.” Or when you move home with your parents again after college and are sitting in your room thinking, I really gotta sit here at my parent’s house with my daddy all up in my business again haha… Ya, I wasn’t feeling that either so I had to do something to make sure I was living, independently without sports.

So, the first thing that I realized when I was “finding my new identity” was that I really was the same person and had the same identity but was in a different environment. I will come back to that when I talk about how I am in the workplace but first I’ll share my experience. So, I was a little distracted because of my personal life and working on my master’s degree but still knew things would change. When I was done playing my senior season, I got the ankle surgery that I should have gotten about two seasons prior [but that is a whole ‘nother blog lol]. After my surgery, the doctor told me I couldn’t play anymore if I ever planned to have kids and wanted to be active with them. He said when they opened up my ankle and stitched me back up that I now had an ankle of a 90-year-old. Pretty much meaning that I had no cartilage left, chipped bones and completely damaged ligaments. I’m not even going to lie, at this point, I really still wasn’t concerned about what I was going to do after sports. I was thinking more along the lines of, “do I want to play and risk this all (Because my stubborn self was going to keep playing because that is what I loved to do despite what the doctor says)?” We see this same situation with a number of student-athletes who are fighters and are going to continue with their passion despite what the doctors say about injuries.

Long story short…After my senior season was over and my horribly played last college game ever (lol), I was emotionally drained and my body was tired. Getting the news about my ankle is really what shattered my drive to try to continue playing any further. I crutched around on my damaged ankle and spoke with some former pros about right choices with potential agents so that it was still an option but in reality, I really wasn’t feeling it anymore. I still question today if I should have kept playing on my 90-year-old ankle and gone pro but then I look at where I am today in my career and consider how much further behind I could have been if I went pro, and I know that I made the right decision. Just like growing in your sport takes effort and time, growing in your career takes the same.

Silver Lining

For some odd reason, I thought that after I was rewarded a degree, and with all the people that I have met along the way in basketball that I would have a great opportunity in the perfect job when I was done in college… It doesn’t work like that my friends. But that’s not a bad thing. Learning to find your identity and yourself in a new, working environment will be fulfilling once you have made it to the place in your career where you feel like you are progressing at a rate that you are proud of…And that time will happen with hard work and commitment to whatever you find that you enjoy doing. The same feeling you got after you shot 200 shots a day & after practice, and as a result consistently averaged around 20 points in games is that same feeling you get when you make people know that you have an unmatched work ethic at work and you obtain skills in the industry you have a passion for that are needed by different leaders or projects or organizations.

Skills (In the business world) are developed with experience. Skills (In athletics) are developed by consistent practice. All in all, building skills requires dedication.

In my personal situation of finding my identity, I think it began with just wanting to get experience. I started in Sales for a carpet cleaning company (Talk about a humbling situation)…I always tell the story of starting my first day and someone asking me to make copies for them. I looked at that big copy machine and was so nervous because I knew I had to ask someone how to use a copy machine and thought I would be embarrassed of their response. I asked someone, and they were happy to help. We can sometimes worry about being inadequate, but it is important for us to remember that even the highest of the high sometimes question his or her ability to respond to questions appropriately or not being able to answer a question. The person I asked to help was glad to help and didn’t seem to judge at all. So long story short, after working with this company for quite some time, I knew sales just wasn’t’ for me. I had intentions of becoming a part of the marketing team for the company (which was aligned with my undergraduate degree) but had to first go through a learning phase of being a Salesperson. The role of the marketing team also didn’t seem interesting at all. What I had been saying I wanted to do my entire college career, wasn’t what I thought. I considered different avenues of work pretty early in my working career.

Eventually I led the group of sales-people for the month and the team acknowledged my work in the group weekly meeting. My direct supervisor then called a meeting with me shortly after. I went into her office thinking that she would congratulate me for my hard work and making the most sales that month. I sat down, and she said, “You are too new to make sales this fast…I think you need to pace yourself, so you can avoid making any mistakes you may be making when you are booking your sales…” I was pretty surprised…I called my friend and said that I wanted to get out the office for lunch and just cried out of frustration (lol). It is funny today but at that moment I remember feeling so defeated. At the time, all I wanting to do was please my direct manager so bad, so I could be considered soon for a marketing position and nothing was enough. Now six years later, I know in a business it is just that; A business. You WILL be let down at times. You will feel like you have failed. Fail fast and learn faster…Essentially I found I was doing something that I just wasn’t passionate about, that didn’t have opportunity for growth, and that it was time for a change. I stayed for a little while longer and came up on a new opportunity right when it was needed.

Change Is Cool

I ended up leaving this company and was unemployed for a while, which felt like the longest and worst thing ever. I know now that if I am wanting to make a change, not to make that change until I land on my feet somewhere else (lol). Luckily, I was playing pick up in a league and met the director of the Institution of Diversity at the University that I ended up working with. I told him I was interested in working with him if he had any positions available and he said that he had a role open for running summer camps. At first, I thought, this will be great. I am going to work with the university that I graduated from. I had no idea what I was going to do but I knew I was excited.

I worked with a diversity department at the University. One of my roles was to help host summer camps for underserved K-12 students and educating them on the resources that they have available to them in college that they may not have known of if they hadn’t been a part of the camps. My role eventually grew to managing the budgets used to facilitate hosting camps for the students, then grew to creating programs to use in the camps, then grew to creating programs to present to students attending underserved schools year round, then grew to managing staff, then grew to grant and policy analysis, then grew to partnering with domestic and international partners to create college-like experience for students when participating in programs that we hosted and more. I progressed with the institution in about 3 different roles in the diversity department. I then went from there to another education institution but in K-12. In this role, I didn’t work directly with students but still managed funds that would be used for this group of underserved and under-represented students in an urban district.

What really put a stamp on what I felt my new identity would be for the time being was my experience with a little girl at camp. She started calling me “mommy” after being the director of her camp. This little girl was in the process of being adopting and came from a home of drug and alcohol abuse. Her family had an eviction notice on their door when I picked her up in my car so she wouldn’t miss the opportunity to attend camp. She and I had a bond that I had never experienced with any child outside of my family. She wrote me a heartfelt note after her camp that I saved forever about what I meant to her and how I was a mommy away from home for her. I felt then that I wanted to keep making a different in youth’s lives. As I look back six year, I realize as I move up and into different industries, I move farther away from those face to face interactions with those I am impacting, but I try to stay as connected as possible. I try to work for organizations that have a plan of making a difference for others in some way.

Knowing that I am helping others in whatever form it may be, keeps me motivated and driven to do the work I do every day.

Another important thing to remember when finding your identity is that change is okay. I have heard a mix of what is right and wrong as far as longevity within one company but at the end of the day, no person has the perfect situation. You have to go through road blocks and learning before you really know what your identity outside of your sport is. Change is ALWAYS okay! Understand that if you aren’t happy in your current situation, for example, like in basketball:

A bad coach takes a player out of the game after making one mistake. This kills his/her confidence and prevents them from playing like themselves (or the person you recruited them to play like)…Similarly, an organization that does not promote innovation, does not reach its full potential. Sometimes we have to question the situation we are in before questioning ourselves.

Here are some pointers when finding your identity:

Be patient

Welcome growth

Learn and absorb as much as you can so you can become the expert that people or organizations will begin to seek!

Be open to new things

Be patient. Trial and error is a part of finding your identity. You never are wasting time if you are learning.

Welcome change! Change and re-evaluating is always okay.