This past spring and summer, I have had the opportunity to sit with high school students, collegiate athletes, and professional athletes. Across levels, ages, and experiences, one thing kept showing up in our conversations: identity.
I started asking what I thought was a simple question: Who are you outside your sport?
The reaction surprised me. Students looked puzzled. Some looked genuinely taken aback, as if I had asked something wildly complicated. Then came the silence. For some, it took 15 minutes of sitting with the question before they could begin to answer it with anything beyond, “I’m a son,” “I’m a daughter,” “I’m a sister,” or “I’m a brother.” Those answers matter. But I wanted them to go deeper. Who are you when nobody is asking you to perform? What makes you laugh? What do you care about? What are you curious about? What do you love that has absolutely nothing to do with a scoreboard, a scholarship, a ranking, a contract, or the next game? Maybe you are a scholar who loves math. Maybe you love swimming even though swimming is not your sport. Maybe you like music, gaming, cooking, art, or long walks on the beach. Maybe you are still figuring it out. And that is exactly the point. We have gotten very good at developing athletes. We measure how fast they run, how high they jump, how many points they score, how much weight they can lift, how many games they win, and increasingly, how much value their name, image, and likeness can generate.
But do we know the person? We know the stats before we know the story. That should make us uncomfortable.
An athlete can be strong and still be hurting. An athlete can be successful and still be carrying trauma. An athlete can have thousands of people cheering for them and still feel alone. Money does not automatically create healing. Talent does not cancel out trauma. Applause does not answer the question, “Who am I when all of this stops?”
Recently, I read a public post from a retired professional football player reflecting on childhood trauma, abuse, and the ways those experiences followed him into adulthood and affected his relationships and his life. I kept thinking about something we too often forget: the uniform does not erase the person underneath it.
Trauma does not care about your stats.
It does not disappear because you received a scholarship. It does not check your draft position before showing up. It does not care how many followers you have, what your NIL valuation is, how much money is in your account, or whether a stadium is chanting your name. And yet, we often interact with athletes as if performance is proof that everything else must be okay.
It is not.
Behind the athlete may be a young person navigating complicated family dynamics. There may be pressure to succeed, pressure to provide, pressure to represent a family or community, pressure to maintain an image, or pressure to keep producing because other people now depend on that production. There may be childhood experiences they have never processed, relationships they are struggling to navigate, fear about disappointing people, or simply the exhaustion of being expected to be “on” all the time. We see the machine running up the field. We cannot forget the human being inside it. I am not just the person who scores the points. I am not just the body that runs faster, jumps higher, hits harder, or wins games. I am not somebody’s return on investment. I am not a scholarship. I am not a contract. I am not a brand.
I am a person.
A person who may have complicated days. A person with family dynamics that do not always go the way I want them to go. A person with fears, relationships, history, interests, dreams, disappointments, and experiences that never appear on a stat sheet.
I am an athlete, but I am beyond the athlete.
And we need to start helping young people understand that before there is a crisis. Identity development cannot begin the day the sport ends. Every athletic career ends eventually. For some, it ends after high school. For others, after college. A small percentage will reach the professional level, and even then, the game eventually stops. What happens when the thing you have been told you are your entire life is suddenly gone? If we spend years developing the athlete without developing the person, we should not be surprised when transition feels like losing oneself. That is why I keep asking the question now.
Ask the 16-year-old. Ask the college athlete. Ask the professional. Ask the retired player.
Who are you outside your sport?
And when you ask it, do not rush to fill the silence. Let them sit in it. Let them struggle with it. Let them discover that the answer is allowed to be bigger than the game. If they cannot answer right away, do not treat the silence as failure. Treat it as information. That silence may be showing us a gap that the adults, institutions, systems, and industries surrounding athletes have helped create. We should absolutely develop great athletes. We should celebrate excellence. We should create economic opportunities. We should help young people compete at the highest level they can reach. But none of that should require sacrificing the development of the human being. So before you cheer again, before you ask about the next game, the next offer, the next contract, the next deal, or the next season, ask the athlete in your life something different:
Who are you outside your sport?
Then be quiet long enough to hear the real answer.
Because when the cheering stops, the person remains.
I am a son. I am a daughter. I am a brother. I am a sister. I am a scholar. I am a friend. I am someone with a story. I am someone with a future that extends beyond a scoreboard.
I am an athlete.
But I am more than my sport.
I am me.