The Last Season

I want to talk to the seniors today. And I want to ask everyone else to just listen, because I think what I’m about to say might be useful for you later.

I ask every senior athlete I work with some version of this question, usually sometime in January or February of their final year: “What are you most afraid of?”

The answers I get are almost never about the season. They’re almost never about winning or losing or finishing strong or making the tournament. They’re about after. What comes after the last game. Who they are when they are not an athlete anymore. Whether the rest of their life will feel as real as this has felt.

One of the seniors I worked with a few years ago said it to me like this: “I’ve been an athlete since I was six years old. That’s not a hobby. That’s my whole identity. And in four months it’s just… over. And I don’t know who I am without it.”

I think about that sentence a lot. And I want to spend some time with it today.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Here is the first thing I want to say: the fear is appropriate. The fear is the right response to a real thing. The athletic career is ending. Something that has been central to your life, your schedule, your relationships, your sense of self — it is coming to a close. That deserves to be grieved, not bypassed. The person who tells you to just be grateful and move on is not wrong that gratitude is important, but they’re skipping something that needs to be felt before it can be released.

So feel it. Let the last season have its full weight. Let yourself notice what you will miss and name it specifically. The smell of the gym before morning practice. The specific exhaustion after a hard game. The way your teammates look at each other in a huddle when everything is on the line. Name those things. Hold them. They are real and they belong to you.

But here is the second thing I want to say, and I want to say it as directly as I can: you are not your sport.

I know that sounds simple. It is not simple. If you have been doing this since you were six years old, the sport is woven into almost everything about how you understand yourself. The discipline, the competitiveness, the identity as someone who works harder than other people — all of that came from the sport and it feels inseparable from it.

But here is what I have watched happen with the athletes I work with. The ones who transition well are not the ones who were least invested in the sport. They were deeply invested. They loved it. They’re the ones who, somewhere along the way, built a relationship with themselves that existed alongside the athletic identity rather than inside it.

Jeremiah 29:11 is written to people in exile. To people who have been taken from the place and the role that organized their lives and planted in a context they didn’t choose. And God says: I know the plans I have for you. Plans for a future. Plans for hope.

The last game is not the last chapter. It is the end of one chapter in a story that God is still writing for you. The gifts that the sport built in you — the resilience, the work ethic, the capacity to be part of something larger than yourself — those do not retire when you do. They go with you into whatever is next.

What is next? I don’t know. You probably don’t fully know either. But the God who planned your future is not confused by the end of the season. He was already there when He made the plan.

This question is the most important one in the devotional. Give seniors real time with it. The struggle to answer it is the formation work.