1. It’s no longer cool for your entire wardrobe to consist of clothes representing your high school team. It’s hard to decipher between being a proud alum, or being stuck in your glory days so once at college it is probably for the best to wear these clothes sparingly.
2. You now have to start watching what you eat. Long gone are the days of pasta parties and team ice cream trips, it’s now time to start paying attention to what you’re eating since your trusty athlete metabolism is going to start changing.
3. There is such a thing as free time. After four years of balancing school work, practice, games, and workouts it almost feels strange having some free time in your schedule. For some former superstars this free time is like a blessing, but for some it is a reminder of the void in your life without your sport.
4. You might have a brief identity crisis. You’ve spent four years of high school, and probably longer being known as an athlete and your life revolving around your sport. Now without the association to that sport and you’re athlete reputation do you even know who you are anymore?
5. You miss your coaches a lot more than you ever imagined. Remember that coach that made you run suicides until you were close to throwing up? That coach that pushed you to your breaking points? That coach that probably made you feel like quitting at some point? Once your time with that coach is over you will realize how much that coach shaped you, and how much you would do to play for them just one more day.
6. You miss your team more than you expected, and you expected to miss them a lot. You spent almost every day with your team for months at a time during your designated season and off season training, and probably talked all the time in the team group message when you weren’t training. Team sleepovers, bus rides to games, and just hanging out with your teammates that became family will forever be some of your favorite memories.
7. There are other people at your college in the same situation. Every college, especially division one has its fair share of former high school stars that either chose not to play in college or didn’t make the cut. Your best bet it to find one of these fellow members of your kind and make them your best friend so you guys can hangout wearing only your best high school sports apparel and share team photos and cry.
8. You might be slightly jealous of the athletes at your school lucky enough to continue playing their sport. You see these glorified student athletes walking around campus sporting their fancy team gear and you can’t help but cry on the inside. Just kidding it’s really not that emotional, but when you see them you can’t help but think “what if” you played in college.
9. No one in college cares about what kind of sports star you were in high school or how talented you might have been. College is basically like starting over, so it really doesn’t matter to anyone who you were in high school. Whether you left a legacy behind at your school or not to the people you meet in college that’s either a mystery to them, or irrelevant if you brag about it.
10. You would do absolutely anything to play one last game. Let’s be honest this sport meant the world to you, and really was your first love. Long before you cared about crushes and drama you were a little kid who fell in love with a game and could only dream they would be able to play for as long as you did. You will never forget this sport and what it meant to you, and even though now it doesn’t seem to matter it will always matter to you what you accomplished in this sport.
