The next play: How pro athletes find their post-retirement careers

Champion figure skater Isadora Williams’ bid to qualify for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — which would be her third appearance at the Games — was nothing short of a struggle.

“I had an injury with my tibia. And then in addition to that, I took the entire year off during Covid,” said Williams, whose training facility was closed during the early days of the pandemic. “I didn't think I was gonna return to the ice, but I decided last minute that I was.”

Williams competed at the 2021 Nebelhorn Trophy in Germany, a feeder event for the 2022 Olympics. But she ended up withdrawing from the competition, signaling the end of her sports career.

“I just was not able to get back into that pre-Covid shape and just —? it's a combination of age and just taking such a long time off the ice.”

It was a devastating moment, but one she had been preparing for.

Years earlier, Williams began to lay the groundwork for life after sports: In 2017, she had begun to study at Montclair State University in New Jersey, while competing as a pro athlete. Williams had reached the pinnacle of her sport and made history as the first female figure skater to represent Brazil at the Olympics. But she knew she had to prepare for her next act.

“Skating was not a lucrative career for me. And I wanted to kind of make it work with skating and my academic career so … I could enter the workspace as soon as possible.”

Conversations about pro athlete retirement usually focus on the superstars, household names who “hang it up” in their late 30s or early 40s. Case in point: Tennis star Serena Williams who at age 40 announced that this summer’s U.S. Open would be her last.

But the typical athlete retirement experience does not go that way.?

For starters, most professional athletes tend to retire earlier on. The average age of retirement for athletes in the four major men's leagues in North America — the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL — is under 30, according to research from RBC Wealth Management. And not all of these retirees can rely on the hundreds of millions of dollars that superstar athletes earn. Many need to find a new career.

Where do athletes go when it’s time for a change?

Isadora Williams earned a Bachelor’s in media and communications studies at Montclair State in 2021. And in February, she got a job as a sales development representative at Placer.ai, a SaaS company that provides location analytics.?

Williams’ path from pro sports to sales is a well-trodden one. Some 27% of professional sports players took on sales roles after leaving the pros between 2015 and 2022, making it the top post-retirement position for athletes, according to new data from LinkedIn.

Why sales? It’s a career path known for its openness to professionals from a wide range of backgrounds. But the athlete-sales connection goes deeper than that. Many of the skills that help athletes thrive on the field translate to success in sales.?

“Sales is the kind of job where you need … a competitive mindset,” Maurice Jones, a career expert and former Secretary of Commerce and Trade for Virginia, told LinkedIn News in April. “You need an ability to frankly receive ‘no’ a lot of times and not be defeated by it.”

Not all athletes choose to venture into entirely new professional waters. In fact, many stay close to the sports world after their playing days come to an end. Sports coaching was the second most common post-retirement role for professional athletes, accounting for 23% of all transitions? between 2015 and 2022, according to LinkedIn’s analysis. And sports and higher education ranked as the top two feeder industries for these professionals.

Beyond sales and coaching, a sizable portion of athletes try their hand at entrepreneurship, with 10% taking on founder and business owner roles in the wake of retirement, according to LinkedIn data. Many of these entrepreneurs lean on their athletic background in their second acts. Sports and wellness were the top two industries for athlete-turned-founders, followed by real estate, a path that appealed to former NFL linebacker Stephen Tulloch.

After spending a decade in the NFL, Tulloch retired in 2016 and soon began to buy and renovate property. His aim? To build a legacy that could last beyond his lifetime.

“I know that to build generational wealth, you have to have an asset, right? A hard asset that is always going to appreciate in value,” Tulloch told LinkedIn News in an interview for Next Play, a video series that explores athletes’ career transitions.?

By 2019, Tulloch decided to expand his entrepreneurial ambitions: He opened the first location of Circle House Coffee, a chain of coffee shops he’s building in South Florida.??

When retirement comes knocking earlier than expected

Isadora Williams began to think about life after sports long before she had to say goodbye to figure skating for good. But for other athletes, post-retirement prep can creep up unexpectedly. That was the case for former professional baseball player Zachary Bird, who has since pursued a career in financial services, the No. 3 industry for retired athletes according to LinkedIn data.

Bird, who was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012, sustained an injury in 2017 that forced him to miss an entire season. During the down time, he began to work on an associate’s degree at Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona.?

“When I started getting that associate's degree, I did not know what I wanted to do. I wasn't even really expecting to not be playing baseball. It was just to kill time,” Bird told LinkedIn News. “But in the last two years of my playing career, I did start to learn that I was really interested in economics and finance by extension.”

Bird, who ended up playing for a handful of minor league teams, retired in 2018 at 23 and ended up pursuing a dual-degree in economics and finance at Arizona State. He now works at Capital One, where he is part of a rotational program that spans multiple departments.

‘What do I do now?’

No matter how much planning goes into life after sports, though, the journey exacts a painful toll.

“Who am I outside of skating?” Williams remembers asking herself. “What do I do now?”?

The thoughts came last fall, when Williams withdrew from the Nebelhorn Trophy competition. Soon after, she publicly announced her retirement at 25.?

“To be so young and to feel like you worked your entire life to accomplish one goal and it's over is just — it's very hard to find the motivation to pursue other things,” Williams told LinkedIn News.

Many athletes also face fears about how they will be perceived by others once they stop playing.?

“It was probably the toughest decision that I've ever had to make,” Bird said, of his decision to retire from baseball.

Bird was about to give up on a life-long dream far earlier than he anticipated, and he says he worried about letting others down and what it would take to catch up professionally with his peers.

“I had this, this boom, ‘I'm a professional athlete,’ but now it's not going too well. And my peers and my friends who have gone to school and gotten degrees, whether they're an accountant or a supply chain manager in marketing, whatever, they're moving on to another chapter. And the comparison never feels good.”

Finding a new path

How can athletes move forward? For Williams, it required? “finding your purpose again,” she said. First, she decided to make a clean break from her sport.?

“I was not watching skating after I retired. I wasn't going on social media. I didn't wanna see anything in regards to skating.”??

Second, Williams turned to a tight network of friends for support and advice on how to start her new professional life.?

“I didn't have a specific type of SaaS company I was looking for,” she said. “It was more so, you know, the culture, the product, and, you know, if they were willing to train someone who had no relevant career experience.”

Williams has remained open to further pivots. In August, after six months working in sales at Placer.ai, she moved into a talent acquisition role at the company, a switch she campaigned for internally.

“If you are interested in moving laterally within a company, you have to express interest and you have to understand what they're looking for. And talk to as many people as possible,” she said. “So when things do open up, even if it's not immediate, you're at the front of their mind.”

Meanwhile, Bird’s fears about letting others down turned out to be unfounded. He says those close to him were mostly concerned about how he felt about retirement and his happiness, offering him what he calls a “soft landing.” He then focused on keeping busy and, like Williams, tried to avoid looking back. He took a retail job, eventually becoming a manager at a Lululemon location. He also became a Lyft driver.?

“I was just trying to keep myself moving,” Bird said. “And of course I started going to school after that because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do, but I kind of wanted to ‘leave the old life behind.’”

Now at Capital One, Bird says his goal is to sharpen his general business acumen and get acquainted with every aspect of running an enterprise. And he says he now thinks of his years in sports as an asset to the working world.?

“I'm a little bit older than all my peers, as far as graduating. So I think that that's attractive to, you know, companies where they can say, ‘Hey, this guy has a little bit of life experience. He's been on teams. He's been under pressure. We expect that he can learn and be adaptable and work hard and get things done and get things to the finish line.’”

Turning to the sports world for a helping hand

Both Williams and Bird emphasized the importance of family and long-time friends in their post-sports transitions. But many athletes turn to the sports world itself for help as they find a new path.?

Professional sports leagues and unions have begun to take a more active role in helping players find their next career. The NFL, for example, offers career development resources and training in areas like entrepreneurship, broadcasting and public speaking.?

“I owe a lot to the NFL entrepreneurship program,” said Stephen Tulloch, the former football player-turned-coffee shop owner. “All those programs prepared me for transitioning for life after football.”

Some retired athletes have dedicated themselves to clearing a path for their peers. In 2021, former WNBA player Alana Beard founded Transition Play, a company that prepares female professional athletes to enter the corporate world.?

“We bring in guest speakers with the goal of helping them sort of develop as individuals and fill those gaps that they may be missing from a skills perspective,” Beard told LinkedIn News. “We also do projects. Our goal and our understanding is that the learn-by-doing approach is the most important way to learn.”

These efforts all point back to a common idea: That some of the best career allies you can find are those who have been in your shoes.?

“You can talk to a therapist, you can talk to other people in the industry,” Williams says, “But I think the best people, the people who are going to understand you the most, are former athletes.”

METHODOLOGY: LinkedIn Economic Graph researchers classify “professional athletes” as LinkedIn members who ever held or hold a professional athlete or player title, or an athlete or player title while listing a professional team or league as the corresponding company. Student athletes are excluded. Jobs, industries and skills data were calculated using professional athlete career transitions between 2015 and 2022.