Emily Allard, Former Pro Softball Player, Chicago Bandits

Sidelined Stories

There are times when the drive to continue to compete is so strong that an athlete can end up staying at it much longer than is probably best. That certainly was the case for Emily Allard who did everything humanly possible to avoid medical retirement. She hadn’t yet, after all, been able to fulfill her dreams of playing in the Olympics and anything short of that goal was unacceptable. At a certain point though, she had to face the fact that the concussion she sustained years earlier had caused such lingering effects that her athletic goals were no longer healthy or sustainable.

Emily shares how her long history of playing through injury, blocking out pain, and putting up a facade kept her from making the decision to medically retire for far too long and also impacted her ability to fully accept her new reality following retirement. Emily discusses what she’s learned over the past several years about the “athletic mentality” and the unhealthy thinking patterns that caused her to power through even when it wasn’t good for her.

This episode is chock-full of various aspects of medical retirement: navigating the decision to medically retire, challenges of a layered transition in retirement (working through both physical symptoms on top of the emotional/psychological), loss of relationships with the team, bottling up feelings, difficulty opening up, feeling lost, hitting rock bottom, seeking therapy, the decision to stay involved with your sport or to walk away completely . . .

We hope this episode is especially helpful to those athletes whose intense grittiness for sport has complicated their medical retirement and made them feel incomplete without the fulfillment of their dreams. You may feel like all is lost, but it isn’t. We hope you, like Emily, will be able to find a way to stop running into the brick wall that is “denial” and lean into acceptance in letting go of control of what you thought your life would look like and find fresh hopefulness for your future.