What Happens to Professional Athletes After They Retire?

Retirement is a journey that poses different challenges for everyone, but professional athletes face a particular challenge: they enter their job knowing that they’ll age out of playing long before reaching traditional retirement years.

The disparities in men’s and women’s professional sports are undeniable. In 2023, the Women’s World Cup prize was still one-third the size of the men’s — and that was after a 300% increase over 2019 winnings. The average WNBA salary is about $150,000 per season, while the NBA’s average salary is roughly $10 million. These financial differences persist long into retirement, and affect not only how but also when female professional athletes choose to retire.

There has been a notable increase when it comes to investment in women’s sports. Women’s professional leagues are poised to generate $1B+ in global revenue this year, up 300 percent from 2021 . . . but we still have a long way to go. As much as we love watching players’ transitions from college athletes to professionals (hi, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese), pro leagues are focused on growing loyal audiences of the game, which means they need to attract more paying subscribers. As such, there isn’t much focus on athletes’ post-court journeys, especially for female athletes, who don’t always secure high-paying sponsorship deals like their male counterparts. (In 2020, women’s sports sponsorships accounted for just 0.4 percent of all sports sponsorships.)

Thankfully, there is progress being made, and programs that help. For example, soccer club Angel City FC (which became the world’s most valuable women’s sports franchise after being sold this summer, per NPR) offers Player 22. The proprietary small business grants program provides funding and resources to current and retired soccer players who want to start or grow their own businesses.

In general, a few of the major barriers to entrepreneurship include lack of access to capital, lack of knowledge (both legal and operational), and lack of mentorship, says Lauren Yildirim, chief of staff at Justworks HR software, which is designed to make administration easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses. The Player 22 program is designed to help chip away at these barriers.

“Starting, running, and scaling a small business is no small feat,” says Yildrim. “And, it’s no secret that, for athletes and non-athletes alike, it’s historically been even more difficult for women than men to do so. While progress has been made, there’s still work to be done.”

PS interviewed four amazing female athletes who are at various points in their retirement journey to learn more about how, when, and why they choose to end their athletic careers — and how they decided what to do next. A common thread among all of their stories? Wanting to give back to the next generation of athletes.

Jill Loyden, Former Goalkeeper for USWNT and Sky Blue FC

After the United States women’s national team (USWNT) won the 2012 Olympics, Jill Loyden knew that soccer wouldn’t fulfill her in the way she’d always dreamt it would. As much as the win meant to her, it made her realize that her life was meant to involve more than playing soccer. She decided to retire in 2014, and put her effort towards making a difference in the world.

Loyden describes her pivot from athlete to owner and CEO of The Keeper Institute as a seamless transition. “I absolutely was very clear in my vision for my life post-playing,” she says. “I wanted to start a business where I could really impact the goalkeeping community in the area that I grew up in.” As a youth goalkeeper in Vineland, New Jersey, Loyden had little to no access to quality goalkeeper coaching. It wasn’t until college that she had a coach who empowered and equipped her with the tools to succeed, and that was when her career took off. Loyden attributes all her success to her collegiate coach, who invested in her and realized that soccer was her calling. After witnessing such a mentorship, Loyden knew she wanted to help her community once she retired; that sentiment grew into a desire to impact players and coaches across the country.

To prepare for retirement, Loyden started The Keeper Institute, a training institute for young goalkeepers in 2013, while she was still playing for the USWNT and in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). It was becoming clear to her that she wanted to empower the next generation. “To me, helping young athletes take their next steps in their goalkeeper journey was incredibly more fulfilling than playing at the highest level,” Loyden says. “I knew that my playing career would eventually come to an end and I wanted something that I could immediately transition into, while simultaneously fulfilling a desire to change the goalkeeping game across the country.”

While her preparation made for a simple transition, leaving pro sports was more of a mental challenge than Loyden initially anticipated. She was coming from a world where someone had told her what to do every minute of the day. For the first few years of post-retirement, Loyden said yes to every opportunity and event that came her way. “I thought my time was infinite now that I wasn’t playing,” she says. “I quickly experienced burnout and knew that I needed balance and the ability to protect my yes.” Loyden jokes that (like many of us), she’s, “still trying to learn that whole balance thing.”

That said, Loyden refers to The Keeper Institute as the best job in the world. Her favorite thing about her current career is impacting younger players, both as athletes and as humans. “My business allows me to fulfill my passions and my strengths every single day,” she says. “I get to invest in the next generation of goalkeepers, empower them to strengthen their character, and embolden them to chase their dreams.”

Amanda McGrory, Paralympic Track and Field Athlete

Amanda McGrory began wheelchair racing and playing wheelchair basketball when she was 11. She loved both sports and went to the University of Illinois on a wheelchair basketball scholarship, where she played for five years. While there, she did her first marathon. She had always loved wheelchair racing and wanted to be a Paralympian; it was that marathon that helped her realize that she was a long-distance racer, rather than a track and field athlete.

She qualified for the Beijing Olympics and decided to compete as a Paralympian as long as she could. She continued training, worked part time, and occasionally had speaking appearances. In 2015, at 30 years old, she began feeling frustrated with her performances.

“Being a professional athlete is one of those careers that comes with an expiration date,” McGrory says. She had seen her friends, teammates, and competitors try to hold on to their athletic careers — only to get pushed out of the sport without a plan B. In order to prepare for retirement, McGrory started graduate school program for information science in 2016. Part of that decision came out of a conversation with her coach, after a period of frustration with her 2012-2015 performances. McGrory realized that she’d always competed her best while in school.

During her second semester of grad school, she competed in the Paralympic games in Rio. McGrory graduated in 2018 and moved to Colorado Springs to intern at the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Archives. Her plan was always to retire after the 2020 games, but around the same time that those games were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the head archivist for the USOPC Archives announced that she was stepping down. McGrory knew it was an opportunity that might not come again. She might not have put her training plans on hold for a different job, but being able to stay involved with the Olympics and Paralympics was a big selling point. “The timing wasn’t perfect, but it was too good of an opportunity to pass up,” she says.

In July 2020, McGrory moved to Colorado Springs to become the archivist and collections curator for the USOPC archives, a position she holds currently. She spent her first year trying to both work and train full time; it was challenging, but she still qualified for the Tokyo Olympics.

“It was a very different experience for me, because I knew it was my last games. It was a nice swan song and gave me a chance to wrap up my career and enjoy the experience for what it was,” she says. “I had a lot of friends and teammates who had retired, and watching that transition and seeing what worked helped me make the decision the way that I did.” Since McGrory announced her retirement, she was recruited to moonlight as a broadcaster to cover major marathons in the US as an expert analyst for the wheelchair division. This summer, she covered paralympic track & field for the Paralympic Games for NBC. “I’ve been really lucky because I was in control of my retirement decision, but also because I’ve been able to stay very involved in the growth and development of the sport through my current career.”

“It fell into place perfectly,” she says. “I’m happy with the decision I made and it’s been a great opportunity for me to stay connected to the Paralympic world, the sports world, and this piece of my identity. One of McGrory’s biggest fears for retirement was that after spending so much time and effort growing and developing wheelchair sport it would be hard to not be a part of it. Thanks to her career, she has not felt that loss.

“I never felt like I had any unfinished business in the sport,” says McGrory. “I did the things I set out to do. I won a gold medal, broke world records, and won major marathons, and I felt like it was time for something new and was ready for a new challenge.”

However, despite the work that McGrory and others have done to bring attention to the Paralympics and alternative sports, there’s still more to be done. “There are huge disparities when you look at the difference between support, sponsorships, and awareness, for male-dominated sports versus female-dominated sports,” says McGrory. “When you move into the Paralympic world, as a female Paralympian, [that support] gets even smaller.”

When McGrory was competing, there were very few opportunities for endorsements or sponsorships beyond what she received from the national team program. She chose to focus on wheelchair marathoning in part because it’s one of the few adaptive sports with significant financial support and prize money behind it. The sponsors she did have were for products only, rather than financial support; she was relying entirely on prize money from major marathons in order to pay her bills, which wasn’t a sustainable setup.

Those disparities continue into retirement. “The smaller sliver of support that Paralympians receive makes it really difficult to fall into any sort of career attached to your sport,” McGrory says. “The opportunities to carry on with those sponsorships, endorsements, and speaking activities just don’t exist in the same way that they do for male athletes and for non-disabled athletes.” People with disabilities are significantly underrepresented in the workforce, so finding jobs and full-time employment coming out of the athlete space is difficult on its own, not to mention finding jobs within their sports or areas of expertise, she adds.

Ultimately, a lot of it is just about normalizing disability overall, says McGrory. The USOPC has been doing this work, supporting Paralympic athletes by changing the narrative of how disability is written and spoken about.

Denise Parker, Olympic Archer

Denise Parker competed in her first Olympic games for archery when she was 14 years old. She competed in the 1988, 1992, and 2000 Summer Olympics. In between the 1992 and 2000 Olympics, she had put her education on hold and moved to California to train full time for the 1996 games, but “totally burned out,” and didn’t make the team.

“It was devastating. One of the things I learned was how important balance was for my life,” Parker says of the experience. She chose to finish her undergraduate degree and took time off, but quickly realized that she wasn’t ready to retire and wanted to do so on her own terms. “I realized that wasn’t how I wanted to end my career, even if I didn’t win a gold medal. I didn’t want to walk away like that,” Parker says.

At that point, she decided she would try for the Sydney games — but now with more balance. She negotiated part-time marketing work with a company sponsoring her while she trained in Salt Lake City. “I knew I couldn’t do a full time job or dive into my career, but I knew I couldn’t put it on hold, either. It gave me a sense of relief to know that I was still moving [my career] forward.”

Parker went into the Sydney Olympics knowing it would be her last competition. “The feeling was really mixed. When you know it’s your last Olympics, you enjoy it and soak in the experience a lot more, because you know you’re walking away from all of it,” she says. “But it’s also a relief because the training is a lot, takes a long time, and is disruptive. I wanted more from my life.”

Wanting more was ultimately what drove Parker’s decision to retire. “I enjoyed being an athlete, but that didn’t feel like all of who I was – that felt like a piece of who I was,” she says. “I wanted a career, to get married, and to have a family. Athletes nowadays are doing it all, and I’m happy for them, but at that time I didn’t see a path to be able to do that.” (While things have certainly improved for female athletes, Allyson Felix made headlines as recently as 2019 for writing about how Nike reduced her contract by 70 percent after she announced her pregnancy.)

Parker didn’t feel that she had other athletes to look to when she retired, and felt that she had to be “scrappy.” Now, she’s in a position where she can offer advice to others based on her own career plan.

“I often tell other athletes to leverage the network you have around you,” she says. As an Olympian, she worked with sponsors and an advertising agency, and leveraged those connections to get a job at an advertising agency. She started her career working for a manufacturer within the archery industry and was a CEO with USA Archery for eight years, thanks to her archery industry experience. “My career path is 100 percent driven from my Olympic and sport experience, and I never would have gotten those connections had I not been competing at such a high level,” she says. “You don’t have to work in [the industry] forever, but it sure helps when you’re starting.”

In her current role as the chief of national governing bodies services and sport operations for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Parker tries to help ease the transition for other athletes coming out of elite sports.

“A lot of the work we do is helping athletes realize that they do have work experience, and that a lot of the things they’ve been doing–commitment, work ethic, and things you learn in the industry–are valuable,” she says, “When I see people trying to transition into post-athlete [life], they think they don’t have any skills, but they do. They’re just non-traditional.”

Ticha Penicheiro, Former Chicago Sky Guard and Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer

Born and raised in Portugal, Ticha Penicheiro started playing basketball at age five, with her dad as her first coach. She received a scholarship to play at Old Dominion University and joined the WNBA in 1998, as a rookie with the Sacramento Monarchs.

“You know right away that you don’t know how long your career’s going to be,” says Penicheiro, who played for the Sacramento Monarchs, Los Angeles Sparks, and Chicago Sky over her 15-year career, as well as internationally. She retired at the age of 38, but started thinking about her next steps at age 35, because she could see the writing on the wall.

“My last year in Chicago, I spent more time in the training room than I did on the court,” Penicheiro says. “My body was literally falling apart, and I knew it was time.” She knew that she didn’t want to coach, but that she did want to stay close to the game–her “first love”–and wanted to pay it forward to the next generation. During her time in the WNBA, she noticed that there weren’t many women representing women as agents. She decided she wanted to be not just an agent, but also a mentor, as someone who had been in the players’ shoes.

Even though her first agent was a woman, and Penicheiro had done an internship with Wasserman (a sports & media talent agency in LA), the star athlete still felt like she had to figure out her next steps on her own. She also had to get certified by FIBA and the WNBA to be an agent, so she prepared by studying to pass the test.

“It’s scary, because you don’t know if the next step is going to be successful. But I’d already taken the leap of faith to leave my country, leave my family to go play basketball in a foreign country where English was my second language, and I didn’t know if I would be successful there either,” says Penicheiro. “But I would rather go, try, and realize it’s not for me, than never go and never try. I have that approach for a lot of things in my life, and I knew that if one chapter was going to end, I was going to go and make the next chapter work.”

Now, over ten years into her career as an agent, Penicheiro views her players as little sisters, and wants them to enjoy success both on and off the court. She also considers it part of her job to make sure they’re good professionals and members of their community. “When you’re an agent, you wear a lot of hats, and it’s important to me to be whatever it is I need to be for them, whether it’s a cheerleader or a big sister.”

In her latest role at On Time Agency (vice president and head of the women’s basketball division), Penicheiro helped launch the Next Chapter division, designed to provide mentorship, networking, and comprehensive support for professional athletes transitioning into life after sports. “A lot of players struggle a little bit with what’s next when they’re about to cross the line into retirement,” Penicheiro says. “Your agent stops calling you and there’s no one to help you.” The goal of the new division is to help provide support for that adjustment.

As for Penicheiro, the hardest part of the adjustment wasn’t the job search, but rather learning how to rest. “The hardest thing for me was to learn how to be OK not doing anything,” she says. After 15 years of playing year-round, with barely any time off and having to work out on her days off regardless, Penicheiro says that learning how to sit down and have a chill day was the hardest part of the adjustment.

As for improvements that she’d like to see in the game, now that she’s an agent? Penicheiro would love for WNBA players to get a pension, like their male counterparts in the NBA. “In this profession, you retire very young. You make so many sacrifices to play for the fans, the franchise, the city, and your country, and then it ends and it’s like ‘poof, you don’t exist anymore,'” she says. “I’m so proud of where the WNBA is, but there’s still so much more room for growth.”

Brittany Wilson Isenhour, Former Goalkeeper for Angel City FC

Isenhour started her career in the National Women’s Soccer League playing for the Orlando Pride in 2020. In 2021, she was traded to Angel City FC. After a difficult season in 2023, Isenhour asked to be released from Angel City FC and attended the Kansas City Current’s preseason to help her make the decision to retire. “I wanted a fresh perspective before I made my decision, to be sure I was ready to step away,” she says. “It ultimately was a gut feeling knowing that my dreams had shifted and changed as I grew and evolved as a person. Once I finally accepted that it was okay for your dreams to change I made the decision to step away.”

For Isenhour, the hardest part of the decision was telling her friends, family, and coaches. “While announcing it on social media did make it feel more real, by the time I posted I had already done the hardest part,” she says. But mentally, she felt relieved, and felt she had made the right decision from the start.

The disruption of routine was also challenging. “I had lived my entire life getting up and being on a mission to become a better soccer player, and seeing my friends and teammates every day,” says Isenhour. “It’s been challenging but exciting giving myself space to explore my new passions and create a new structure and routine with the tools I learned as an athlete.”

She says that listening to what her hopes and dreams are now, rather than trying to force what was once her dream, has made her adjustment period an overall positive experience, As for her new career? Isenhour never planned to do social media full time, but gained an amazing community while she was playing. Her content has pivoted away from her life as a pro soccer player, and more to sharing the lessons and tools she learned during her career, to help others on theirs.

“Now that I’m doing this full time, it’s opened a lot of doors to travel and new and exciting partnerships to continue to share my love for the game,” says Isenhour. “I want to inspire the next generation of athletes to chase their dreams and fall in love with their sport, not just for the athletic achievements, but also for the growth and development only sport can bring.”

Kaley Rohlinger is a freelance writer for PS who focuses on health, fitness, food, and lifestyle content. She has a background in the marketing and communications industry and has written for PS for over four years.