An Examination of Sport Retirement Through Concept Analysis of Occupational Retirement

Occupational retirement is a major life transition that involves extensive planning, preparation, and coping strategies. Concept analysis was completed to explore adaptation to occupational retirement as a way to further understand sport retirement. Thirty-nine occupational-related articles were included in the final analysis. The primary antecedent to occupational retirement is financial stability, followed by age and family life. Antecedents to sport retirement include graduation, exhaustion of NCAA eligibility, and possibly injury. The antecedents are unique to each type of retirement, but the consequences are similar. Retirees of both types often experience feeling of loss, grief, depression, and identity crisis while adjusting to the change. Achieving adaptation to the life transition of retirement can be enhanced by forming identities outside of work and sports, viewing the change as a gain rather than a loss, and preparing for retirement. Additionally, through this analysis, tools to measure quality of adaptation to occupational retirement were discovered. These tools could be applied to sports in future research.