Balancing Performance, Academics and Anticipatory Grief
By Maddie Meadows | IG: @maddie_meadows_
During my senior year of college, I came home for Thanksgiving break expecting relief. A pause from fall ball. A breath after months of balancing practices, lifts, and classes as a Division III women’s lacrosse player. Instead, I was met with words that split my life in two: my mom had Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Terminal.
And then… nothing stopped.
I was in my final year of college, preparing for multiple licensing exams to become an elementary school teacher while juggling practices, workouts, study halls, and leadership roles on my team. I was captain of my team, the Community Service Chair, a member of SAAC, and during my senior spring, I was student teaching full-time in elementary schools, which required me to work the same long hours as my supervising teacher and still try my best to make it on time to team meetings, practices and games. I had worked so hard all four years and there was no way I was missing out the most important year of my athletic career.
To keep playing, I trained alone at night after missing team lifts. I left practices early to make it to school on time. I drove myself to away games after full days of teaching, sometimes arriving just as the National Anthem started, sprinting onto the field to meet teammates who had been there for hours already warmed up and ready to go. I played entire games, then drove home alone behind the team bus, exhausted, emotionally numb, and determined not to fall apart.
At the time, I told myself this was strength. This was resilience. This was what it meant to be a student-athlete.
But years later, after pursuing a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, I realized how deeply my mental health had been struggling. I was grieving while performing. Carrying anticipatory loss, anxiety, and fear in a system that rewarded toughness but rarely asked, “Are you okay?”
At the Division III level, we don’t have access to sports psychologists or team therapists. Coaches receive minimal mental health training, and grief is often invisible unless it becomes disruptive. Many student-athletes lose parents, siblings, or loved ones during their careers and are expected to keep showing up, keep competing, keep producing.
I want to share my story to open a conversation that sports culture often avoids: grief in athletics. Grief doesn’t wait for the offseason. It doesn’t care about practice schedules or game days. And when it’s ignored, it quietly shapes anxiety, burnout, and identity struggles in athletes long after the final whistle.
By bringing sports and mental health into the same conversation, we can begin to normalize grief, educate coaches and teammates, and remind athletes that they are human first long before they are competitors.
