Community Cling
The evolution of your circle and how to hold space for both your people and yourself.
Alongside competition, participating in sports can bring a strong sense of community for a lot of us. Friendship can feel inevitable when you’re in season. You’re spending almost every day together, experiencing similar challenges and successes and growing together on the field. It’s only natural that your team can become your community off the field too. Women’s sports in particular is widely known to be an inclusive environment across race, gender, sexual orientation, and age. Another unifying force, activism, has also been at the forefront of women’s sports -- primarily led by players within the WNBA and USWNT around topics like social justice for LGBTQIA+ and Black Lives Matter movements as well as equal pay. When you’re spending most of your time around talented, passionate and all-around badass women -- it’s not hard to fathom how your team can become your closest allies.
So when it’s time to step away from the game, ‘losing’ your community can be an extremely difficult and isolating period of time. A lot of athletes I speak to describe their teammates as their chosen family. When you are part of a group of people who don’t make you feel othered by who you are or who you love -- this can provide a sense of safety and comfort that doesn’t always exist outside of sports.
If we take a look at this study by Our World in Data that shows who Americans spend their time with over the years, you can see the ebb and flow of groups as we age.
The key thing I took away from this study was that the folks around you will often be changing based on the phase of life that you’re in. Since many of us aren’t staying at the same job for 40 years, so will your teammates or co-workers. I’ve definitely gained some incredibly close friends through all phases of my life -- high school, college, my first job, business school, relocating to a new city, and other jobs along the way. I’ve also experienced the loss of close relationships because of different phases of life, physical location or just a change in values that we hold. And those losses aren’t always easy to rebound from. The closer and more involved a relationship is, the more difficult it can be to reimagine your life without them in it.
So when you find yourself on a new team or stepping away from your sport altogether, here are a few things to keep in mind as it relates to who you spend your time with:
You can’t control who you spend all of your time with, so when you can control who’s in your life -- make sure they deserve to be there.
Circumstances don’t have to determine the length of a relationship. Shared experiences can be the foundation of a beautiful friendship, but they don’t have to be the full reason your friendship exists. Put in the work with the people you care about to make it last.
Know your values and allow them to evolve with you over time.
Check-in with your circle at times to make sure the folks you’re surrounding yourself with are the people you want to be there.
Get to know you. In the graph above, the amount of time we spend with ourselves grows over time. So above all other relationships, invest in getting to know yourself, your wants + needs as you grow, and how to ask for + get what you want.
It's only natural for relationships to come and go over time in different phases of life. Expecting this to happen can change your perspective on those relationships from the beginning.
Having a built in community, like your teammates, can be incredibly unifying, comforting and motivating for the time you have together. Experiencing shared wins and losses and walking alongside folks as they reach their full potential is incredibly inspiring. So I say -- soak it up! When you expect things to be temporary, it may be easier to ride the highs and lows with your circle. And also, spend some time with yourself, other friends, family, or loved ones with intentionality.
Pumped for you.
— A
