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When I first began planning my action research project, I felt a strong sense of clarity and purpose. I knew exactly what I wanted to study: collegiate athletes’ transition out of sport. It was a topic that felt deeply personal and close to home. As a former collegiate women’s basketball athlete, I had experienced firsthand the difficulty of that transition; the loss of structure, identity, and the close-knit community that comes with being part of a team. I wanted to understand more about that experience, not just through my own lens, but through the voices and stories of other athletes who lived it. I imagined conducting interviews filled with powerful insights, uncovering themes that connected people’s narratives, and maybe even discovering resources or strategies to help athletes navigate life after sport. I saw this project as both personally meaningful and academically valuable and a chance to make a real contribution.

At the beginning, I felt motivated and on track. I met regularly with my community partner, brainstormed interview questions, and organized the early stages of the project. I believed I mapped out a realistic timeline. I was aware the project would take effort, but I was confident in my ability to balance it alongside school, work, and personal obligations. What I didn’t fully grasp at the time was just how much time, mental focus, and emotional energy research actually demands—not just in theory, but in the day-to-day work of it.

As I moved into the more technical phases, like preparing materials for IRB approval, thinking through recruitment strategies, and coordinating schedules, I felt increasingly overwhelmed. Every step took longer than expected. Certain processes, like securing participants, stalled entirely. Although I kept telling myself I was, “Working through delays,” the reality was that I had slowly started to deprioritize the project without realizing it. I wasn’t blocking out time to work on it. I wasn’t engaging with the material in the same way when I had started. Other areas of my life demanded attention, and I let them take precedence. I reassured myself that I would get back to the project when things calmed down, but they never did.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment when I decided to stop. Instead, it happened gradually, almost silently. Eventually, I had to confront the fact that I was no longer making meaningful progress and, more importantly, that I didn’t have the energy or clarity to pick it back up. What was even harder to admit was that I no longer wanted to finish it. I felt exhausted and disconnected from the work. That realization came with a wave of discomfort and self-doubt. I felt guilty for not following through on something that had once inspired me, and I worried about what it meant for me as a student and a researcher. I also felt a sense of disappointment, like I was letting down the people who had supported me in the early phases.

Around the same time, I also started to feel a shift in how I saw my future. For years, I had been committed to the idea of pursuing a PsyD, specializing in sport psychology. It was the plan I had felt sure about for a long time. I thought that earning a doctorate and building a career as a sports psychologist was where I was headed, and for a while, that goal made sense to me. But as I progressed through my Master’s degree, especially while juggling work and life outside of school, something started to change. I began to question whether I truly wanted to commit to several more years of intense academic work. The deeper I got into the research process, the more I realized how draining it was for me. Instead of feeling inspired, I found myself feeling discouraged. I wasn’t motivated to continue with more schooling. If anything, I felt the opposite—ready to be done.
My current jobs have also played a big role in this shift. Being out in the workforce and gaining hands-on experience made me realize that I find a lot of fulfillment in working directly with people and staying active in professional spaces. The idea of stepping away from that to return to school for several more years no longer felt aligned with who I am or what I want right now. I don’t want to spend more years in a classroom or in academic programs that don’t energize me. I’d rather keep moving forward, building experience, and focusing on growth through work, not another degree. That realization hasn’t been easy to accept, especially because it means letting go of something I had envisioned for a long time, and I think that kind of clarity is valuable in its own right.

The longer I sat with these shifts, both in my motivation around the project and in my larger career plans, the more I began to understand that this experience, though incomplete, was not a failure in the way I had initially framed it. In fact, it became one of the most impactful learning experiences I’ve had. This process taught me things I couldn’t have learned from a textbook or a classroom discussion. I learned how difficult it is to manage a long-term project that requires not just technical organization but emotional investment. I learned how quickly momentum can fade when other responsibilities pile up and how difficult it is to rebuild that momentum once it’s lost. I learned what it feels like to care deeply about a topic but still not have the capacity to follow through.

Most importantly, I learned the value of being blunt with myself when something is no longer working. It would have been easy to keep pretending that I was going to finish the project eventually, to continue checking in half-heartedly without making progress. Choosing to be truthful about my limits, my burnout, and my loss of connection to the work was a turning point. In many ways, the focus of this project shifted. It became less about the research topic and more about learning how to navigate real-world challenges, manage emotional fatigue, and take ownership of my personal and professional growth.

As I reflected more on why this project did not come to completion, I realized it paralleled the very topic I had originally set out to study. Transitioning out of college athletics is rarely neat or straightforward. It is often messy, full of unexpected challenges, and requires letting go of an identity or plan you once thought was certain. In many ways, my research experience became part of my own transition. Just as I once struggled to adjust to life after sports, I found myself struggling to adjust to the demands of graduate-level research. Both experiences forced me to face the discomfort of stepping away from what I had envisioned and to accept that growth sometimes comes through letting go rather than pushing through.

Although my research on athlete transitions never fully took shape, living through this unfinished project gave me an even deeper understanding of the uncertainty and vulnerability that athletes often feel when leaving their sport. My project may not have produced a set of findings, but it gave me a lived connection to the very process I wanted to explore. In this way, the incompleteness itself became a form of data about me, about transition, and about the reality that moving forward does not always look like finishing what we start.

This was not the story I expected to tell about my action research. I thought I would be reporting findings, presenting themes, and discussing implications for athlete development. Research, including self-research, does not always go according to plan. Sometimes the most valuable lessons come when plans fall apart. This experience reminded me that growth is not always tied to completion. Sometimes, it is tied to the process of reflecting honestly, letting go of expectations, and understanding that transition is rarely a straight line.
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