Story by Kaitlyn Schmidt
Madison Orobono cleaned out her locker this past winter. As the former UNC-Chapel Hill field hockey player packed up her dirty clothes and carefully took down teammate letters and a Daily Tar Heel article from her first national championship, the words “Hey Girlfriend” written on her mirror made her pause. That phrase was how her grandfather began his texts to her every game day.
“I’ll never get one of those again,” Orobono remembered, tears pooling in her eyes.
As Katherine Marianos held a bouquet of yellow and white flowers on the floor at the University of Kentucky gymnastics senior night in March 2020, she watched the video board intently, showing slideshows of her younger self. Returning to the locker room to peel her freshman year headshot from her locker, the finality of her last home meet set in.
Just weeks later, though, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated her already difficult transition from the sport.
“Even though I knew it was coming to an end, all of a sudden, everything just stopped,” Marianos said.
After his third day of NFL rookie camp in 2013, Quentin Williams, former football and baseball player at Northwestern University, peeled off his shiny blue helmet for what he knew to be the last time.
Jogging off the practice field, the realization weighed heavy in his stomach: he didn’t perform well enough; his football career was over.
“There was a part of me the whole time that didn’t really think it was gonna end now,” Williams said. “Like, I will keep playing as long as they let me, you know?
“I was just kinda taken aback.”
A small percentage of college athletes actually go pro — the rest must acclimate themselves to a life not defined by sports. Often, it’s a struggle of confidence, lack of structure and a sense of self and community.
Dr. Robert L. Parisien, a former Brown University football player and current Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Surgeon and trustee of Athletes Soul, dubs the transition a “quarter life crisis.”
“I think that a lot of athletes talk about it amongst themselves,” Parisien said. “But they don’t realize that there are many, many athletes that are all going through the same thing.”
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Marianos, Williams and Orobono began their respective sports before the age of 10, and until they retired from their sports in their early twenties, they never had more than a week off. Training to play at the highest level, sport was not just their first priority — it seeped into every cranny of their existences.
With the year-round demand of gymnastics and field hockey, Marianos and Orobono missed high school dances and Friday night football. Williams swears that he had adrenal fatigue during his junior and senior years, going from spring football lift to pitching a baseball game all in one evening, his stomach tied in knots from only eating a PB&J in-between.
Marianos was recruited to UK’s gymnastics program as a high school freshman and committed sophomore year, which made her wish away the rest of her high school career.
“Before junior year of high school, there were two years of seeing my future teammates at Kentucky and I was like, ‘I just wanted to be there.’” Marianos said.
Similarly, Orobono committed to UNC to play field hockey during her freshman year and spent her early high school years traveling to South Africa, Austria and Canada on the U.S. Women’s Indoor National team — even flying to Berlin in 2018 for the World Cup. Along with missing school for travel, Orobono lacked motivation to study and almost didn’t graduate on time.
“It was like, trying to find that balance between ‘OK, I need to do schoolwork. I need to play field hockey,’” Orobono said. “But field hockey is getting me to where I want to go in my life. So what will I put my efforts more towards?”
Williams teetered between football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring, all the while upholding honor roll status and being student council president.
By the time the three athletes entered college, they faced a new transition: they not only had new level talent to compete against, but they needed to adjust to rigorous academics, intense training and occasional injuries.
The three rarely enjoyed breaks, parties or career-building experiences during the early years of their collegiate sports because they were so focused on the tasks at hand.
Their sports, a part of them, also isolated the athletes to their facilities, classrooms and dorms.
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By her third year of collegiate gymnastics in 2019-2020, Marianos had sustained three knee surgeries and an ACL tear. Following her decision to graduate a year early, Marianos spent most of her junior year in rehab and competed once during senior night against Florida… Then the COVID-19 pandemic ended her season early.
A year’s worth of rehab for one meet, then a decade’s worth of work was over. Back at her childhood home in Alpharetta, Georgia, Marianos struggled to grasp her new reality.
“I still thought I had a month or two left, but then all of a sudden, it was just like, ‘Yep, you’ve had your last practice,’ and everyone went home,” Marianos said. “We never really had any kind of closure.”
Following UNC head coach Karen Shelton’s retirement in November 2022, Orobono decided that she’d retire as well, instead of taking her fifth year. After all, she had just won her third national championship that year and knew that she finished her true senior season on a high note.
She was sure of her decision, but it didn’t make leaving her team any easier… Or her future any clearer. After telling the assistant coaches over winter break, Orobono fled to the locker room and sobbed by locker #5. She sent a teary-eyed selfie to her family group chat, texting her parents and sister that it was the last time her name plate would be there.
“I think it really hits athletes hard, because we dedicate everything to our sport,” Orobono said. “Then that comes to an end. Where do we go from there?”
Williams quit baseball after two years of playing in college to free up his schedule, and played football through his fifth year of eligibility at Northwestern with aspirations to play in the NFL or overseas.
In June 2013, his pipe dream came to fruition at rookie minicamp with the Chicago Bears. After the first two days, though, it was clear to Williams that he wasn’t one of the five or six players that would make the cut.
Blue helmet in hand, Williams trotted to the locker room in shock. Like how he had to begrudgingly wear the Bears’ new Nike cleats instead of his trusty Under Armour ones, Williams struggled to find his footing in the days after the tryouts.
“Wow, it was weird walking off the field… I didn’t feel like I was running off the field, you know?” Williams said.
Seven months after, Williams worked as a tour manager for the 2014 Under Armour All-American Game, handing out All-Star jerseys for college football commits. At a time when his confidence was drained from rejection, Williams mourned football as he saw younger players assume the “swagger” he once had in the game.
“I’m no longer in the limelight, these kids are in the limelight. These kids are the future,” Williams said. “The tables totally turned.”
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Then came the hardest part: finding themselves as active members of society.
“They’re struggling with, you know, all of those adjustments identifying as something other than an athlete,” Parisien said. “For the first time in their lives, they’re trying to figure out how to work out.”
Orobono has found a routine in going on two-mile runs and walks every day, and still gets to practice with the team in Chapel Hill. She’s tried structured workout classes, like Orange Theory, along with starting a new job at the local Finley Golf Course as a Director of Operations. But she still hasn’t gotten accustomed to the free time in her schedule.
“It’s nice to have the downtime, but I’m telling you, there’s some days where I’m like, ‘What am I doing with myself?’” Orobono said. “I’m like, OK, I need to realize that this is good for you. This is what you’ve been needing.”
It took Marianos a bit longer to establish her own schedule. Stuck in quarantine in 2020, she found little motivation working out without a team or a coach listing out her exercises.
That was until she found The Junkyard, a gym in Greenville, South Carolina, founded by two former college football players. With a community of athletes, Marianos visits 3-4 times a week for instructor-led HIIT and lifting classes.
“That’s probably been the best thing for me after being done with gymnastics,” Marianos said. “Once I found my routine and found the gym and met friends, I would say I’m a lot happier now than when I was doing gymnastics.”
Williams tried his first CorePower yoga class in Lincoln Park, Chicago, not expecting to like it. But after an hour of the flow when he laid sprawled out on his back in Shavasana, Williams was able to… relax.
The experience was the antithesis of his past rigorous workouts; the whirl of his active life took a pause.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, you just want me to lay here? I’m not supposed to do anything? I wasn’t supposed to be lifting anything or breathing a certain way?’” Williams said. “For the first time in my life, I was basically taking a nap, or just taking some time to actually think. And it changed the game for me.”
He found that the monotony of sports had smothered his inner artist, and yoga — as both an art and exercise — liberated him again. With this epiphany, Williams turned to meditating and trained to become a yoga instructor.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve ever had flexibility, I was so used to the drill sergeant style of sports,” Williams said. “I was getting back in touch with my artist at heart. And that’s what I mean by getting back in touch with who you were before sport.”
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Williams’ mother, Evelyn, died when he was 15 — right in the thick of his busy high school athletic career.
“I started to see how grief works, and it’s part of the reason I’m inspired to work with people, because you’re talking about a loss of identity, a loss of purpose,” Williams said. “It’s like grieving a person when you’re losing your sport.”
Williams tried out the corporate world before finding his niche in athlete development, founding WORLD CLASS LLC in 2019 to train athletes on the “intangibles of life beyond sport so they can win in everyday life.” He additionally helps athletes through retirement as a transition coach for Athletes Soul, a nonprofit organization founded and run by former athletes to support athlete development beyond sports.
Orobono has created a mental health mentorship program for the UNC field hockey team, and has since led a panel alongside former DI volleyball player and Athletes Soul member Victoria Garrick Browne for UNC athletes to de-stigmatize mental health.
Marianos lives in Greenville, South Carolina and works in real estate. Since gazing at the jumbotron on her senior night, Marianos has done things she never could as a gymnast: attending Clemson football games with season tickets, traveling to weekend bachelorette party destinations, and something that’ll top all the school dances she’s missed:
Her wedding is in July.
“You’ve got to see it for what it was, value it and say, ‘OK, this is a chapter of my life. And it’s an influence on me,’” Williams said.
“‘But it doesn’t define me.’”
