JUST SAY YES

Share your story series: Braving and navigating the ‘post grad experience’, drowning in job applications, and my biggest lesson through it all

“Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.” – Chris Grosser

---

MY NAME IS ALYSSA DOYLE & THIS IS MY STORY

Cheer | University of Nevada

I still remember my last game as a collegiate cheerleader. We had just been eliminated from the NCAA’s March Madness tournament, the band started playing the fight song, and right then and there I started sobbing. It finally sunk in for me at that moment; this would be my last time performing. The day after we got home from the tournament I felt like I had gone through a breakup…heartbroken, emotionally drained, just all around sad. I thought I was going to be so excited to move on and enter a new chapter of my life, however, I was instead met with feelings and experiences nobody had prepared me for. 

For a lot of us athletes, our sports career ends when we graduate college. With that comes the ‘post grad experience’. For me, that looked like endless hours on LinkedIn searching for a job, email rejections, or sometimes not even hearing back from an employer at all, seeing “entry-level jobs” that required 3+ years of experience, the job search felt very discouraging. I found myself facing the reality that I had very little job experience because I had spent my last four years, while in college cheering– when would there ever have been time to work and gain job experience? I even had an excel spreadsheet that showed every job I applied for and the outcome of those applications. 

Months of job searching passed when I was finally offered a full time position as a marketing assistant in September 2024. I promptly accepted the position and even though it’s still relatively new to me still, I have learned so much already. I definitely still struggle with navigating ‘post grad’ life and no longer having the schedule of a student-athlete, but many lessons have come out of this for me. I have learned to try new experiences and say yes more often. It can be very daunting, the pressures that come after graduating college and not having a sport that keeps you active or social, by way of hanging out with your built-in best friends (teammates) everyday. However, I’ve learned that growth is not linear and mindset truly is everything.

My first game I attended as an alumni was the hardest. Being on the other side watching my former teammates and friends I felt so much pressure to move on from cheer and quickly get through the grieving process from what was once a big part of my identity. I still experience some feelings of sadness when I go to games but I also feel thankful for the lifelong friendships cheer gave me and how it shaped the person that I am today. As cliche as it may sound, my best advice for navigating post grad and being a retired athlete is to say yes to new experiences. Try something that you have always wanted to do that you weren’t able to do before or didn’t have the time to, keep in touch with your former teammates, taking a walk outside can be healing, give yourself grace when job searching, and lastly, allow yourself to grieve over closing that chapter of your life.