How practitioners screen for complicated grief, pace return-to-play, and build team-wide protocols
In 2022, sports psychology researcher Melissa Pack described grief in athletic settings as "under-examined and frequently marginalized" , a striking assessment given that grief in this population extends well beyond bereavement to include season-ending injuries, sudden deselection, forced retirement, and the loss of a training identity built over a decade or more.
The practical tension for applied sport psychology practitioners is cultural. Norms of toughness and emotional control, documented across Reardon et al. (2019) and Rice et al. (2016), actively discourage athletes from naming what they're carrying. That silence shapes everything downstream: screening decisions, referral timing, scope-of-practice boundaries between performance consultants and clinical grief specialists, and whether an organization has any bereavement protocol at all before it needs one.
When most people hear the word "grief" in sport, they picture a teammate's death or a family funeral. When sport psychologists hear it, they know the list is far longer, and that the losses no one names out loud are often the ones that do the most damage. Understanding both categories of loss and the cultural forces that keep athletes quiet about them is the first practical step toward better service delivery.
Athletes encounter grief through at least four distinct pathways, each carrying its own timeline, identity disruption, and social meaning.
Each trigger can produce the same grief process in athletes: unfamiliar fatigue, concentration lapses, irritability, emotional swings, and numbness. Yet sport environments rarely frame these experiences as grief.
Sport, by design, prizes physical ability, mental toughness in sports, and team achievement (Sarkar and Fletcher, 2014). That emphasis creates an environment where vulnerability is treated as a performance liability rather than a normal human response. Research on toughness and emotional-control norms (Reardon et al., 2019; Rice et al., 2016) shows that athletes internalize expectations to suppress distress, push through pain, and project composure. Disclosing grief in that context can feel like admitting weakness.
The result is a systemic silence. As Pack (2022) observed, grief in sport remains under-examined and frequently marginalized in both research and practice. Practitioners have limited evidence-based protocols to draw from, coaches receive almost no training on recognizing grief reactions, and athletes themselves lack language for what they are experiencing.
Michele Kerulis, Ed.D., frames this gap directly in her Psychology Today blog "Sporting Moments," noting the disconnect between the intensity of loss athletes face and the near-total absence of organizational readiness to address it.
For sport psychologists and performance consultants working at sportspsychology.org and beyond, the takeaway is structural, not just clinical. Recognizing the four grief triggers above as legitimate presenting concerns, rather than side issues, changes intake questions, case conceptualization, and the referral conversations you have with coaching staffs. It also highlights why continuing education in grief-informed practice is not a niche elective but a core competency gap the field is only beginning to close.
No large-scale study has yet measured prolonged grief disorder specifically in athlete populations. The figures below draw on the best available general-population and bereaved-adult research, alongside what we know about elite-athlete mental health prevalence. Given that toughness norms discourage emotional disclosure in sport, true rates among athletes are almost certainly underreported.
This checklist is a practical screening tool, not a diagnostic instrument. Its purpose is to help coaches and sport psychologists notice behavioral shifts early so they can determine whether closer follow-up is warranted.
No single grief framework captures every athlete's experience, and applying any model too rigidly risks overlooking resilience, growth, or trajectories that fall outside that model's assumptions. The table below compares three frameworks that sport psychologists encounter most often. Each lens highlights different aspects of an athlete's grief response, so practitioners benefit from drawing on more than one when building a case conceptualization.
| Feature | Kübler-Ross Stage Model | Dual Process Model (Stroebe and Schut) | Meaning Reconstruction (Neimeyer) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core idea | Describes grief through five emotional stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, originally observed in terminally ill patients and later extended to bereaved individuals. | Identifies two stressor categories, loss-oriented (confronting the pain of the loss) and restoration-oriented (adjusting to new roles, routines, or identities), with the bereaved person oscillating between them. | Frames grief as a process of rebuilding one's assumptive world after loss through sense-making, benefit-finding, and identity reconstruction. |
| How it has been applied to athletes | Sometimes used descriptively when athletes face career-ending injury or forced retirement, mapping emotional reactions onto the five stages as a loose narrative rather than a strict sequence. | Adopted in stress and adaptation literature to explain how athletes shift between grieving a performance or role loss and engaging in rehabilitation, new roles, or life changes after sport-related loss. | Applied in identity disruption research to help athletes reconstruct their sense of self and life story after losing an athletic role, team status, or career. |
| Typical intervention style | Psychoeducation and normalization: helping the athlete name what they feel without requiring that feelings arrive in a fixed order. | Regulatory and behavioral: guiding deliberate oscillation so the athlete can grieve when needed and re-engage with training or daily life without suppressing either process. | Narrative and cognitive: structured exercises such as journaling, life-story revision, and guided reflection aimed at building a coherent new identity. |
| Key limitation for sport settings | Research shows grief is highly individual and non-linear. Prescriptive use of the stages can invalidate diverse grieving trajectories and may reinforce the "toughen up and move to acceptance" culture already present in sport. | Provides a broad regulatory framework but offers limited specificity about cultural, contextual, or identity-based factors, which matter significantly in team dynamics and diverse athlete populations. | Emphasis on complex narrative work can be demanding to implement in brief or highly structured sport settings, and may under-specify acute emotional or physiological adjustment needs. |
| Best fit in a sport psychology caseload | Useful as an introductory psychoeducation tool for coaches and young athletes who need a simple vocabulary for grief reactions. | Well suited for return-to-play planning because it explicitly accounts for the athlete toggling between grief work and performance demands. | Particularly valuable in career transition, retirement, or deselection cases where identity disruption is the central concern. |
Sport psychologists must know where their expertise ends and where clinical grief specialists begin. Performance consultants can address adjustment challenges, support athletes through identity disruption, and facilitate return-to-competition planning, but when sports psychology isn't enough, complicated grief, trauma responses, and clinical depression require referral to licensed grief counselors, clinical psychologists, or thanatologists with specialized training. Drawing this line protects both the practitioner and the athlete.
Emilio Parga, a thanatologist and founder of The Solace Tree, created the Death and Trauma Informed Grief Special Interest Group within the leading global organization for sport psychology, the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. The group's purpose is direct: help sports professionals prepare their organizations for the aftermath of death before tragedy strikes.1 The SIG is open to anyone interested in working with student-athletes at the high school or college level, performers, coaches, military personnel, first responders, and organizations experiencing loss. Practitioners seeking to join can contact the SIG Coordinator through AASP's member directory.1
The group met at the 2025 AASP conference in Room 517 D, with no preregistration required.2 While specific continuing education credits through the SIG are not currently documented in published materials, participation connects practitioners with colleagues developing death-informed protocols across sport settings. Practitioners seeking formal grief training should also consider thanatology certifications or grief counseling credentials through clinical pathways outside AASP.
When a teammate dies, the first three days shape how a team processes collective loss. Athletic departments should have protocols in place that include:
Several institutions have published bereavement structures practitioners can reference. Wichita State University's draft policy from late 2024 allows up to five academic days over a two-week period for the death of an immediate family member, with three days for non-immediate family. Students traveling more than 300 miles receive two additional travel days.3 Northern Arizona University separates athletic and bereavement excuses through different approval channels, with athletic absences approved by the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and bereavement excuses handled by the Dean of Students.4
One institutional athletics handbook includes a dedicated bereavement section that covers excused absences from athletic events, death communication procedures, student athlete mental health resources, memorial guidelines, and staff training requirements.5 This kind of comprehensive approach ensures that grief support is not improvised during crisis.
A 2021 analysis in the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology noted that many schools still lack bereavement policies specific to student-athletes, leaving teams to navigate loss without clear guidance. Practitioners can advocate for policy development by presenting existing frameworks to athletic directors and compliance officers. The goal is institutional readiness, not reactive scrambling when loss occurs.
Grief rarely looks the same from person to person. One athlete may withdraw completely while another pushes harder in training to avoid the pain. A third might seem unchanged until a specific trigger, a song, a date, a smell, brings everything rushing back. This variability is precisely why sport psychologists must approach each grieving athlete with individualized assessment rather than assuming a standard timeline or presentation.
Atkins & Lorelle (2024) and O'Brien et al. (2025) found that loss disrupts three things at once for athletes: identity, psychological safety, and performance consistency. That triad matters for case conceptualization because it tells practitioners the grief work isn't only emotional processing; it's identity repair happening under public pressure to perform , a holistic sports psychology concern.
Athletes whose sense of self is built almost entirely around competition, what the literature calls foreclosed athletic identity, tend to have worse grief reactions when that foundation cracks. A career-ending injury, a deselection, or a bereavement doesn't just remove a role; it removes the primary lens through which the athlete has understood their own worth. Sport psychologists should screen for this early: ask what the athlete would say about themselves if sport were subtracted entirely. A thin answer is a flag for more intensive identity work, not just symptom management.
Consider a college athlete forced to retire after a career-ending knee injury, where return to play psychology gives way to identity reconstruction. Framed only as loss, the story stalls at what's gone: the scholarship, the team, the identity as "the athlete." Framed as a transition, the same facts support a different narrative: discipline built over a decade of training now applies to coaching, sports medicine, or a new competitive outlet. The injury didn't erase the skill set, it redirected it. That reframe doesn't minimize the grief; it gives the athlete a next chapter to grieve toward instead of an identity to grieve alone.
No universal timeline exists for returning to sport after bereavement or a major psychological loss. Current return-to-sport research consistently shows that criterion-based decisions outperform fixed calendar milestones, and that psychological readiness is a required clearance domain alongside clinical, functional, and patient-reported outcomes. Ask your team physician, athletic trainer, and a licensed mental health provider to co-author a written, individualized graduated return-to-sport plan rather than waiting for a one-size-fits-all schedule.
Grief shows up differently depending on where an athlete sits in the developmental and competitive pipeline, and the resources available at each level shape how quickly a sport psychologist can intervene.
A competitive club player begins missing practices and snapping at teammates after the death of a grandparent who drove her to every game. Her volunteer coach notices the irritability and fatigue but chalks it up to "being a teenager." A sport psychology consultant brought in for a pre-season workshop recognizes the pattern: unfamiliar fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and disproportionate emotional swings, the everyday grief signs that research has identified in sport contexts. Because the club has no bereavement protocol, the consultant drafts a brief response plan with the club director, identifies a licensed counselor for a referral, and meets with the athlete to normalize what she is feeling. The takeaway at the youth level is that grief literacy among volunteer coaches is almost nonexistent, so the sport psychologist working in sport psychology for community coaches often functions as an educator first and a service provider second.
A Division I sprinter receives a cardiac diagnosis that ends her eligibility overnight. She has built her entire social network, daily schedule, and scholarship funding around the team. Within weeks she stops attending classes. The university's sport psychologist frames this as an identity-level loss, not simply a medical event. Using meaning-reconstruction techniques, she helps the athlete articulate which parts of her identity existed before sport and which can transfer forward. The sport psychologist also coordinates with the athletic department's academic advisor and the university counseling center, a referral step within NCAA sport psychology services that respects scope-of-practice boundaries between performance work and clinical grief counseling. The dual-role infrastructure common at the college level, where sport psychologists sit alongside clinical and academic services, makes this kind of coordinated response far more feasible than in youth or even some professional environments.
A strength coach on a professional roster dies unexpectedly. Players react in starkly different ways: one veteran becomes emotionally flat on the court, a rookie cannot stop crying in the locker room, and a third insists nothing has changed. As Emilio Parga, the thanatologist who founded the Death and Trauma Informed Grief Special Interest Group within the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, has observed, "Grief rarely looks the same from person to person." The team's sport psychologist activates a pre-existing bereavement protocol that includes optional group processing sessions, individual check-ins scheduled around game travel, and a clear referral pathway to a licensed clinical provider for anyone showing prolonged functional disruption. The protocol also accounts for media obligations, a stressor unique to elite environments that can force athletes to discuss loss publicly before they have processed it privately.
Across all three levels, the common thread is the same: toughness and emotional-control norms discourage disclosure, so practitioners must build structures that invite grief into the conversation, an approach aligned with how sports psychologists build trust with athletes, rather than waiting for athletes to bring it up on their own.
Grief-focused sport psychology work spans several occupational pathways, each with its own credentialing requirements, work settings, and compensation levels. The table below draws on national 2025 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. Keep in mind that actual pay can vary significantly by state, employer type, and whether a practitioner works in private practice, a university athletic department, or a professional sports organization.
| Occupation | National Employment | 25th Percentile Salary | Median Salary | 75th Percentile Salary | Mean Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clinical and Counseling Psychologists | 75,990 | $73,210 | $100,580 | $135,200 | $112,750 |
| Psychologists, All Other | 18,820 | $68,850 | $110,840 | $147,240 | $111,210 |
| Psychology Teachers, Postsecondary | 41,530 | $63,400 | $80,340 | $105,920 | $93,860 |
| Coaches and Scouts | 248,950 | $35,330 | $47,320 | $64,710 | $60,160 |
