Why Sport Needs Extending

By Alyssa, Founder of Sport ExtendED

When people ask me why I started Sport ExtendED, I usually take pause before I answer. Because the real answer is complex, layered; and not always easy to say out loud.

It’s not just because I love sport. I do. Sport shaped me, saved me, and taught me what discipline, community, and purpose can feel like. But it also exposed me to isolation, anxiety, and loss; the kind that follows when an athlete gets cut, injured, or simply can’t carry the load anymore. The kind that surrounds managing mental health, navigating identity, or being one of few racialized people on the team.

And the kind that shows up when the institution (whether a school, a league, or a national program) thanks you for your service and then withdraws all support.

It’s as if the athlete’s value was tied only to performance, not personhood. Too often, sport forgets that it's dealing in people’s futures, livelihoods, self-identity, and sense of worth. Athletes are moved through the system quickly, sometimes carelessly, with decisions made about them, not with them.

If you’re no longer useful, you’re expendable. And the game moves on.

I started Sport ExtendED because I couldn’t ignore that treatment anymore.

Too many athletes are told to “push through” things that are actually breaking them. Too many don’t know what to do with themselves when the sport ends; whether by choice or by force. And too many young talents are left out of the game before they ever get a chance to fully step into it because they don’t have access to the right supports, funding, or networks.

We celebrate athletes when they win, but we don’t always show up for them when they’re human.

That gap (between performance and well-being, between access and opportunity, between who gets seen and who gets left behind) is what Sport ExtendED was built to address. Our work is about closing the distance between talent and sustainability. Between potential and long-term success. Between the athlete who “makes it” and the one who doesn’t, not because they lacked ability, but because the system was never designed for them to thrive.

This is deeply personal work for me, not only as a former varsity athlete, or an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) practitioner, but as someone who has seen what it costs when brilliant, capable people walk away from sport (and sometimes from themselves) because no one extended the support they needed to stay whole.

So if you’re here, reading this, I want to thank you. Sport ExtendED isn’t just a project. It’s a call to reimagine what’s possible when we build systems that care as much about who athletes are as what they can do.

Let’s extend the game.

Let’s extend the care.

Let’s extend the chance.

Because talent isn’t rare.

Support shouldn’t be either.