Former college athletes find Olympic success in different sports

The NCAA's longstanding branding tag line emphasizes that most of the nearly 500,000 college athletes will go pro in something other than sports.

A very small percentage, however, go pro in a different sport. A few of these rare athletes will be competing at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, representing a less traditional part of the significant Olympic pipeline that is college sports.

A recent Social Series episode featured two such athletes: Elana Meyers Taylor, a former softball player at George Washington who qualified for her fourth Olympics in bobsled, and Jake Brown, a former three-sport athlete at St. Olaf (cross country, Nordic skiing and track and field) who qualified for his first Olympics in biathlon on Team USA.

Talent identification camps open doors for many of these athletes to pursue an Olympic dream in a new sport. For these types of athletes, like Springfield College's Kelly Curtis, the connection between their college and Olympic sports is different from that of a hockey player who spent years on collegiate ice, for instance. Still, there is significant overlap in how these Olympians say they benefited from their collegiate experience in their pursuit of the Olympics.

Leadership, for starters.

Meyers Taylor was a captain of her George Washington softball teams, and now she pilots a four-person bobsled that can go more than 90 miles per hour.

"One of the biggest things is that as a bobsled pilot, you're a leader in your sport. You lead a team; you manage a team. I was in that leadership position (at George Washington), and I really learned it there," she said. "Leading that team really taught me how to work with other people, how to manage a team, how to deal with different personalities."

Andrew Blaser, a skeleton athlete for Team USA who was a decathlete and heptathlete at Idaho, shared a similar reflection from his college experience. More specifically, he noted the ability to work with different people and coaches as a benefit from his time at Idaho.

"You're learning those communication skills, and you're learning things that you can take with you anywhere. I get a lot of compliments with how I interact with a coach, but I learned those skills from my interactions with my coaches," said Blaser, who also coaches high school track. "I think there's a lot that NCAA athletics brings to the table aside from just competition, and there's a lot of things that I will hold with me forever."

A few others Blaser noted are the time- and stress-management lessons instilled in college athletes. This holds especially for multisport college athletes like Brown and Michigan Tech alum Deedra Irwin, also a biathlete for Team USA.

"For college athletics, the biggest thing is being able to balance it all. Whether you're a multisport athlete … to balance that with your studies is the number one difficulty every athlete faces, and every college student knows that. That doesn't change, even when you're a 'professional' doing your sport full time," Brown said. "There's just so much in life that you have to balance, and you have to be able to prioritize. Having been a college athlete gives me a little bit of a leg up on other people who came out straight from high school and tried to keep doing biathlon or cross country skiing. It allowed me to be able to step back, figure out how to have a little more balance in my life, figure out what aspects of training I need to prioritize, and even when it's important to take a rest."

Meyers Taylor echoed Brown's experience.

"In bobsled, you have a lot of different moving parts all the time, and there's always plenty of stuff to do. But it pales in comparison to what it's like to be an NCAA athlete when you're pulling 18 credit hours and you've got study hall and you're on practice field 20-plus hours a week and you've got games and all this kind of stuff," she said. "You're managing a lot, and I like to think my experience as an NCAA student-athlete definitely helped me."

Blaser said his time as a decathlete and heptathlete taught him a lot about perseverance, which is key in picking up any new sport in an Olympic pursuit. Brittany Bowe, a former women's basketball player at Florida Atlantic and three-time Olympian in speedskating, agreed. 

"Going through four years of collegiate basketball definitely built my backbone very strong," she said. "My four years of playing basketball really taught me how to be resilient and to overcome obstacles."

Those obstacles look a little different for each person and sport. Blaser recalled learning how to pole vault, an event he never tried until college, and how he's carried that experience with him. Now, he coaches the event at the high school level, which allows him to reflect on how he matured through the process.

"It's kind of fun for me, that little 4½ years of learning through college really took off and played a really big part in my life. You make a lot of mistakes when you're learning to vault. You'll break a pole. You'll peel off a pole," he said. "That kind of taught me a little bit more with the tenacity and sticking to the sport in general. It's really easy to walk away from skeleton. It costs a lot of money. It takes a lot of time, and you hit a lot of walls at upwards of 80 miles per hour. All of that kind of prepped me through this."

Similarly, Blaser said his ability to stay composed after a bad run or turn stems from his time on the track.

"I'm very used to being at a higher level of athletics, and I'm used to always having another shot," he said. "When you're going through the decathlon, you may have one really bad event, but you know you're going to have a good one next. And I feel like that relates a lot with the skeleton. When I have one bad run or one bad corner even, I keep my composure when I'm going down the track to get back on line and get back where I need to go to accelerate my sled.

"One of the things I learned with the decathlon is that it's OK to make mistakes. It's OK to not be perfect. But we're striving for consistency, not perfection. That's one thing with skeleton … consistency is important. That happens from repetition and that (lesson) happened from the opportunity that I had walking out on the track every day for 4½ years in college."