About approximately 1% of collegiate athletes are successfully drafted into a professional league, while the average professional career lasts only about three years. As a result, approximately 99% of all college athletes will face foreclosure of their athletic identity upon graduation. As changing higher education becomes more of a focus for our country, sports psychologists have begun to focus their attention on athletes. and their pursuit of exceptional athletic performance in elite sports and the extent to which this pursuit impacts personal development. According to Lavallee (2005), previous research has found that collegiate athletes are more likely to have lower levels of career maturity and delayed career development than their non-athletic counterparts. Additionally, the researchers also found that college athletes were less capable of developing mature career and educational plans than other fellow college students. Therefore, this suggests that the education made available to collegiate athletes to develop career-related knowledge is lacking or incomplete; indicating that future research should be more focused on athletes' personal development. In a study by Beamon (2012), the phenomenon of athletic identity and identity foreclosure following retirement from sport was examined. Athletic identity can be defined as a social role or professional self-image embedded with the social, behavioral, cognitive, and affective obligations associated with athletic identification. Due to the entertainment nature of our culture, elite athletes are socially reinforced for their physical abilities and success. Unfortunately, because of this, most athletes conceptualize their identity and “self… middle of paper… essential stressors during competition. According to Nicholls & Polman (2007), the ability to cope with stress plays a significant role in an athlete's performance during and outside of competition. In line with this research, the construct of self-efficacy has been found to influence how an individual evaluates a situation and the corresponding way in which he or she approaches it. Self-efficacy can be defined as an individual's beliefs about their ability to achieve a certain outcome which is further expressed in their opinions about their ability to perform a specific behavior or task. Because stress is a consistent and determining variable in sport and life outside of sport, it is critical that athletes develop ways to successfully deal with stress and effectively implement these methods in order to avoid negative effects in competition and life ( Nicholls, Polman, Levy, & Borkoles, 2010).