I feel like the fix has to come well before you start to think of yourself as a teenager as having an "athletic career". The fraction of 'college athletes' who continue in the sport is miniscule, and the ones who do spend their lives in minor teams, get a sudden career-ending injury, or simply never make anything of themselves. If you start in high school actually convincing yourself that you're gonna be one of the maybe three or four boys your age to actually end up making something of themselves, enough to make it the focus of your life, you've already made a massive mistake.

Long before the end of college, any athlete should understand, this is not my career path, this is not going to be helpful or good for me, this has a soon and immediate expiration date. I should treat this as a hobby and build skills and friends and a network and a plan assuming that it will soon be gone and I'll be doing nothing but playing pick-up games on Fridays.

Anyone who gets to the end of college believing this was going to be their career who now suddenly has to backtrack... gosh I don't even know how to deal with the problem once it gets that big. It has to involve recognizing that something you just devoted some of the most formative years of your life to was a waste of time. I don't know how you'd begin to do that. Therapy, I should think.