Maria Sharapova says she used tennis breaks to prepare for retirement

Maria Sharapova, 39, says she used injuries and time off from tennis to prepare for life after retirement.

In an interview with the WSJ Leadership Institute Published on Tuesday, Sharapova said she began planning her next chapter years before she left the sport.

“I realized from an early age that my career as a woman would end much sooner than in other professions,” Sharapova said. “I was like, ‘I gotta get started. I gotta start learning from other people.'”

She said she also realized that her growing profile as a tennis star gave her “a platform” that opened doors outside the sport.

As she became more financially secure, she began making investments that she hoped would “yield solid returns on investments in the future,” Sharapova said.

“Whenever I got injured or had a break, I went to business school, did a few weeks. I grew, I interned. I went to the NBA for a few weeks to shadow Adam Silver,” Sharapova said of the league’s commissioner.

She said she deliberately used her time off from the sport to broaden her knowledge beyond tennis.

“There are elements of growth that I thought even though you were making progress in one area, it was really important and crucial to help grow in other areas,” she said.

Sharapova won her first Grand Slam title at the age of 17. During her career, she won four more Grand Slam titles and was the highest-paid female athlete in the world for eleven years in a row. In 2020, at the age of 32, she announced her retirement from professional tennis.

Sharapova began building her business portfolio by launching her candy brand Sugarpova in 2012.

In 2016, she was given a fifteen-month doping ban after testing positive for meldonium.

During her time away from sports, Sharapova enrolled in a global management course and a leadership course at Harvard Business School, she said. CNBC Make it in 2018.

Sharapova also interned with the NBA and worked with Silver.

“She attended many of our department meetings to learn about NBA operations,” a Silver spokesperson said The New York Post in 2016.

Other athletes have also used their playing careers to lay the foundation for a second act.

Serena Williams launched venture capital firm Serena Ventures in 2014 while she was still competing and later said she hoped to be remembered for more than just her tennis career.

“I admire Billie Jean because she transcends her sport. I would like it to be this: Serena is this and she is that and she was a great tennis player and she won those slams,” Williams wrote in a column. for Vogue in 2022.

In a 2022 interview with GQTom Brady said he started thinking about retirement a decade before he retired.

“I’ve seen a lot of athletes’ careers end, and they don’t have anything fun to get into, and then they have too much free time. I thought, ‘That’s not going to be me. I’m going to do some really cool things in my second career,'” Brady said.

Brady briefly retired in 2022 before returning for one final NFL season. He finally retired in February 2023.

Since his retirement, Brady has expanded his business portfolio. He launched his clothing brand BRADY, invested in various sports teams and signed A 10-year contract worth $375 million with Fox Sports as lead NFL analyst.