The Athlete Took A Knock
So The Mother Could Stand

I had my life planned. I had done something no one in my family had ever done before, reached a height that made the sacrifices of those before me feel worthwhile. I carried their pride alongside my own ambition. I knew where I was going. I had mapped the route with the certainty that only someone with everything ahead of them can feel.

I was a rugby player. I had earned national colours, the first in my family to do so. That meant everything. Not just to me, but to the people who came before me, who sacrificed and struggled and never had the opportunity to stand where I stood. And I believed my best was still to come.

Then, I found out I was pregnant. And the map disappeared.
The shift didn’t ask permission. It arrived the way life does when something greater than your plans walks through the door. Overnight, I moved from full-time athlete to full-time mother because that is what the moment demanded. You care for the baby first. You care for yourself later. Sometimes much later. Sometimes that later never fully comes.

My body changed. My identity quietly fractured. The athlete in me took a knock so the mother in me could stand. For a long time I grieved her; the player, the competitor, the woman who once believed her best rugby was still ahead of her. The woman who had been the first in her family to wear national colours and had dreamed of wearing them again.

I still don’t have my body back. But I have learned something that no selection could have taught me. That accolades change and changed accolades are not lesser ones. They are simply different. They are harder won, less photographed, and almost never celebrated by anyone except the woman living them.

My story is not unique.
Across South Africa, in provinces and townships and small clubs where women’s rugby is held together by passion and very little else, there are women who know this shifting of accolades intimately. Women who were formidable, capped players, provincial champions, leaders on and off the field who stepped away from the game when life required it.
Some never found their way back.
Your body changes. Pregnancy, recovery, the physical demands of motherhood take something that training alone cannot give back. The sport that once welcomed you becomes a door you can no longer open. You hang up your boots quietly. No farewell match. No tribute. No acknowledgement of what you gave. It happens to rugby players. It happens to dancers. It happens to every woman whose body was once her instrument and then became something the world expected her to simply fix.

You disappear for nine months. When you return, your position is gone. Not filled by someone better just filled. The squad was rebuilt without a conversation. The coach moved on without a phone call. No one was cruel. They simply forgot to wait. And forgetting is its own cruelty. It happens on the rugby field. It happens in the boardroom. It happens in every space where a woman dared to be essential before life interrupted her.

You want to return. But wanting is not enough when there is no sponsorship, no financial support, no one to watch your child while you train. In a country where professional contracts for women’s rugby remain scarce, the decision to go back is never just about desire it is a calculation that does not always add up. You chose your child. You chose to eat. That is not failure. That is not weakness. That is a broken system forcing an impossible choice on the woman it should have been protecting. It happens to athletes. It happens to artists. It happens to every woman who had to choose between her ambition and her survival.

You step away intending to return. But the person who left the field is not the same person standing in her kitchen three years later. The athlete and the mother collided without warning, without preparation, without anyone offering a map for the terrain between them. The athlete is still in there. But no one came to help her find the way back. No sports psychologist. No return to play programme. No one who understood that you were both and that both deserved to survive. It happens to rugby players. It happens to academics. It happens to every woman who lost herself in the space between who she was and who life needed her to become.

And then there are those who left completely.
Not gradually. Not with plans to return. You walked away from the sport entirely. From the training, the teams, the community, the identity and built a life in which the game that once defined you simply no longer existed. Some left because the pain of almost returning was worse than not returning at all. Some left because the sport had taken so much and given so little that walking away was the only form of dignity available. Some left because nobody called. Nobody checked. Nobody said we see you, we need you, come back when you are ready. The silence from the institutions that once celebrated them was louder than any applause. And so they built new lives. Became teachers, nurses, entrepreneurs, mothers fully and completely women who carry a past that most people around them do not even know about. Their medals are in boxes. Their boots are in corners. Their records exist in documents nobody updates. They left and the world did not stop. And that the fact that the worl ind did not stop is perhaps the most honest indictment of how we treat women who dare to be great before life interrupts them.

And there were those who chose not to return and made peace with that choice. Women who gave everything to their sport, who loved it completely, and who decided that this chapter was closed. Not in defeat. In fullness. In a life that expanded beyond what any jersey could contain.

This year, my daughter played her first netball match.
I sat in the stands in the morning watching her nervous and brave on that court, finding her own sport, her own field, her own version of the dream. She didn’t choose rugby. She found something that belongs entirely to her.

That same afternoon, she watched me play. She never saw my head hang. She watched her mother hold her head high through every knock, every setback. She saw me refuse to give up even when we were losing. She saw a woman who loved something enough to keep showing up for it even on the days it did not love her back.

Every working mother is being watched. Not for her victories. For her recovery.
That is my accolade now. Not a cap. Not a selection. Not my name on a list.
Her eyes watching me choose not to quit.
To the women who made it back and those who didn’t. To those whose names belong in record books that were never written. To those who altered their dreams so that life could continue and called that alteration by its real name.
Strength.

I am Kamo Mbambo. I am a mother, a rugby player, and sports journalist completing my Advanced Diploma in Media Studies. I am building an archive because these stories deserve to exist somewhere permanent.
Because one day, someone will search for women who looked like her, who carried what she carries, who loved what she loved and lost it and found it again or didn’t. And still kept going.
And I want her to find us.
— Kamo Mbambo