As a sports fan, you follow your idols careers no matter what– victories, defeats, successes, missed opportunities, career highs and career lows. But what about the career after sports? We learn from the media what  Boris Becker,  Diego Maradona or Serena Williams do after their professional career, but every athlete has an afterlife, and not everyone stays in the limelight – many are reorienting themselves.

Armin Wurm, born in Füssen in 1989, has been a professional athlete and defender with the Grizzlys Wolfsburg since 2009. Playing for the same club for fifteen years is something special and shows loyalty, team spirit and the desire to build and help shape something sustainable. As a young boy at age nine, Armin persuaded his parents to let him play ice hockey, inspired by his uncle who who was his role model. But Armin didn’t even dream about becoming an ice hockey star. After school he completed an apprenticeship in the metal industry and started to work. At the same time, he continued to pursue his favorite hobby, trained and played with dedication and ambition. At 19, his hard work paid off when he received an offer from the Grizzlys Wolfsburg, a first division club. Armin left his hometown and moved to Wolfsburg. It was the first time away from home – a new club, new teammates, new challenges, a new city.

Hundreds of games, numerous victories, defeats, highs and lows later, Armin looks back on his career with gratitude. “I like being with the Grizzlys, I know what I get out of the club, and I think they know what they get out of me, too…”, says the veteran in conversation. “And what a life after a sports career looks like, one has to really think about” he adds. He openly admits that it is not easy to deal with the emotions when, as a 34-year-old professional athlete, you realise that your body is no longer quite playing along as you would like it to. “You then see the young ones pushing, you realise how your own body is signalling that something has to change.” That’s how he sums up the thought process of the last two years for himself.

After his professional career, Armin Wurm does not want to return to the metal industry, he has been away from it for too long, too much has changed. Therefore, he has used another facet of professional sport to find a perspective for the future – the relationship with sponsors. For Armin Wurm, sponsors are not just financial backers who have placed their logo around the ice hockey arena. “After 15 years, I know the club inside out. Some sponsors you see at every game, many are interested in talking to the players and ask how our daily routine works, want to gain more insight into the life of the club. That’s how I got in touch with Rainer Gruhlke. When Rainer found out that I would be leaving the Grizzlys after the next season, he offered me an internship so that I could take a close look at the IT scene and his company COMbridge. I was able to look into different areas, got to attend meetings, do some coding and bring my experience from professional sports into the product development of the sports apps that COMbridge develops.”

Whether Armin will be part of the COMbridge team in the future or not remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that Armin will bring a lot of potential to his next task, whatever that may be. As a professional athlete, he has learned to remain ambitious even when things don’t work out, to keep at it, to work with passion towards a goal and above all: working as a team. “You can only be successful as a team,” Armin says with great determination. In keeping with our slogan “IT is a team sport”, we would be delighted for Armin to join our team with his qualities in the future. But whatever his life path looks like after the Grizzlys, we certainly hope Armin is as successful in his life after the Grizzlys as he has been so far.