UCLA Baseball player Roch Cholowsky leaves Jackie Robinson Stadium after his last game as a Bruin in UCLA’s NCAA Regional loss to St. Mary’s. May 31, 2026 (Frame of Play/Laura Casadonte)
A Close Up on the moment every athlete eventually faces, and almost nobody captures.
This spring, UCLA baseball was the number one overall national seed. They went 52-8 and put together one of the greatest regular seasons the sport has seen in years. Expectations weren’t just high, they were historic.
Then they ran into Saint Mary’s in the first round of the regionals on their own field, and lost. And because of how the bracket worked out, they had to play Saint Mary’s again. And they lost again. Just like that, the best season in recent program history was over before it really started. UCLA became the only number one national seed ever to lose its tournament opener. I was there shooting it, and I genuinely could not believe what I was watching. It was stunning. It was heartbreaking.
But this piece isn’t really about the upset. It’s about a moment that happened afterward.
Roch Cholowsky was the best player on that team, and one of the best players in college baseball, period. The regional unexpectedly became the last time he would ever play on that field as a Bruin.
This is what I want to talk about, the moment where you leave a place for the last time as an athlete.
I was shooting video for the baseball game, and I knew him leaving that field for the last time was a moment that mattered. It was historically significant, and the final look back deserved to be captured even if the whole clip wouldn’t be shared. The photo attached to this post is a screen grab of the initial turn around to take it all in one last time. This photo and the shot his back as he walked away feels like enough to honor the moment. Not so much that I shared something that wasn’t mine to share. (I wrote a whole post on shooting in diffucult moments like this, give it a read here.)
But seeing his final time leaving Jackie Robinson Stadium out put me somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go.
Because I know that walk. Not his specifically, but the feeling underneath it.
Here’s the thing almost nobody outside of sports understands, or maybe just forgotten: for a huge number of athletes, the end of a season isn’t the end of a season. It’s the end of everything. There comes a time for every athlete where they play their last competitive game, meet, or match ever. They’ve spent their entire lives on this one thing. Locked in, honing it, sacrificing for it, building their whole identity around it. And then one day, often with no warning, it’s just over. For some people, that’s the end of high school, or others its college, and for a select few its their last game in the pros. The uniform comes off and it doesn’t go back on.
Even if it isn’t the final moment of a whole career and there’s still a another level to move on to, there’s always an ending to a chapter.
Sometimes that ending is beautiful. A championship, a perfect final moment, a storybook close. And sometimes it’s like this one. A team that felt invincible getting sent home early, a star player going quiet at the worst possible time, a whole season of momentum evaporating in a single weekend on the field you thought you’d be celebrating on.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of watching this, and after living a version of it myself. No matter what note it ends on, there’s almost always that final look back. That moment where an athlete turns around one more time and takes in the field, the track, the court, whatever it was. And somewhere in that look is the quiet understanding that they will never be here in this way again. Not as this person. Not in this moment. Even if they come back someday and stand in the same place, the time for it being what it was has passed. It will never be that again.
And because I’ve lived it, I know to look for it when I shoot.
I competed at the Division I level in track. But honestly, the version of that moment I think about most wasn’t even my last meet in college. It was leaving high school. My final state meet. I remember walking off and turning around one more time, just to look at the track, just to be in that energy one last time, knowing it would never be the same. And it never was. Even now, years later, I can stand somewhere familiar and feel the gap between what a place is and what it was. The place doesn’t change. You do. The time just passes.
That’s why I knew to look for the moment when Roch walked off. Not because I was hunting for something dramatic, but because I’ve been on that side of it, and I knew it was coming before it arrived. He loved his time at UCLA, so of course leaving would mean something. My years as an athlete trained my eye as much as any camera ever did. I know where to point the lens because I know what it feels like to be the person in the frame.
I’m not someone who gets upset easily, but I’ll be honest, it was hard to keep it together watching that. Harder than I expected. Not because of the score, and not because of anything specific I could point to, but because I recognized exactly what I was looking at. The end of an era for someone who gave everything to it.
That moment happens at every level, every single day. The high school senior whose team loses in the first round and who will never put the jersey on again. The college athlete running her final race. The player walking off a field for the last time without knowing for sure if anything else is coming. Most of them won’t go on to something bigger. For most athletes, that last look back is the end of the only competitive life they’ve ever known.
And almost nobody captures it. Because it happens after the cameras have already turned toward the team that won.
That’s the moment I want to pay attention to. Not the trophy. Not the celebration. The quiet turn, the last look, the understanding settling in. It’s one of the most human things in all of sports.
Even if all you show is someone’s back, walking away.
