Sports Psychology

From Amateur to Pro Sports Sports in the 19th century were quite different from sports today. While major athletes of the modern era, like LeBron James or Lionel Messi, make tens of millions of dollars per year and are known across much of the entire world, many athletes of the 1800s were not widely known past their own city blocks. Most organized sports were offshoots of businesses like factories, providing a means for workers to have fun and build team spirit, relying entirely on the largesse of ownership for costs and paying little or nothing to players. Even high-profile professional teams could not afford to pay their players much money at all; the highest-paid baseball player in 1874, Ross Barnes, cashed in a salary of just $2,000 at a time when an unskilled worker made about a dollar per day. As such, many sports teams lacked the money needed for any kind of training, either physical or psychological. Such training, furthermore, was not always welcome: one fundamental ethic of these early sports was amateurism, the belief that true athletic talent should always win out instead of rigorous training. Despite the lack of money and the focus on amateurism, teams then as now wanted to win, and they pursued ways to get an advantage. Some of the first scientific studies on sports psychology, using the collection of data to indicate what did and did not improve performance, took place about the same time as the first modern Olympics. In fact, Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, published articles on topics in sports psychology (despite his lack of training in psychology itself) such as the motivation behind children’s sports, the degree of stress and strain an athlete should avoid in competition, and how to achieve mental focus for better athletic performance. Coubertin, like many of the first sports psychologists, believed in the close links between body and mind, and his work was influential as the field grew.

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Sports Psychology