Sports Psychology

Werner Schulte. His 1921 book Body and Mind in Sport set the foundations for many concepts in sports psychology research and findings. Schulte, unlike many psychologists of the time, had access to his own entire research laboratory at the Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen, the German College for Physical Exercise. For the next decade, Schulte’s publications influenced other researchers across Europe. Two Russian psychologists, Avksenty Cezarevich Puni and Piotr Antonovich Roudik, conducted major research on sports performance by studying the influence of preparation and memory, respectively. Roudik founded Russia’s first sports psychology research laboratory, while Puni studied the influence of mental focus in the sport of table tennis. Both researchers influenced Russian sports for decades, helping to develop the strategies that would help the Soviet Union win nearly 400 gold medals (second only to the United States, all-time) throughout the 20th century. In the United States, Coleman Griffith founded the first psychological research lab on sports studies in 1925 at the University of Illinois. He wrote two key books, Psychology of Athletics (1928) and Psychology of Coaching (1926). Griffith likely taught the first university-level sports psychology class to Illinois students, simply called “Psychology and Athletes.” While Griffith’s research influenced several major league teams, including the Chicago Cubs, his laboratory was famously shut down in 1932 because the researcher had developed a poor relationship with the university’s football coach. Today, Griffith is known as the father of North American psychology in sports, having published some two dozen studies in the field. However, Griffith’s work did not affect broader psychological studies, as it was too far outside the mainstream of a growing (and not entirely trusted) science. During the 1940s, a woman named Dorothy Hazeltine Yates made history as perhaps the first applied sports psychologist in US history, demonstrating

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Sports Psychology