Sports Psychology

that they no longer needed to work another job in the offseason. As a result, more athletes could commit more time to training, with a greater number of support staff to help them out. As teams built out their staff rosters, they expanded from a handful of managers or coaches to include fitness trainers, equipment managers, and team physicians. With greater numbers of people working on sports teams, and with the new field of sports medicine growing by the day, opportunities for sports psychology grew in tandem. Additionally, sports took on greater and greater importance in global society due to international factors like the Cold War: communist and democratic nations competed intensely to field the most talented athletes in the Olympic Games, while best-on-best sports series (like ice hockey’s 1976 Summit Series between the USSR and Canadian national teams) captured the attention of entire countries. With such a fertile space for growth, sports psychology began to come into the mainstream. Psychologist Franklin Henry, of the University of California-Berkeley, proved to be a pioneer during that era, demonstrating aspects of physical and mental performances that had been unknown to science. His studies on motor learning and control helped to demonstrate the link between changes in brain perception and changes in body movements. Additionally, previously unresearched topics, like the personality of athletes and their ability to perform in a sport based on mental arousal, gained notoriety due to Henry’s insights. Applied sports psychologists also helped to move the discipline away from journals and textbooks and into the mainstream of sports business. David Tracy, a psychologist who studied hypnotism, was one of the first applied sports psychologists, hired by the St. Louis Browns (a baseball team that moved to Baltimore and is today the Orioles). Tracy believed that intensive hypnosis could help players to better relax and

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Sports Psychology