Sports Psychology

Psychology, hosted in Morocco. Seventy different nations sent representatives to the event, with some 700 experts discussing and debating progress in research and development. Applied sports psychology continued to grow as professional teams began to not just send their players to psychologists for mental help treatments, but also to hire psychologists to develop winning strategies throughout the season. In 1988, Harvey Dorfman broke ground as Major League Baseball’s first “mental consultant.” Dorfman would later write a book called The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance . Permanent psychology staff positions would take further time but arrived in number after teams realized their value. In 2016, Tish Guerin became the first on-staff psychologist for the Carolina Panthers of the NFL. She said of the experience:

Football—just because of the schedules, the demands, the constant changes in terms of you never know if you’re going to be traded or if you’re just entering the league or if you’re getting ready to work through, you know, retirement—there are just a lot of variables that go into the sport in general. And long-term, that can definitely take a toll. In [former NFL player] Steve Smith’s case, I was just super-excited that he shared his journey and just everything that he was going through to let other players know that, you know, it’s OK to not be OK, right?

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Sports Psychology