Sports Psych In the News

  • Simone Biles withdrawal a 'true heroic moment' (VIDEO)

    • “Physical Excellence is inextricably linked to psychological resilience and mental health”

    • “Always a team behind the athlete”

    • “We know from research 97-98% of Olympic Athletes use imagery”

    • “We have seen an exponential growth in Athletes willingness to be honest and vulnerable and to share with the world that they come at performance as entire human beings.”

    • Any time we do something that is important and meaningful and the outcome matters, we all experience butterflies…learn how to get those butterflies to fly in formation.”

  • What A Sports Psychologist Has To Say About The Olympics

    • “Mental performance, the focus is on being at your best, being able to perform optimally, whereas mental health is really about wellness and taking care of your health and wellness and ability to function and operate in the world.”

    • “The prefrontal cortex, which is just kind of the higher-order thinking part of our brain, does not fully develop until age 27.”

    • “One of the major roles of the prefrontal cortex is to model the future and understand what consequences our actions now will have in the future.”

  • ‘OK not to be OK’: Mental health takes top role at Olympics

    • “We’re human beings. Nobody is perfect. So yes, it is OK not to be OK.” -Michael Phelps

    • “Tennis player Naomi Osaka withdrew from the French Open, never went to Wimbledon…Olympic cauldron was a bit too much to handle.”

    • “Sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson made no secret of the issues she faced…She said she used marijuana to help mask the pain of her birth mother’s death, to say nothing of the pressure of the 100 meters.”

    • “Dutch cyclist Tom Dumoulin left training camp in January to clear his head, saying he was finding it “very difficult for me to know how to find my way as Tom Dumoulin the cyclist.”

    • “Liz Cambage, a WNBA player, pulled out of the Olympics, because of anxiety over entering a controlled COVID bubble in Tokyo that would have kept her friends and family away.”

    • The International Olympic Committee, aware of the struggles young athletes face, increased its mental health resources ahead of the Tokyo Games.

  • Athletes and anxiety: How mental health is playing a role in performance at all levels

    • "And then you start to realize there is a human under there and they are experiencing human feelings, but the world is holding them to a higher standard."

    • "There is no question there is a trend in our society to have young people specialize in a sport from an early age," said Waldron. "There is a capitalism to sports at a young age.”

    • "Then we're putting off a child's sense of agency and making their own decisions and a child's sense of discovery of their own identity," she continued, "that journey for identity that so many people go through naturally."

    • “Waldron said she teaches young athletes to have a dialogue with coaches and parents and she practices with them to teach them that it's okay if sometimes you cannot do what is asked of them.”

  • Detroit Lions hire organization’s first mental skills specialist

    • “So much of the way that particularly football players have been raised and everything about the sport is that you show no weakness. For forever, not knowing what it was or wasn’t, when you had a mental issue, it was, ‘you’re weak.’ So you don’t say anything, but yet if you just got a little bit of help and had the right resources around you, you could live up to your potential and then some.” -Dan Campbell, Lions Head Coach

  • Tom Daley shares the secret that helped him finally win Olympic gold medal

    • “I think the big difference this year was that I never ever visualized anything other than that gold medal. And Matty did the same. Every day, every night before bed, the gold medal, what we were going to do to get there. Never ever visualizing anything going wrong.

    • “I think the power of visualization and imagining yourself on the top, is what you got to do.”

  • Fresno State prof brings mental coaching expertise to Tokyo Olympics

    • “As a mental performance coach, his goal is to prepare athletes for play, leveraging the skills to build the ability to perform at the highest levels of mental and physical performance in team and individual settings.”

    • “He helped guide us on a journey, both individually and collectively, and explored things we’ve never tried before, such as brain priming, meditation, and visualization. It stretched us out to do it, and at the same time reminded us of what we were already doing.”

  • Tennis players discuss mental health issues raised by Osaka

    • “I keep a lot of things to myself, and over time, it can just create a big snowball. And then, at one point, you just kind of explode, and you’re like, ‘Whoa. Where did that come from?’ But really it’s just a build-up of everything.” -Jennifer Brady, professional tennis player

    • “Any time an athlete shares with us, or shares with the world, their experience, we can learn something from it, especially if we’re listening.”

  • How Olympians Are Fighting to Put Athletes' Mental Health First

    • Team USA in Tokyo will also include, for the first time, four mental health professionals—a psychologist, two psychiatrists, and a social worker— and each Team USA sport will also have its own dedicated psychologist.

    • “Just to know that [these resources] are on hand if you need them is awesome, especially for the younger kids” -Simone Biles

    • “Athletes are not perfect, flawless gods.”

    • “Our vulnerability as athletes is going to make us stronger”

    • “I am personally accepting that speaking out and getting help and being vulnerable is strength” -Allison Schmitt, USA Swimming