Premier Sport Psychology is excited to welcome Dr. Troy Moles to our team. He will be starting August 22, 2016. Below is a quick interview with Dr. Troy so you can get to know your potential sport psychologist!
Ok, Troy, let’s start with a bit about your background.
Dr. Troy
I completed my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Sport & Exercise Psychology in August 2016 from the University of North Texas. While there, I provided sport psychology consultation services to coaches, teams, and individual student-athletes within the university from 2010-15. I also spent time working with community-based athletes and student-athletes (children, adolescents, and adults) from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Over the past year (2015-16) while completing my doctoral internship at the University of Missouri-Columbia Counseling Center, I consulted with the MU athletics department mental performance team and worked with several individual student-athletes. While completing my M.S. at Chatham University, I had the opportunity to work with the University of Pittsburgh student-athletes on leadership, life skills, and career counseling for a year. Before all that, I completed a B.S. in Computer Science and Psychology at Allegheny College, where I was a student-athlete in track and field for 4 years (sprints). My other primary athletic experience was playing football for 11 years through my senior year in high school (QB/DB).
What made you choose sport psychology?
After graduating college, I spent some time reflecting on what I really would be most happy doing in my career life and what my ideal job would look like. At that time, I was thinking about pursuing a career in Computer Science until I realized I wanted to work with athletes so much more than I wanted to work with computers! Knowing I would thrive/be happy working with athletes and given the combination of my interest and background in both psychology and athletics made becoming a sport psychologist my dream! My own experiences as an athlete have definitely fueled my passion for working with athletes. Having been on many championship level teams (and some really “bad” ones too!) in both individual and team based sports, I have an understanding of the demands of being an athlete, what it is like to be an athlete, and how important the mental aspect is to performing at a high and consistent level. After learning how important the mental aspect is to performance in college, I now want to help others reach their full potential or cope with their adversity, whether it be as athletes, students, partners, and/or other performers/leaders.
What work will you be doing with Premier? What does it mean to be a post-doctoral fellow?
I will be doing a variety of work with Premier Sport Psychology over the course of the next year, including providing sport psychology consultation and assessment/supervision of assessment services to local area college/university student-athletes (including the University of Minnesota) and community-based clients (of varying ages and level of competition). Actually, part of why I’m so excited to work with Premier this year is because I will may be working on many different tasks, such as program development and providing team workshops! Being a post-doctoral fellow in psychology means I have already been granted a Ph.D. in psychology and I am now working toward completing state licensure requirements en route to becoming a licensed psychologist. In my case, I will be completing a one year post-doctoral fellowship with Premier Sport Psychology in order to meet the clinical hours requirement for licensure. Being a post-doctoral fellow also typically allows one to build further formal experience and expertise in a specific domain within psychology (with Premier, it is sport psychology).
Thanks for taking the time to do this get-to-know-you. To wrap it up, what’s one fun fact about yourself?
I am an avid gamer and movie lover. In addition to being a sport psychologist, it has been said I could have been a video game designer or movie director/critic.
To learn more about Troy, check out his bio or call our office at 952.835.8513