The following are excerpts from “Underdogs? No respect? That’s the Patriots’ story and they’re sticking to it” at Philly.com. You can view the full article here.

Nobody wants to be Goliath anymore. Everybody wants to be David, the scrappy, little slingshot-toting, 6½-point underdog.

Even the NFL’s ultimate Goliath, the big, bad, fee-fi-fo-fum Patriots, who are making their ninth Super Bowl appearance in the last 18 years, have spent the last few weeks trying to convince everyone that they’re The Little Engine That Could.

The beauty of being the underdog, according to sports psychologists, is that no one expects you to win, which means you’re dealing with less pressure. And less pressure often translates to better performance.

Justin Anderson is the director and founder of Minneapolis-based Premier Sports Psychology. A former college quarterback, he works with professional athletes in every major sport. He said high expectations often cause even elite athletes to play a little tight.

“We know from a performance standpoint, when we play tight, we’re just a fraction of a second off in our timing,’’ he said. “That could be the difference between breaking up a play or giving up a touchdown catch. The difference is that minute.

“The way expectations tend to work in the mind are twofold. If you don’t have a lot of expectations, you don’t tend to think about the outcome or the result as much. You’re more in the moment.

“The other thing is, with higher expectations, you tend to see a lot of athletes begin to look at passive results a little bit more. Like, are we tracking the way we expected to track? And if we’re not, like, if you have a team that’s supposed to be ahead and they’re not ahead at certain parts of the game, they start to tighten up even more.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, crap. We’re supposed to be blowing this team out,’ or ‘We’re supposed to be ahead and we’re behind.’ Often times, in those case, you don’t handle the adversity as well.”

Read the full article at Philly.com

The following are excerpts from “Student-athletes given more access to mental health services” at Chicago Sun-Times. You can view the full article here.

As a high school swimmer, Northwestern University senior Jack Thorne was a three-time Colorado state champion and the No. 2 swimming recruit from the state. In college, he participated in U.S. National Swimming competitions and had a top 20 time at the 2018 Big Ten Championships.

But outside the swimming pool, Thorne has experienced anxiety and depression since middle school, when he first began to think about his homosexuality. During his freshman year in college, he suffered a tear in his shoulder, causing him to miss the rest of the swimming season, go on antidepressants and stop going to classes. Thorne described this time in his life as “rock bottom.”

Though he began seeing a psychologist in his senior year of high school, it wasn’t until Northwestern connected him to an athletic trainer who focused on both his physical and mental health that he saw long-term improvements with his mental health symptoms.

To assist athletes like Thorne, college athletic departments are connecting athletes to mental health resources at higher rates than ever. A 2016 National Institutes of Health study found that nearly 135 Division I programs had a mental health clinician, compared to the fewer than 25 programs that had a clinician in 2014, according to ESPN.

Justin Anderson, the founder of Premier Sports Psychology and the sports psychologist for the University of Minnesota, said the efforts have been “really positive for mental health and treating mental health.”

“You look at these all-stars and players that others look up to and think, ‘If it can happen to him, it can happen to me,’” Anderson said. “So that’s really helped and the NBA has taken notice of that.”

Read the full article at Chicago Sun-Times