Premier Sport Psychology currently works with programs of all stripes, from high school athletic departments to college programs at the D1, D2, and D3 level, to professional sport franchises and Olympic teams. Despite the differences in scale and scope, our mission with each program is consistent: to optimize the performance and well-being of the athletes, and to help coaches, staff, and athletes strengthen team bonds and culture.
Sport psychology sessions approach each athlete holistically, and target any variables that may be impacting performance, livelihood, or well-being. Our sessions can range from performance restoration, for those athletes dealing with performance impediments or burnout, to performance optimization, for athletes who want to find another gear, greater consistency, or advanced mental training in anticipation of a transition or big event.
No matter how supportive or well-resourced the program, depression, eating disorders, and undiagnosed mental health challenges are only too common among student athletes. As licensed psychologists working in the athletic domain, our providers understand how these dynamics impact athletes, and are trained in interventions to help athletes manage their symptoms and improve their mental health and wellness.
Premier Sport Psychology is a licensed provider of ADHD testing for all athletes 16 years of age or older, and can assist athletes in understanding their diagnosis, and when necessary, provide medical consultations and documentation for academic accommodations.
Assessments allow athletes to gain self-awareness in areas that underpin performance, leadership, and successful communication. Our staff is trained in administering and evaluating six different assessment instruments directly related to personal, interpersonal, and performance dynamics—including athletic intelligence, responsiveness to adversity, emotional intelligence, ADHD, behavior traits, and communication styles.
Like any training, mindset optimization requires repetition and routine. Premier Sport Psychology offers a “Premier Mindset Academy,” which allows athletes to learn the techniques most directly related to performance enhancement in their own homes and at their own pace. Click the link below to sample the program for yourself.
Team optimization helps coaches and athletes alike build trust bonds, productive and proactive lines of communication, and shared expectations, goals, and values. Our team sessions are ideal places to set expectations and team roles, discover motivation drivers, and build mental toughness and cohesion as a group.
The Premier Sport-Culture Assessment maps the topography of a team’s culture across four domains: Team Alignment, Leadership Effectiveness, Individual Strengths, and Strength of Relationships. This allows coaches and staff to effectively measure motivation, buy-in, and engagement of their athletes, identify current strengths, and gain specific and practical guidance on areas for growth.
Our workshops and speeches aim to educate athletes, teams, coaches, and program staff on topics related to mindset training and mental health. These topics have included: stress management, leadership development, communication strategies, increasing student-athlete buy-in and motivation, building confidence, preventing psychological problems, overcoming mental blocks, and sustaining team culture.
Premier Sport Psychology has a devoted leadership staff, including Olympic Medalist and Leadership Consultant David Plummer, and curriculum designed to develop resiliency and leadership potential in student-athletes. Training can take place in a series of individual or group sessions on campus, or virtually through our video lecture series and online workshops.
Your student athletes are likely concerned with their performances on the field, court, rink, or mat. We’ll help with that. Rest assured, however, that every step in this process will be building skills that foster overall wellness, build healthy relationships, and help manage the sport/life balance every student-athlete must contend with at some point in his/her career. Mental skills training begins with identifying what’s working in an athlete’s life, and what needs to be improved for the athlete to realize his/her full potential. Sport psychology reinforces this kind of awareness, and provides athletes with the skills to nourish what’s best in their lives, and address what’s holding them back.
As with sport participation, the skills we build are not just for sport, but for life. Understanding one’s role as an athlete and one’s responsibility to teammates, to coaches, and to a team tradition isn’t altogether different than understanding one’s role as a friend or a neighbor, and one’s duty to a larger community. Both require and build empathy, compassion, gratitude, and a sense of belonging to something greater than one’s self. Sport psychology embraces what’s best in sport, and applies it to life. Performance is performance, whether we’re performing as athletes or as citizens.
Create consistency in your student athletes, in good times and bad. Resilience, or grit, creates mental adaptability, allowing student-athletes to be more resistant to adversity and to rebound faster when setbacks inevitably hit. Resilience has been shown to be a more reliable predictor of success than intelligence or talent, so building skills to make your athletes’ resilience more robust is vital to any program.
The demands on coaches, support staff, and on-campus counseling centers are many. We can help. Regular sessions with sport psychologists, whether on campus or off, will allow us to monitor and assess the mental health of your athletes, provide guidance, and when necessary, immediate interventions to support the safety of your program and the well-being of your student athletes.
