Do your research.  Watch our videos.  Bring us your questions.  Let us know your reservations.  Gather the information you need to make a decision on whether sport psychology is the right path for your family and your athlete.  The more confident you are in the value of sport psychology, the more comfortable your child will be giving it a try.

Tell your athlete that, like the physical strength and conditioning training required to excel in their sport, the goal of sport psychology is to give your athlete the mental strength and conditioning to consistently perform at their best.  The brain is just another muscle that needs training, too.

While Premier Sport Psychology has worked with hundreds of youth athletes and has a division devoted to youth athletics, youth athletes are not the only clients we see.  We work with professional athletes in the NFL, MLB, MLS, NBA, WBNA, NHL, and PGA.  We work with student-athletes at all collegiate levels, including the Power-5.  We work with Olympians, and medal winners in the last four Olympic Games.  If your child has a hero in sport, the chances are good that this athlete has a sport psychologist or mental performance consultant, and might even work with one of the team here at Premier.  Athletes at every level want to perform better, to feel better, and to be better.  Your athlete isn’t alone, and we can help.

As a parent, you can be as involved as you’d like to be in your athlete’s care.  In most cases, however, your athlete’s sessions will be one-on-one with his or her sport psychologist or mental performance consultant.  These are opportunities for your athlete to speak freely in a safe environment about his or her feelings, goals, fears, relationships, and mental states.  Like any counseling session, we use this information to understand and advocate for your athlete, and create strategies and build skills to help him or her feel and perform better.

The image of a traditional talk-therapy session will likely elicit groans from youth athletes.  But sport psychology sessions, while drawing from many of the techniques used in talk therapy, are interactive and dynamic, including games, exercises, and problem-solving that will help your athlete learn important life skills in a fun and interactive way.

Will your athlete learn to better manage emotions?  Build communication skills?  Create support networks and a healthy sport/life balance?  Yes to all of the above.  But most athletes simply want to know whether it will help them play better, more often.  And it will.  The mental skills introduced in sport psychology sessions teach athletes to better focus, to be more confident, to be more motivated, to manage setbacks, to handle pressure, and to steady themselves against the highs and lows of competition.  All of these skills are scientifically correlated to more consistent performances and growth over time.  We can’t teach talent, but we can teach resilience and grit, which are better predictors of success than talent.  Sport psychology doesn’t replace time spent in the gym, or studying the playbook, or working hard in practice, but it gives them another set of skills to draw from when the going gets tough, or the pressure is on, or the season gets long, and your athlete needs that extra gear to keep going and meet the challenge.