 Calvin
will take you home
The book Doing
Sport Psychology
will be available
from Human Kinetics in July, 2000
Preface
Why Another
Applied Sport Psychology Book?
Relaxation, imagery, goal setting, self-talk--these are the workhorses in the applied
sport psychology canon, and the applied texts describing and outlining the use of these
mental skills in the service of performance enhancement are legion (e.g., Gauron, 1984;
Harris & Harris 1984; Murphy, 1995; Syer & Connolly, 1984; Williams, 1998). So, is
there a need for another applied sport psychology text? The answer to that question, in
what must be a prime example of equivocation, is "yes and no." Why
"yes" and why "no" would depend on what sorts of issues and questions
the author(s) of such a new applied text would attempt to address. So how does this book
address new issues and questions, and how will it be useful to students, supervisors, and
practitioners?
The first question that lies at the core of the
format of this book is: how can doing sport psychology service best be illustrated?
Instead of writing about "what" should be done (relaxation, goal setting), what
is needed are examples of "how" service delivery is accomplished. The best way
to provide a window into what occurs is to have extensive examples of conversations (and
inductions) between sport psychologists and athletes and coaches. Examples that give
students, practitioners, and instructors actual voices from documented encounters can
bring service delivery alive. Real-life conversations, along with commentary and
interpretations, will let students and practitioners hear what applied sport psychology in
action sounds like. Next to actually delivering service or participating in a live role
play, the encounters between sport psychologists and athletes on these printed pages are
about as close as one can get to real experience.
The questions of "how do we do sport
psychology?" and "how do we do it well?" are something most students, and
many practitioners, ask themselves regularly. These are the process questions of our
practice. Interestingly, sport psychologists often, when consulting on goal setting, place
great emphasis on process goals with more limited attention to outcome goals. Many
researchers and applied authors, however, when writing about sport psychology services,
place great emphasis on the outcome of interventions and service delivery (e.g., improved
performance), and very little, if any, emphasis on the process of working with athletes
(e.g., how athletes and sport psychologists talk to each other). My prejudice is that if
we take care of, and understand, the process of service delivery, then the athlete's (and
sport psychologist's) desired outcomes may be more likely to eventuate.
And that brings us to the book you are holding,
Doing Sport Psychology; it is a book devoted, in large part, to revealing and
understanding process. I have shamelessly borrowed the title from the classic clinical
text Doing Psychotherapy by Michael Franz Basch (1980). In my master's and
doctoral training I had used a variety of counseling and psychotherapy texts. Although
most of the texts were interesting and helpful, they were more about models and what
should occur in counseling and psychotherapy rather than how one puts models into the
actual words, action, and process of psychotherapy. Then I started training in
psychodynamic psychotherapy with Deborah Brogan, M.D. at Arizona State University, and my
beginning text was Basch's. The book was a revelation. There before me was a fascinating
model of psychotherapy with long transcripts of therapist-client conversations coupled
with in-depth analyses and dynamic interpretations of the psychotherapy encounters. Next
to actually doing psychodynamic psychotherapy and going through the supervision of that
therapy, reading Doing Psychotherapy taught me, as we say in Australia,
"heaps" about the process of service delivery. During this time in my education
I thought that training in sport psychology could use the equivalent of Doing
Psychotherapy. That was the beginning of this book's gestation. My goals here are not
to produce a psychodynamic sport psychology text, far from it. I don't think Oedipus or
castration anxiety are mentioned even once (some core process issues from psychodynamic
theory, however, such as analyses of the relationships between athletes and sport
psychologists, will be prominent features). Rather, I wanted to take Doing
Psychotherapy as a model for this book and with each chapter present various
theoretical orientations and models of service delivery coupled with conversations and
interventions illustrating what sport psychology services sound like. Along with the
dialogues, in-depth commentaries, interpretations, and athlete case analyses, the authors
will also explore sport psychologist-athlete interactions and the developing working
relationships in the practice of applied sport psychology. I hope this approach will help
the reader consider the complexities of what we do when we work with athletes, how we go
about understanding the people we serve, and how we understand ourselves in the process of
delivering service.
Organization
of the Book
Sport psychology service delivery does not have a unitary model, and I have assembled a
group of practitioners who will represent the wealth and diversity of viewpoints on
working with athletes. The authors come from exercise science/coaching (e.g., Jeff Simons,
Vance Tammen), counseling psychology (e.g., Trent Petrie, Karen Cogan, Al Petitpas), and
clinical psychology backgrounds (e.g., Kate Hays, Sean McCann). The models the authors use
to guide practice have coaching, cognitive-behavioral, rational-emotive, performance
enhancement, developmental, and psychodynamic roots.
In some of the case studies, the clients are
actually amalgamations of athletes constructed for illustrative purposes. All of the
cases, however are based on real encounters. For the cases that are based on single
athletes, names, personal details, situations, and sometimes even the sports have been
changed to protect confidentiality.
The book is divided into five broad sections.
Part I: Getting Started contains three chapters and covers three broad approaches to
service delivery. These chapters provide three different viewpoints or orientations to
service delivery and serve to illustrate how models of service actually guide practice in
general, and getting started with service in particular. There is no singular model of
where to start and how to proceed in sport psychology, but each of these chapters could
serve as a foundation for practice. In Chapter 1, I start the book off where all good
stories start, and that is at the beginning, looking at first encounters, intake sessions,
and the development of working alliances between sport psychologists and athletes. In
Chapter 2, Burt Giges reframes sport psychology interventions and describes his work in
removing psychological barriers to optimal performance. Al Petitpas addresses, in Chapter
3, his approach to working with athletes in general and the issues of managing the
stressors athletes have both on and off the playing field in particular.
Part II: From the Sport Psychology Canon covers
the more traditional aspects of sport psychology service delivery such as goal setting,
relaxation, imagery, and self-talk. These techniques and interventions are the mainstays
of sport psychology and performance enhancement service delivery. Many applied sport
psychology texts have covered similar ground in terms of the broad topics. The difference
with these chapters, however, is that the focus is not so much on what to deliver, but on
how to deliver the service. The chapters in this section were developed because so much of
sport psychology service centers around these cognitive-behavioral interventions. These
interventions, however, are quite complex, require a significant amount of training to
master, and are not as easy to deliver effectively as some past texts seem to imply. With
these chapters, I hope the reader develops a strong sense of the power of these techniques
and the responsibilities that accompany them.
In Chapter 4, Clay Sherman and Artur
Poczwardowski offer a look at relaxation techniques and their complexities. Clark Perry
and Herb Marsh, in Chapter 5, discuss experiences working with an Australian Institute of
Sport athlete on what she says to herself and how self-talk and self-concept are
intertwined, and Jeff Simons reports on how he uses imagery with international track and
field athletes in Chapter 6. Then, in Chapter 7, Daryl Marchant discusses team goal
setting that is based on his years of working with a professional Australian Rules
football team.
In Part III: Beyond Performance Enhancement,
Working With and Working Through, the focus moves away from traditional sport psychology
services into the realm of counseling and clinical psychological issues with athletes.
Again, the focus is: what do clinical and counseling sessions with athletes sound like,
what is happening in such sessions, where are the sport psychologist and athlete headed,
and how do they get to where they are aiming when dealing with sensitive problems? Sport
psychologists constantly come up against clinical and personal counseling issues in
service delivery. Often after five or six performance enhancement sessions, the athlete
gets up the nerve to talk about feeling blue or drinking too much or having panic attacks.
Clinical issues also affect performance, and any practicing sport psychologist, sooner or
later, is going to run into clients similar to the fascinating athletes in these chapters.
Beginning this section, Karen Cogan (Chapter 8)
reports on her emotionally taxing but rewarding work with an athlete who is depressed.
Trent Petrie and Roberta Sherman (Chapter 9) discuss their cognitive-behavioral approach
to working with an athlete who has an eating disorder. Steve Barney, in Chapter 10,
presents a difficult and challenging case from his pre-doctoral service delivery
experiences of how an athlete approaches, avoids, and begins to come to terms with
personal issues of deep loss.
Part IV: The Study of Service: From Supervision
to Complex Delivery is what I would have to call a synthetic section, and it is where we
examine practice and process at a more complex level. The major emphasis is on the
supervision of working with athletes and the professional development of the sport
psychologist as reflected in supervisory sessions and the analysis of multi-faceted cases.
The chapters progress from a prime focus on supervision through to descriptions of complex
delivery with supervision as a leitmotif. Complex cases and supervision are grouped here
to illustrate the depth and richness of sport psychology in some of its more advanced
forms.
Chapter 11 is the odd-one-out chapter in the
book in that it does not contain any dialogue. Judy Van Raalte’s and my prejudice is
that supervision is one of the most important services sport psychologists deliver and
receive, and it is nearly impossible to discuss it too much. It is a new topic in applied
sport psychology, and we know of no major text in the field that offers more than a few
sentences (if that) on service delivery supervision (there is one full page on supervision
of counseling in a recent sports medicine text; Ray & Wiese-Bjornstahl, 1999). So we
decided that supervision would need a full introductory chapter before presenting a case
study. The following Chapter 12, written with Greg Harris, is dedicated to a year-long
case study of the supervision of a neophyte sport psychology practitioner. Vance Tammen,
in Chapter 13, describes his experiences coming out of an exercise science department and
landing his first internship at the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado
Springs and how his supervision was a key facet of his learning experience. This chapter
was written specifically for graduate students just starting out and captures the
Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass atmosphere of a beginning sport psychologist working for
the first time at a national sport center. Moving on to complex delivery, in Chapter 14,
Frances Price discusses the many ways she worked with a professional American football
player (e.g., consultation one-on-one, over the phone, through email, through
transcontinental travel). Underlying all the complex delivery is the theme of
understanding the dynamic quality of the relationship with the help of supervision.
Part V: Branching Out: Other Practitioners,
Other Settings takes the delivery of service into areas beyond sport and illustrates
practice in the hands of other professionals (coaches, physical therapists, career
counselors) and with other clients (performing artists). This section shows the
applicability of many of the skills sport psychologists teach and how these skills may be
used by other professionals to enhance their services. Before branching away from
traditional practitioners, this section starts out with Sean McCann, the head of sport
psychology at the United States Olympic Committee, telling the story of service delivery
in a setting that is truly "other," the Olympic Games. Greg Kolt (Chapter 16),
who is both a psychologist and a physical therapist (being an Aussie, his title is
actually "physiotherapist") writes about combining psychology and physical
therapy when working with injured athletes undergoing rehabilitation. Britt Brewer takes a
spin on sport psychology service delivery in Chapter 17 with his experiences as a
cross-country coach helping his athletes with the mental aspects of running. For Chapter
18, David Lavallee and I write about another type of branching out through helping
athletes with the transitions they experience in their lives and in their sports when they
retire from sport careers. Kate Hays takes us out of sport and pushes service delivery
into the arts. In Chapter 19, she applies performance psychology to her work with a
musician. Finally, Shane Murphy, one of the most sagacious sport psychologists I know,
offers, in the Afterword, a few comments on "what it's all about."
I have enjoyed working with all the authors in
this book; they have taught me heaps about doing sport psychology. I believe their
contributions will help many beginning and seasoned sport psychologists see and understand
themselves and the athletes they work with in new and fascinating ways. I hope you enjoy
their efforts.
Mark B. Andersen
Melbourne, Australia
References
Basch, M. F. (1980). Doing psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
Gauron, E. F. (1984). Mental training for peak performance. Lansing, NY: Sport Science.
Harris, D. V., & Harris, B. L. (1984). Sports psychology: Mental skills for physical
people. Champaign, IL: Leisure Press.
Murphy, S. M. (Ed.). (1995). Sport psychology interventions. Champaign, IL: Human
Kinetics.
Ray, R., & Wiese-Bjornstahl, D. M. (Eds.). (1999). Counseling in sports medicine.
Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Syer, J., & Connolly, C. (1984). Sporting body, sporting mind: An athlete's guide
to mental training. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, J. M. (Ed.). (1998). Applied sport psychology: Personal growth to peak
performance (3rd ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. |
