A professional is someone who has a job that they do all the time and they follow certain rules and standards to do their job well. A sport psychology professional is someone who knows a lot about how sports and exercise affect people’s minds and emotions, and they use that knowledge to help athletes perform better (Poczwardowski, 2019). To be a sport psychology professional, you need to have a degree and other qualifications. Most of the time, sport psychology professionals are called things like sport psychology consultant, sport psychology practitioner, or mental coach (Portenga et al., 2017; Poczwardowski & Sherman, 2011).
There are different parts to being a sport psychology professional, like having a certain way of thinking about your job, being ethical, having the right education and experience, talking to athletes and figuring out what they need help with, and then coming up with ways to help them (Poczwardowski, 2019). It’s also important to have a good relationship with the athletes you’re helping, and to be able to evaluate how well your help is working.
Poczwardowski, A. (2019). In D. Hackfort, R. J. Schinke, & B. Strauss (Eds.), Dictionary of sport psychology: Sport, exercise, and performing arts. Academic Press.
Poczwardowski, A., & Sherman, C. P. (2011). Revisions to the Sport Psychology Service Delivery (SPSD) heuristic: Explorations with experienced consultants. The Sport Psychologist, 25, 511531.
Portenga, S. T., Aoyagi, M. W., & Cohen, A. B. (2017). Helping to build a profession: A working definition of sport and performance psychology. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 8, 4759.
