Sport Psychology Offers Broader Opportunities Beyond Athlete Support
While athlete support is considered the central task, sport psychology offers additional valuable and broader opportunities for sport organizations. It does not only support athletes in the organizations but can also impact many other aspects within them. For example, these potential areas of influence include, social interactions, organizational culture, and practices, as well as training coaches and other staff in psychosocial aspects related to their work.
To illustrate, communication skills are particularly important for coaches, but they are not always systematically taught to them. Thus, sport psychology could be a crucial asset for Continuous Professional Development (CPD) in sport organizations. While we all know how to talk, we do not always know how to communicate effectively. Sport psychology professionals could teach relevant information and skills, as well as provide one-on-one support for coaches to help them apply these skills into their work.
Sport Psychology and 3 Examples of Organizational Perspective
1. Sport Psychology Can Enhance Sport Environment and Social Interactions
First, and maybe the most common theme is the sport environment. This is especially important in team sports, where team cohesion is universally considered an important aspect of success. Yet, the environment and the social interactions are important in every sport as there are people involved. Sport psychology professionals have the ability to take this environment under careful consideration, building and developing it continuously.
In addition to team cohesion, the overall sport environment, communication, team processes, team culture, and social interactions are some of the key considerations that can affect the performance and well-being of people and teams.
Thus, paying adequate attention to this area of performance and utilizing psychological knowledge for this task can be a great advantage.
Knowledge and interest in human behavior, which creates these environments, places sport psychology professionals in an excellent position to provide support in this way too.
2. Sport Psychology Can Help to Develop Athletes More Comprehensively
Next, athlete development is an essential part of many sport organizations with a goal of producing elite athletes that can bring success for the organization.
However, this process is not easy. Systematically bringing young, talented athletes through this process takes a lot of consideration. While sport-specific skills are the most important part, breaking into elite level and to continuously succeed at that level requires more than this.
Here, sport psychology can come into picture, helping the young athletes develop psychologically strong mindset that can deal with 24/7 nature of highly demanding and competitive elite sports.
Furthermore, young people are still in the midst of the natural development process, which in itself can be challenging in many ways (e.g., psychologically, socially, biologically).
Thus, many talented athletes may benefit from psychosocial training, education, and support, which can help them to develop into more complete athletes.
Incorporating this complete elite athlete view into the athlete development process can bring many benefits for sport organizations but also contribute to the development of the young people who receive this more comprehensive training.
3. Sport Psychology Professionals Can Conduct Organizational Psychology Tasks
Finally, in addition to possible CPD examples mentioned earlier, sport psychology professionals could be used for other organizational psychology tasks in sport organizations.
Even though not specifically trained in organizational psychology, the two sub-fields share a considerable amount of similar tasks and methods.
Furthermore, sport psychology professionals have the advantage of having a deep understanding of the sporting field, which makes it easier to perform some of the organizational psychology tasks in sport organizations.
For example, these tasks can include enhancing employee satisfaction, well-being, and performance, providing training and advice on range of psychosocial themes, or develop organizational culture and strategies.
Wider Perspective Should be Carefully Considered
While sport psychology professionals' role can be focused solely on athlete support tasks, this wider perspective on sport psychology can be especially fruitful for smaller organizations.
In smaller organizations, hiring a sport psychology professional solely for the first team can be challenging for financial reasons or there might not be enough demand for a full-time focus on athlete support. In these cases, organizations could widen the job role to meet the demand.
Larger organizations, on the other hand, could utilize sport psychology professionals for these different job duties as needed.
However, the basic training in sport psychology often focuses on individual work, and therefore it is important to carefully assess how the professional’s education, experience, and proficiency fit to these extended tasks.
Additionally, the amount of tasks and responsibilities given to a single professional needs to be carefully considered. Too much responsibilities can weaken the work quality and overburden the professional.
Conclusion
In summary, we strongly believe that fully harnessing sport psychology is an invaluable service, especially for sport organizations who operate in challenging and demanding environments.
We argue that sport psychology professionals can bring valuable expertise to these organizations for athlete support and beyond.
After all, the most valuable assets of sport organizations are the people inside them.
Through this idea, considering how the expertise of sport psychology professional can be used beyond psychological skills and athlete support is an interesting future avenue.
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