Stay in the moment, visualize, don’t dwell on past failure or letting your team down if you screw up again, remember what you did when you were doing well, accentuate the positive, cast out the negative, believe in yourself, breathe deeply. There needs to be a profession to state this? 

The sports psychologist is another example of uselessness masquerading as value. What could this person possibly have to say that is going to make an athlete perform even marginally better beyond the one moment right after the talk? Yet it is de rigueur for individuals and teams to have sports psychologists. Let me state this, if your team needs a sports psychologist, it’s not going to win. They may well have one but if they need one, forget it.

In professional team sports, the mumbo jumbo starts before the player even knows where he is going to play. To be considered in a professional draft, applicants have to undergo psychological testing. It’s bad enough that they are subjected to physical testing which is hyped but pointless, doesn’t change minds and yields little of consequence about how an athlete will perform under pressure. But psychological testing? I’m waiting for the day when one of the best prospects declines to be probed. Will they refuse to draft him? Ha!

Psychological testing consists of answering inquiries about your personality and based on those responses, having a highly-trained stranger tell a bunch of people you’ve met once or never, who you are.  Are there correct replies to these questions? If it’s a written test, the options will never read quite right, never really get to an answer you like. Still, you’re obligated to make a choice. Isn’t life more nuanced than shading a circle that makes only slightly more sense than the ones you don’t fill in?  As Woody Allen astutely opined about psychiatry, “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”

What does an interview with a sports psychologist prove?  An athlete trying to get drafted is going to be all gussied up and on his best comportment. The mafia looks innocent in court. Ah yes, but the psychologist is qualified to see through the guise. Well, just by living and getting to where they are in a pro sports organization, so are the managers, coaches and scouts. If they can’t make decisions based on want they’ve observed over months and years, they shouldn’t be in those roles

Shouldn’t the person making claims that may decide your future have a larger picture of your life than a half hour conversation? It’s how you prepare, what you do on the field or court or ice, what kind of teammate you are, how you react to winning and losing that says who you are. It’s the little things that good scouts see and lousy ones don’t, that should determine your capability to play. That any weight in the decision making process is given to what you say or how you appear to a person who wanders into your life for thirty minutes in a controlled situation is not just ineffective, it’s counter-productive. 

In no way does psychological testing improve the odds of a team making a good selection. If sports psychologists were forced to make their player opinions public, I’m sure the whole charade would be discredited and given up as a bad idea. Yet such is our drive to conformity, a pro team wouldn’t want to be viewed as out of step by keeping the quacks out of the pond. You want to be a progressive manager?  To steal a saying directed at a player when he is released - give the mind reader an apple and a road map. 

Had this phenomenon existed historically, it would be interesting to see the psych take on past greats. What would the soothsayers have said about Ted Williams, Derek Sanderson, Ken Stabler and Bill Russell? I doubt any of those guys would have tolerated the intrusion. With Teddy Ballgame it would have been ugly. 

What would psychologists make of Alonso Quijano aka Don Quixote? Would he be labeled as mad or playing at madness? Was he brave or ludicrous or both? Was he happier as the lunatic knight-errant or when he recovered his senses and died soon after? Scholars and laymen alike have been attempting to understand Don Quixote for centuries. Opinions vary to extremes. If it’s hard to know him after hundreds of years of reading and re-reading his adventures, analyzing his behavior, examining his decisions, it seems improbable that one could claim to comprehend him after a fleeting interview or a few multiple choice questions.  

If sports psychologists make such a difference why do the same persons or teams win so often? Are there only a few good sports psychologists and they just happen to be advising those with the most talent? Too bad the head doctors on the other side can’t convince their employers to win. It’s about talent, effort and chance not about shrinking people or trying to quantify their behavior. 

If you’re an athlete in an individual sport, motivate yourself to work hard, minimize but don’t fear mistakes, don’t fret about what your parents, the fans or press think and do the best you can on a given day. If you’re in charge of putting a team together, find a lot of intense competitors who can think a little or a lot, who want to go deep into the playoffs and who don’t need someone constantly and calmly talking about letting go and moving on. 

Many sports psychologists are those who weren’t good enough during their careers because they spent too much time reflecting instead of acting, because they had to scrutinize the force rather than letting it be with them.

The study of the brain is in its infancy. The best admit they don’t know much. How is it then that we ended up with so many experts when the brightest are just starting out?