Sports Psych Coach

[goodoleboy]

Anyone know if the Panthers have one on staff. I have worked with a number of these guys over the years with swim teams I have coached. Looks like the Seahawks are using one more than most. Could be one of the reasons why Wilson has been so successful at letting go of a bad play and moving on to the next one.

 

 

For most of the last two seasons, the Seattle Seahawks have been the most physically prepared team in the NFL, a collection of perfectly honed athletes that can outrun and outmuscle opponents at will.

The Seahawks’ secret weapon, though, just might be the team’s willingness to give a sports psychologist the freedom to roam the training facility, locker room and even the sidelines every game, to make sure their heads are as sound as their bodies...........

 

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“We are a relationship-based club,” Carroll said Tuesday. “In Mike I found a guy I could see eye-to-eye with.”

Gervais and Carroll met through a mutual friend in 2011, and Gervais began spending substantial time with the Seahawks the following season. During a typical week, he arrives Saturday, and is with the team throughout dinner and the pregame meetings. He is there when players arrive at the stadium, with them on the sidelines throughout the game, and again all day Monday when they are reviewing what happened. He doesn’t have an office at the end of some hallway, or make therapy appointments. He floats around and talks to coaches and players about their lives and their endeavors.

“It’s the most fascinating culture I have ever been able to witness,” Gervais said of the Seahawks. “There is a relentless approach to the idea that relationships matter.”

Matter more, in fact, than results, at least to him and the coaching staff, which has come to view outcomes as a byproduct of their approach rather than an end.

Gervais said he tries to de-emphasize results when he speaks to athletes, who live in the ultimate outcome-oriented world. The danger, he says, is when athletes allow those results to define them. Let that go, he tells them, because there is no outcome that can possibly define who a person is. “It’s one blip on the 20,000 days you are alive,” he says. “Life is a collection of moments. It’s not possible for one moment to define a person.”

 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shrink-on-the-seattle-seahawks-sideline-1422402204