Into the Zone
The kind of mental conditioning that makes athletes into superstars also helps ordinary folks become extraordinary
Tony DiCicco became head of the U.S. Women's World Cup soccer team in 1994; a year later, he hired sports psychologist Colleen Hacker. He knew that coaches often talk about the importance of the mental game but rarely give it time commensurate with its importance. He is certain that hiring Hacker strengthened both individual and team performance. DiCicco points out that he is not alone in a growing appreciation of the value of sports psychologists: The U.S. Olympic team had only one in 1988, but it had 100 by 1996. There are now over 100 academic programs specializing in sports psychology, at least three academic journals, and over 1,000 members listed by the Association for the Advancement of Applied Sports Psychology. And elite professional and amateur teams and athletes seem to be increasingly using their services.
The business. These specialists are taking the lessons of great athletes and coaches and shaping them into techniques that aspiring peak performers can learn to use. Sports Publishing Inc. of Champaign, Ill., whose books discuss how athletes get in the zone, plans to release 112 titles this year, about double last year's number. In the past few years, Simon & Schuster has published and reissued such titles as Golf is a Game of Confidence and Executive Trap: How to Play Your Personal Best on the Golf Course and On the Job. Many professional sports teams have psychologists on call, but that's a largely reactive, therapeutic approach. But another approach is spreading. Baseball's Cleveland Indians have a three-man performance-enhancement program that costs about $300,000 a year and deserves some credit for five straight American League Central Division titles since 1995, two of which led to World Series appearances.
Bob Troutwine, a psychologist in Liberty, Mo., has helped 18 NFL teams decide which players to recruit and how to use them. In 1998, Troutwine urged the Indianapolis Colts to draft Tennessee's Peyton Manning over another quarterback with similar statistics, Washington State's Ryan Leaf. A personality test showed that Manning was confident, but not brash, and Troutwine liked the fact that he was the son of former NFL quarterback Archie Manning. Troutwine was vindicated: Manning did well with the Colts, and Leaf, who was drafted by the San Diego Chargers, has flailed as a quarterback, insulted fans, and wants to leave the team. "In general you want competitive players," says Troutwine, who also consults for such corporate clients as Ford Motor Co. and Sprint Co., "but if a team is in a building phase, a hypercompetitive player may not handle losing very well."
The trend in hiring sports psychologists has yet to trickle down to the lower levels of sport, according to Albert J. Figone of California's Humboldt State University. But that's in large part because coaches view motivation and the mental game as their prerogative, even if they usually give it too lit-tle attention. Stanford University's Jim Thompson, director of the Positive Coaching Alliance, thinks it's absurd to use this stuff on kids. "All the sports psychology in the world isn't going to help the average kid unless he has tremendous skills as well," Thompson points out. "The danger is that parents might think, gee, if I could get my kid a good sports psychologist, he could be Tiger Woods. Well, no."
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