SPORT PSYCHOLOGY

Get to know your instructor, the plan, and what’s coming your way. This session sets the tone — who you’ll learn from, how the course flows, and what’s expected to make the most of it.

• Instructor intro
• Course structure
• Assignments & expectations

Get inside the athlete’s mind and see how performance, wellbeing, and environment all play off each other. Explore what sport psychologists do, how they work with teams and individuals, and why the right mental setup can change the game.

• The role and importance of the sport psychologist
• Performance & wellbeing
• Individual, role & environment triangle
• Working with teams vs. individual athletes
• Case Study: ATP, Premier League, NFL, NBA

Learn how to spot when athletes and teams are truly ready to perform and when they’re not. You’ll break down real cases, apply practical frameworks, and start asking the kind of sharp performance questions that move results.

• Why assessment & formulation matter
• Identifying performance questions
• The 5 P’s framework
• Considering individual, task and environmental factors
• Workshop: Needs assessment practice

Assignment #1: Write a psychological needs assessment of your chosen athlete/team, highlighting environmental, task & individual factors that influenced your confidence in the athlete or team's capability to achieve their performance goals.

Learn how to build environments where athletes feel safe, supported, and ready to perform. Explore psychological needs, developmental history, and safety strategies, then put it into practice by adapting Premier League examples to your own team or athletes.

• Psychologically informed environment overview
• Responding to psychological needs
• Considering developmental history
• Building psychological safety
• Workshop:Developing psychologically informed environments in elite football

Lead in ways that inspire your team. Explore motivational strategies, foster collaboration, and connect inclusively, using real-world sports examples to bring leadership lessons to life.

• Transactional vs. transformational leadership
• V-MOST process: Vision, mission, objectives
• Leadership vs. followership
• Case Study: Leadership behaviours in an NFL team going through a takeover

Learn how to review, refine, and level up performance. Explore match-to-year review processes, design practical performance plans, and create an end-of-year system that balances short-term wins with long-term growth.

• What it takes to win
• Review processes: Match, weekly, quarterly, annual
• Developing performance plans
• WITTW & review processes
• Workshop: Creating a practical end-of-year review process

Assignment #2: Produce a summary of your athlete/team’s environment and propose interventions to improve psychological safety and performance.

Get clear on what makes athletes perform at their best. Learn to analyse, assess and design tasks in training to optimise for performance success.

• Asking effective performance questions
• Working with multi-disciplinary teams to identify key performance indicators
• Establishing role clarity & consistency
• Ensuring specificity of training outcomes
• Workshop: Evaluating the specificity of the current training plan

Design training that works. Learn to replicate target performance while supporting development, guide growth without over-correcting, and keep your team or athlete performing at their best.

• Replicating psychological factors that occur during competition
• Dosage & providing space for failure & reflection
• Identifying when & how to intervene within training
• Considering the use of multi-disciplinary team in training
• Workshop: Designing a practical training session tailored to your athlete or team

Keep athletes cool when it counts. Explore mental toughness techniques, design pressure-based training, and adapt elite strategies to boost resilience in athletes, while sharpening your own coping and delivery skills.

• Mental toughness & performing under pressure
• Reward & punishment sensitivity
• Designing pressure training & exposure to punishment
• Transformational delivery & coping skills
• Case Study: Mental toughness programme in elite cricket

Assignment #3: Analyse the current quality of the training your athlete or team engages in, and suggest interventions that would improve the transfer of outcomes from training to competition.

Understand what really fuels elite performance. Dig into what drives athletes to push harder: from motivation theories and goal types to finding a personal “why” that keeps the fire burning long-term.

• Considering what underpins drive in elite athletes
• The need to succeed
• Performance, mastery & outcome goals
• Motivation theories: Intrinsic/extrinsic, self-determination
• Strategies: SMART goals, personal “why”
• Demo: Setting clear, achievable SMART goals for an athlete or a team

Learn how to keep emotions in check when the stakes are high. Explore tools for focus, flexibility, and calm under pressure, and see how breathing and mindset techniques can help athletes stay in control when it counts.

• Emotional awareness & emotional intelligence
• The importance of co-regulation
• Emotional control during competition
• Strategies for emotional regulation in elite athletes
• Demo: Practice guided breathing & relaxation exercises

Learn to give and receive feedback, build stronger team relationships, and develop leadership skills that boost performance. Through self-awareness, role-play, and practical strategies, you’ll discover how openness can level up both the game and the teamwork.

• The role of relationships in learning: Epistemic trust
• Attachment styles
• Self-awareness, support, help seeking
• Giving & receiving feedback
• Strategies to enhance openness within individuals
• Workshop: Role-play giving constructive feedback

Assignment #4: Describe your athlete/team’s individual traits and outline one or two interventions you would use to improve their motivation, emotional control and / or openness.

Bring sports psychology into your coaching without crossing the line. Apply mental performance strategies ethically, create supportive environments for athletes, and tackle real-world scenarios where coaching meets mental health.

• Incorporating psychological principles into daily performance environments
• Creating a psychologically supportive environment
• The ethical boundaries: Coaching & psychological practice
• Workshop: Establishing the boundaries between a coach & a psychologist

Wrap up what you’ve learned and turn it into action. Explore the latest in sport psychology, reflect on your key takeaways, and build a clear plan to apply your skills moving forward.

• Future directions & innovations in sport psychology
• Discussion: Share your key takeaways
• Final Q&A session & next steps

Final Project: Athlete/Team Mental Performance Improvement Strategy
Combine all assignments into a complete strategy. Produce an actionable, ready-to-deploy plan that demonstrates your ability to facilitate and develop athletes’ psychological needs, mental toughness, and overall performance.