Mind Games

Fans know the pain of having their team melt down in the last minutes after dominating the entire game. Eighteen thousand plus felt it last Saturday. Most left Princeton Stadium asking a simple question: What happened — and how could the Tigers have prevented it?

"I always told the coaches to tell [their teams] to play like they're 10 points behind all the time," says Dr. Darwyn Linder, a preeminent sports psychologist at Arizona State University. "You're 20 points ahead, play like you're 10 points behind."

Linder — who, needless to say, is not a fan of the prevent defense — believes that by pretending they are down, a team will resist the urge to relax and coast and thereby will have less of a tendency to get out of the rhythm that garnered them the lead in the first place.

Unlike the average Monday morning quarterback, Linder actually gets to voice these sorts of opinions to coaches. Linder researches what allows athletes to perform at their peak — and uses that acquired knowledge to help out collegiate teams across the country.

A number of head coaches at Princeton have embraced Linders' field, asking experts like him to work with their teams.

Women's swimming head coach Susan Teeter is one of the biggest believers in sports psychology, occasionally bringing in a 'life coach.'

"My particular life coach is a former Big Ten swimming coach who was also a world class swimmer," Teeter said. "So it works in a lot of ways for me to have someone working with my team like that who's trained in a lot of different areas."

The primary role of the life coach is to teach the swimmers how to communicate better with each other. In one activity, the team members write compliments on stickers to give to teammates. It is intended to build self-confidence, and Teeter has seen some interesting results.

"It's kind of corny, but it's fun," she said.

The NCAA allows teams to bring in experts to deal with these sorts of peripheral issues; psychologists and nutritionists are the most frequent consultants.

Women's lacrosse head coach Chris Sailer has also taken advantage of the opportunity. She brought a specialist in a couple years ago in an effort to gain some sort of an edge but has not used one since.

Sailer's short-lived use of an outside specialist might be a telling sign. There seems to be an understanding among coaches on campus that the psychology of their athletes is vital to the success of the team; most, however, just like to do it themselves.

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"I remember one time, some years back, the women's [lacrosse] program [employed one]," said Bill Tierney, head coach of the men's lacrosse team. "Their psychologist was meeting with them, and I went into the locker room after, and they had things written on the board that I looked at and thought, 'it's kind of all the same stuff we're doing.' "

Sports psychologists, in other words, might not be able to tell a coach anything he or she doesn't already know by instinct. Tierney thinks that much of a team's psyche is subtle and can only be negotiated by someone who pays very close attention — someone like a head coach. But he does see their value.

"I think someone from the outside who has a little more of an objective view would be a beneficial resource," he said.

Real science

Though some coaches, like Tierney, are suspicious of the benefits of sports psychology, it is unquestionably a science rather than just motivational talks and strange, yoga-like meditation.

At Arizona State, Linder has found legitimate ways to improve an athlete's performance under pressure. Statistics show, for example, that a golfer standing over a tough, pressure-packed putt should count backward from 100 by twos during the act of putting.

"What that does is it prevents them from being in the process of evaluating their performance while they're actually trying to perform," Linder said. "One of the important components in choking is that the pressure increases and all of a sudden you're not just shooting the free throw or stroking the putt, you're thinking about how well you're performing. Once that starts to happen, then the automaticity of the skill is really destroyed by that self-evaluation."

But, most importantly, an athlete can — and must — be conditioned to deal with pressure. Coaches who talk about placing their athletes in game-like situations in practice are on to something. Studies show that repeated exposure to tough situations improves performance, possibly by raising confidence. High confidence, in turn, is shown to correlate directly with performance in nearly all situations.

With its growing prominence, sports psychology has become a very accepted science. Some of the conclusions drawn from sports research even have applications in grander, arguably more important, disciplines.

Take University of Arizona professor Jeff Stone, for example. During a postdoctoral stint at Princeton, Stone conducted research to determine the effect racial stereotypes have on athletic performance. He found strong evidence to suggest that both black and white athletes' performance can be adversely affected when certain negative stereotypes are present.

Thanks to the work of psychologists like Linder and Stone, there is no longer any doubt that the brain can have profound effects on how the body acts. In the battle of brain versus brawn, brains may not always turns out victorious but, at the very least, they have home field advantage.