University Times

In a sports-mad region famous for Hall of Fame quarterbacks, pro teams with state-of-the-art athletics facilities and nationally ranked college teams, a new development to the sports scene has emerged: the role of the sport psychologist, who helps athletes cope with the stress and pressure of competition.

Stephen A. Russo directs the recently created sport psychology center, a unit of the UPMC Health System Center for Sports Medicine.

Russo has been a sport psychology consultant for the Pitt athletics department since 1999, starting as a volunteer during his pre-doctoral internship at the Veterans Administration Healthcare System in Pittsburgh. He works with individual athletes and teams of all levels, including amateur, scholastic and professional, teaching mental improvement skills designed to enhance athletic performance. He also teaches a sport psychology course through Pitt's Department of Psychology.

In 2000, Russo was part of the sports performance team that helped some of the nation's top college football and hockey players prepare for the National Football League and National Hockey League player drafts.

He earned his B.S. degree in psychology at Pitt in 1993. He received his master's degree and doctorate in clinical psychology from Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

Russo can be contacted at the UPMC Center for Sports Medicine, 412/432-3666.

University Times staff writer Peter Hart interviewed Russo this week.

University Times: When did sport psychology become part of the mainstream sports scene?

Russo: Psychology is usually about 10 years behind medicine; so if you think that sports medicine has only been around for maybe 30 years, sport psychology has only been around as an area of specialization within sports medicine for 20 years or so. But it's definitely growing. Membership is growing for sport psychology organizations, we have journals devoted to it, and most professional organizations have a sport psychologist on staff, especially professional teams who pay their athletes a lot of money — they like a safety net for their athletes.

Then sport psychology here is not an academic program?

Not yet. Right now, it's a staff of one, and I'm it. Part of that is getting established, letting people know we're here and what sport psychology is all about.

My personal goal is eventually to provide an environment of research, publications, having students, fellows and post-doctoral candidates — these are all the things we're shooting for down the road. Because there really aren't many places, maybe 10 or 12 nationally, to get training in sport psychology, to get supervision, to see athletes in a clinical setting, there's an opportunity for that. And we have the perfect setting here.

I am teaching a for-credit sport psychology course for the first time this term, and there are about 40 students enrolled, which gives you some idea of the interest level in it.

How many people do you see professionally?

It varies. Right now, I'm working with three or four [Pitt] teams on a regular basis, meaning I go to some of their practices and I work with the coaching staff. I also work with one team at Robert Morris University. Then I'll have teams I work with on a less frequent basis. Say, I'll come in once and talk to the team about goal-setting. Or we'll talk about mental processes in competition.

I do some coaching seminars for area high school coaches, track and field, soccer. I speak to the Pittsburgh Ballet. I've done some pre-training seminars for the [Pittsburgh] marathon. Even with all that, the majority of my time is spent seeing individual athletes.

But it's wherever I fit in. Ultimately, it's whoever wants me to work for them.

Does working with a diverse clientele require you to be very flexible?

I've always been really flexible in how I work with people. It's been my approach to psychology, psychotherapy, treatment in general. So that helps. Ultimately, it comes back to the coaches and what they want of me. As a sport psychologist, I feel I actually function best when I'm the least intrusive. I'm not running the show. I'm sort of like the mental coach. The strength and conditioning coach isn't running plays; the athletic trainer isn't designing schemes, and the sport psychologist isn't either.

Even when I attend competitions or practices and I'm looking at group dynamics, a lot of times I'm speaking with individual players on the sidelines. But I'm in the background. I try not to step on the coaches' turf. Frankly, sometimes I sound an awful lot like a coach, when I talk about overcoming adversity; dealing with negativity, setting goals for yourself.

How would you characterize the relationship between you and an athlete?

It's a professional relationship. My services are available to anybody, as far as within the Pitt athletic department. It's hard sometimes, because things are confidential between an athlete and me. So if I have an athlete come to see me from a team that I don't necessarily work with, and said-coach calls me about said-athlete, I can be put in a difficult position. Or, if I'm present at team meetings when the coaching staff isn't present, that information doesn't get shared with the coaches. Same thing when I speak with the coaches; that doesn't get shared with the players. And so a lot of things have to be worked out beforehand, with the coaching staff, with the individual athletes.

In terms of referrals, do coaches say, "I can't do anything with this player. Can you help me?"

There's some of that. Sometimes, it's a combination of coach and athlete recognizing that there's a problem. In determining what the issue is, I have to ask if this is something you're amenable to working on. Is this a coach's issue, and the coach is mandating the athlete to come to me, which rarely works, or is the athlete also a part of this? Is the coach's involvement part of the problem?

But a lot of what I do isn't problem-oriented at all. There's a push in psychology literature called positive psychology, and sport psychology is probably one of the precursors of positive psychology. We focus on how can you play better, how do you improve. Rather than focusing on problems or dysfunction, we focus on function, on performance enhancement.

Are there performance enhancement techniques that work across the board with athletes?

Absolutely. That's the nice thing about sport psychology in general. And maybe the "sport" part of it is a misnomer. In some ways it's "performance" psychology. Whether it's performance of an athlete on a playing field or performance of an individual in a job interview or the performance of someone before a group giving a speech, a dancer, an actor, singers — these are all people who need to develop a proper mindset to perform at their best.

But that's no different from anyone in the real world.

Exactly. But when you throw the word sport in front of psychology, it's a little more palatable to the athletes. They don't see you so much as a psychologist. People see you in a different light. In my experience, my role is more like teaching and training than it is like therapy or counseling. When we're talking about performance enhancement, it's literally about learning skills, techniques, approaches to performance that will make you play better or do whatever you're doing better, including later on in your life.

What are some of the techniques you teach?

Diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle techniques, what we call autogenic training, meditation, yoga, these are all techniques that have shown in other areas of psychology to help performance, specifically to help relaxation.

We take a psychology technique and apply it to a sports scenario, but the trick is how do you get good at doing relaxation so that you can apply it in a minute or two in a performance situation?

I'm going to teach you these skills but they might not be ready-made for your sport. You have to try it out, you have to practice it, you have to get good at doing relaxation when you don't need it. You have to learn it to the point it becomes second nature so that in competition it's just something you do.

There's a old notion that you need to be a little nervous to play well. To some extent that is true. The problem is that at a certain point any additional anxiety or nervousness starts to impair performance, as muscles become too tight, as your concentration starts to narrow, then anxiety starts to interfere with performance. There's a fine line there. And that line is different for every person, it's different for every sport, it's different for different performance domains.

Being relaxed for a job interview is more important than being pumped up. For a basketball player who's going to be running up and down the floor, being pumped up is more important. Being relaxed and calm standing over a 10-foot putt is much more important than being fired up on the golf course. It's a function of the sport and a function of where we are in a game. Is it the final 15 seconds and now it's important to relax?

Part of it is you need to be able to trust your talent, trust your own ability. When I trust something, I don't worry about it, I don't think about it. If I can promote self-trust, self-confidence, I don't care if I am talking to a 19- or 20-year-old athlete, if the things I teach them now they can use 10 years down the road when they're in that job interview or whatever they do in life — that's the idea.

Does the athlete need the right attitude to be open to these techniques?

Attitude is hard for me to quantify. I tend to look at behaviors, at what happens. Do your emotions get the best of you in the middle of a game? Some may see that as a function of attitude — "He's got a bad attitude. He's not committed to the team" — as opposed to the behavior of becoming frustrated. I can understand frustration and how to change that, and I can teach you specific skills to help you not get frustrated. And then it's a question of whether you can do it in the middle of competition, and can you practice it outside your sport so that when you need it in your sport, it's there for you.

Are there particular questions to hone in on if an athlete senses something's wrong but can't articulate it?

This is the benefit of being around the team, of showing up for practice, showing up for the competition, because you can see it. Sometimes I can learn more by watching an athlete practice than I can in several conversations in a clinical setting.

But when I see athletes individually, it's more or less standard psychology intake that a person would get seeing any psychologist: getting the family background, getting the medical history. Maybe there's anxiety that runs in the family. Maybe an athlete has a chemical imbalance. Just because I'm a sport psychologist doesn't mean I leave the psychologist part out of it.

There are questions, yes, that are important. Take nervousness. I ask, When does it hit you? When does it start? Do you have trouble sleeping the night before a match? When do you start to think about the game? How do you experience nervousness? Do your muscles tighten up? Do your thoughts start to race? Do you have trouble sitting still? Are you agitated?

But these are things I get the athlete to think about. Get them to realize that this is something they can change. Get them to relax under pressure. The expression, when you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, that's the idea. And you can learn how to do this.

But the first thing to realize is that in competition, stress comes with the territory. The fact that you're going to be evaluated, the fact that at the end of the day someone's going to lose. The fact that you can try your best but there's no guarantee that you're going to perform very well. Sometimes your shots just don't fall.

Sport is inherently a stressful situation. So part of having someone like me around is to help cultivate a mindset that helps you perform at your best in stressful situations and be happy with that.

Is there any difference to advising an athlete of lesser talent?

I don't think it's different. There needs to be a recognition and appreciation that you have two things you're dealing with that are important to performance: on the one hand, athletic talent, ability, skill. On the other hand, mental skills. Performance itself is relative. The mental techniques apply to everyone. It doesn't matter if you don't have the talent to get to the Olympics or to the NFL. You can enjoy your sport more, play to your ability at a higher level.

When you make comparisons to others who may have more or less talent than you — you're not really gauging performance internally, you're not asking "Am I doing my best?" So you may have athletes who have too high expectations, or if you don't have as much talent, you put extra pressure on yourself to be perfect, to not make mistakes, or you commit to over-training to make up for it.

So part of what I do is give people a bigger perspective on things, being a mirror for them, tell them you can still perform to the best of your ability.

Are there differences between advising male and female athletes?

I don't think it's a question of gender. It's more a question of the sport. Individual sports have more pressure associated with them than team sports. When I'm a member of a team, it's a shared group. It isn't one person's sole responsibility. Versus a tennis player or a golfer or a swimmer or a diver or a gymnast. The individual aspect of those sports leads to more pressure. "No one is there to help me. I have to do it on my own. I'm being judged as an individual."

But swimmers, for example, although they are individual performers, are still members of a team. So there are questions about how does this team get along outside of their individual performance? What can a coach do to promote support among them?

What kinds of issues involve coaches?

How do we improve team chemistry, team motivation? How can I as a coach communicate more effectively with the team? How can I handle a specific athlete in a specific situation? I talk to them about communication; clarity; how you phrase things; reinforcement strategies, positive and negative; the appropriate use of discipline; the appropriate use of praise. Are you rewarding athletes who give their highest performance? Are you recognizing that? Are you reinforcing just winning and losing or are you reinforcing effort? Are you reinforcing sportsmanship?

There are techniques of behavioral modification. These are some of the most researched topics in all of psychology. For teams, there's a lot of research on interpersonal psychology, group dynamics, team chemistry, team cohesion, group structure — a lot of psychology on group therapy that sport psychologists draw on. The same principles apply.