.

When talking about sports psychology, from the term itself it is adamant the involvement of two
different fields sports and psychology. When studying psychology we start realising how psychology is
playing a part in almost every single aspect of life there is, as such it’s not surprising for psychology to
have such a role in sports. But unlike most of these aspects sports psychology could be said to be a
discipline of it’s own, while other comes under discipline of psychology. So sport’s psychology could be
said to be the study of Behaviour thought and cognition of an individual or a group in regards sports or
in other words we would call sport psychology as the means of using different psychological tools
present at one’s disposal to improve or learn sports.

Sports psychology is one of the few sub disciples of psychology which has existed as long as discipline of
psychology itself, that being said even though the 1 st noted research of sports psychology was done in
1898 by Norman Tripeet. In which Triplett investigated the phenomenon of social facilitation, in which
performance is affected by the presence of others. He demonstrated that cyclists tended to cycle faster
when racing against other cyclists than they did alone. Triplett did not pursue further sport-related
research, however, and it was not until the 1920s that the discipline of sport psychology was formally
established. Even after the establishment of discipline and even the establishment of 1 st lab in 1925 by
Coleman Griffith also widely known as the father of sports psychology, sport’s psychology didn’t gain it’s
momentum until 1960’s in USA and in the European region after some years. It’s said that sports
psychology gained popularity in Soviet union before USA and Europe but so far no documents is present
to support the claim as such sports psychology is said to be actually began in the year 1960.

So far we can divide sports psychology into three sub fields of educational, clinical and exercise. This
division is based upon the function of different individual in the field of sports psychology.

As the name suggest educational sports psychologist is involved in doing further research in the field of
sport psychology as well as teaching others about sports psychology. Clinical sports psychology the one
of the most explored field of sports psychology is when a psychologist help a professional athlete or a
team to further develop in their respective sports and the exercise psychologist involves individual who
help non professional player in learning or improving certain sports.

Even though we divided the field of sport psychology into 3 further types that by no means suggest as
these psychologist working in different aspects of sports psychology, as it’s the case in psychology where
almost every field is overlapping every other field such as the school of thoughts of psychology or the
approaches of psychology each overlaps the other. As such the job of these fields are also overlapping. If
we have to talk about how the job of sports psychology we can further divide into a no of catagories like
1. Attention focus- psychologist who helps improve and concentrate the attention of the individual
or the team on the required goal in there specific sports
2. Mental toughness- as the name suggest it’s to improve the mental capabilities or function of an
individual under tremendous stress
3. Visualization and goal settings- to help the individual or the team to create the mental picture of
the goal in there specific field and also to visualise conquering the goal.
4. Motivation and team building- This could also be said to be one of the most important aspects in
sports as such, motivating an individual and increasing their team work by different
psychological tools
5. Anxiety- helping the athelete to deal with the anxiety and stress especially like perfomance
anxiety which one may experience before a game. Psychologist teach athelete different means
to stay cool headed so that they don’t mess up the game.
6. Rehabilitation- it’s the job of psychologist to get a player back on his/her tracks after a setback
like losing the finales or injury.

So far talking about sports psychology we can see that the discipline for now is Focused on
improving sports by the means of psychology and that is the purpose of sports psychologist. This is a
far a s sports psychology has come from its beginning but that doesn’t mean sports psychology is at
it’s final junction. So far we used psychology in sports now different psychologists are using sports in
psychology , it’s a well known fact that sports help our mental health in many ways but so far no
research is done in which sport can help with which mental health issues as such sports psychologist
and further studying how by the use of sports can one improve in field of mental health. That being
said the exercises used in sports psychology is helpful to many other fields especially stress/ anxiety
management motivation and team building. As such sports psychology which 1 st took off from
psychology becoming a discipline of it’s own is now finding it’s way back into the discipline of
psychology and enhancing the background of both.