- Meredith Whitley, MSU sport psychology student
Austin Thornton, senior and co-captain of the MSU Spartan Basketball Team, doesn’t solely rely on skill to make points when he steps up to the free-throw line; he also has to master control of his own thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand over the anticipatory whispers wafting from the Izzone. It’s these crucial moments of performance that put sport psychologists in business.
Driven by her fascination with the concept, Meredith Whitley will be graduating with her Ph.D. this spring, concentrating on Psychosocial Aspects of Sport and Physical Activity, from Michigan State University’s Department of Kinesiology. She also volunteers at Lansing’s Refugee Development Center, teaching life lessons and soccer to children there.
When she was recently interviewed about sports psychology in an article for Medill Reports– Chicago, she said, “It’s really exciting to think about working with athletes, coaches, people who are in the sports world and trying to help them find their path and have a positive experience that will stay with them for the rest of their life.”
Professional golfer Drew Weaver was advised by Whitley about overcoming his mental hurdles. “One of the main things we talked about is maintaining an even keel and not getting too excited about a good shot and not getting too down on yourself when you hit a bad shot because you’re not going to hit all perfect shots,” he said. “Just take the result and live with it and move on to the next shot.”
According to Whitley, golf and tennis players were among the first to take interest in and invest in the advantages of sports psychology, and only recently have more mainstream sports such as football, basketball and baseball begun catching on and respecting the profession.
“In the past, you wouldn’t hear about that and it wouldn’t be so accepted in those sports,” she said. “It seems like every month I’m hearing of another instance of a sport psychologist being hired or another team using a sport psychologist.”
This is good news for the over 5,000 professionals that entered the field from 2006 to 2010, a statistic from the Education News Career Index, a database that serves in aiding higher educators through making career decisions. The site lists median salary increasing 12 percent during this same period of time, measuring up at about $67,000.
To learn more about Whitley and her work with refugees, view her Spartan Saga.