HITSORY OF SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY
By: Ronnie Laruan (KornDawg)
Pierre De Coubertin
Credited with being the first person to use the term "sport psychology" in 1900
Norman Triplett
*Social Facilitation: an improvement in performance by the mere presence of others.
*noticed that cyclists times were improved when they raced against each other versus racing against the time
Dr. Carl Diem
was a German sports administrator, and as Secretary General of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympic Games, the chief organizer of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games.
Coleman Griffith
was an American sport psychologist. Born in Iowa, he is considered the founder of American sport psychology.
Societies
*The international society of sports Psycology (ISSP) was formed in Europe in 1965.
*The North America Society for the Psycology of Sports and Physical Activity (NASPSPA) was formed in 1967
Walter Miles and B.C. Graves
• Along with college football coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, focused their attention on football.
• They wanted to find out the quickest way for offensive linemen to move in harmony after the center hiked the ball.
• Miles created his own experimental equipment, a durable chronoscope to record football players' reaction times.
• The ingenious device tested the individual reaction times of seven linemen simultaneously. When a lineman moved, he triggered the release of a golf ball that fell onto a rotating drum.
The drum was covered with paper stretched over a wire mesh, and the ball made a definite impression on the paper that allowed measurement of the lineman's quickness.
Coaches agreed that the initial charge of the line was a great advantage for the offense, and they were interested in ways to quicken that movement.
Edward W. Scripture
experimental psychologist at Yale University
was a founder of the American Psychological Association
Trained under Wilhelm Wundt
• Believed that involvement in sport built character or fostered the development of favorable qualities of personality
• Studied the effects of athletics, calisthenics, and manual training on the development of self-control on felons at the Elmira Reformatory
Reported remarkable success with attitude in prisoners who participated in sports
• Argued that character strengths developed by motor activity could be transferred to other areas of everyday living
DAVID F. TRACY
New York psychologist and hypnotist, David F. Tracy, was hired to help the St. Louis Browns.
First time a psychologist had been hired on with a major league baseball team.
The team's athletic trainer convinced them that the psychological elements of athletics were important.
In the 1950s, baseball scout Jim McLaughlin began bringing to player recruitment the kind of “scientific attitude” that Griffith had promoted in the 1930s.
Today...
Sport psychologists work in a variety of settings. They have their own private practices, offer consulting services, help professional sports teams, conduct research and hold positions at the NCAA, among other roles.
One sport psychologist taught sharpshooters to be cognizant of their heartbeats (by using a biofeedback device) and to learn to fire the gun between heartbeats, thus giving them a slight advantage in steadiness.
The quest continues as sport psychology has become an important applied field in both amateur and professional ranks. Today, psychologists often focus on the mental aspects of sport because, as baseball great Yogi Berra realized so long ago, "Half of this game is 90 percent mental"