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How can psychologists switch sports?

How can psychologists switch sports?

Leading practitioners from the NBA, football and cricket share their tips on how psychologists can successfully jump from one sport to another

Jul 03, 2025
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The Mind Room
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How can psychologists switch sports?
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You start the season working with a national football team and finish the year helping your country's handball squad to world championship glory.

It's the kind of story that's always made me curious about how sport psychologists switch between wildly different disciplines, each with distinct cultures, identities and ways of working.

So, I asked Martin Langagergaard, a performance psychology consultant working with the Norwegian national team and Danish handball team (whose season the above example is loosely based on), Kensa Gunter, head of the NBA's Mind Health program and a former NFL clinician, and Sarah Murray, whose career has spanned sports as diverse as football and real tennis (the medieval version of what you'll see at Wimbledon over the next week), what challenges they face when they switch sports, how they're overcome obstacles and what fellow practitioners should be considering when making the jump between pitches, courts and tracks.

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© 2025 John Nassoori
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