How did you prepare to become a sport psychologist

I want to talk about an important and often underestimated topic in sport psychology: supervision. I state that this activity is now required and defined by the main international organizations of sport psychology including the world association, International Society of Sport Psychology (ISSP) and the European Society of Sport Psychology (Fepsac).

However, I often receive letters from psychologists who would like to do the internship with me and, as they often literally write, “see how I work”. This is not possible for me because of the type of organization of my work. However, through the Master of Sport Psychology and the activity of the Academy of Integrated Football I follow psychologists for the internship. On the contrary, I have never had a sports psychologist ask me to supervise their work. I leave to you the explanation, perhaps due to the fact that the internship is free while the supervision has a cost for the psychologist; the work is poorly paid so you would lose the gain; the work is simple and therefore even a novice can handle it effectively; the area of sport psychology is still only one of the areas in which they work and therefore there is little interest in implementing the specific skills; however, it is believed that once qualified to carry out this profession you have already invested enough so the supervision is unnecessary.

Everyone gives their own explanation and I want to give you mine.

Personally, when I met Ferruccio Antonelli in 1981, he gave me the task of translating the abstracts of the International J. of Sport Psychology from English into Italian and then corrected them, pointing out where the translation did not make sense in our language. I understood that what mattered was to make myself understood as a reader. Then he gave me books to read. Through him I never saw an athlete, but I read a lot and after a year I knew who the main authors were at the international level on the main topics of sport psychology. At the same time, in 1981, I met Carmelo Pittera, coach of the men’s national volleyball team and a great man of culture and open-mindedness. And even in this experience that lasted 7 years, we spent time studying motor anticipation, how to train it, how to transfer this knowledge to the children of minivolley. This approach allowed the production of 4 books on motor education (still valid today), a book on the psychology of volleyball referees (never repeated in any other team sport), my book on Mental Training and research published in international journals.

This is to say that at the base of success there is specific knowledge, otherwise we will be like that doctor who improvises orthopedics or cardiology. In the meantime, during those years I did two schools of psychotherapy for a total of 6 years. Today, my approach remains the same. In 1998 I published with Il Mulino the manual “Sport Psychology” and in 2021 a totally new and updated edition entitled “Fundamentals of Sport Psychology” came out.

So how did you prepare for this profession?