Sport psychology has reached a remarkable level of popularity in academia. Thousands of articles are published each year, spanning all areas of this discipline.
The most important publishing houses very frequently publish manuals rather than books devoted to a single psychological topic or sport discipline.
Finally, there are the popular books and not least in relevance the biographies of athletes in which they often tell how they faced, suffered or solved their mental challenges.
We have at our disposal a wealth of information in which it is also easy to get lost. Over the course of a person’s career beginning in the 1980s, the availability of news has changed dramatically. Human Kinetics had just been born, and there were two international journals. The first English-language handbook I read was in 1984, “Psychological foundations of sport” by John Silva III and Robert Weinberg, and I regarded it as a kind of missal to be consulted weekly on whatever issues came to mind.
Coming to today, I have the impression that psychologists who want to deal with sports read very little and their readings are very much oriented toward popular and not very complex books. They follow athletes a lot, either on instagram or by reading their biographies, and even these are sources of information that do not remain within the scope of an individual’s experience but also become an orientation on which to direct their work. In-depth study of a textbook is not routinely considered a major option. I understand that it may be less compelling than the life narrated by, for example, Agassi in his book “Open,” but it should be unavoidable, and then narrow one’s interest to more specific scientific articles according to one’s interests.
I hope I am wrong and have the wrong perception with respect to this issue of knowledge.
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