TPC Journal V7, Issue 4 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 4 377 become part of the solution to addressing the mental health needs of athletes at all levels, counselors must prioritize advocacy for athlete mental health and be able to competently describe how their involvement in sport will benefit athletes across the lifespan. A first step for counselors is to better understand the current mental health services that exist for athletes. The majority of individualized attention to psychologically related services offered to athletes (both collegiate and professional) has historically been provided by practitioners of sport psychology. Two primary organizations exist within the sport psychology profession: the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) and American Psychological Association (APA) Division 47. AASP certifies master’s-level “consultants” who display competence in kinesiology and psychology to educate athletes on the role of psychological factors in sport performance and teach mental skills that athletes can utilize within and beyond the context of their sport (AASP, 2017). In contrast, APA refers to sport psychology as a specialization within the general practice of psychology for doctoral-level psychologists (APA, 2017). Clinical sport psychologists with proficiency through Division 47 provide clinical interventions for eating disorders, substance use, grief, depression, sexual identity issues, aggression, career transitions, and more (APA, 2017). Practical, organizational, and philosophical differences between these two primary organizations have challenged the sport counseling specialty to establish a unique identity (Aoyagi, Portenga, Poczwardowski, Cohen, & Statler, 2012). Both AASP and Division 47 identify performance optimization as a primary responsibility of sport psychologists, though licensed psychologists with the Division 47 sport psychology proficiency claim specialized knowledge in clinical and counseling issues with athletes and biobehavioral bases of sport and exercise. As a result, athletes seeking mental health services are likely to receive services from sport psychologists with disparate levels of education, varying degrees of competence, and significant differences in their goals for treatment. This lack of potential continuity of services, coupled with the unique contributions of counseling in sport, marks an opportunity for counselors to become a major resource among athletes. Counselors can address the current discrepancy in services by approaching athlete mental health concerns from a bottom- up, rather than top-down, approach. Counselors can utilize their strength-based, wellness-oriented philosophy to prioritize mental health needs over performance in efforts to enhance performance through improving overall wellness, rather than the reverse. Specialty training in sport can create a more streamlined set of competencies and standards that fall within the general counseling guidelines, but still cater to the unique needs of athletes. Acknowledging the limitations of sport counseling’s history and its current status may encourage clarification of an identity, development of competencies and standards, and recognition of the important contributions that counseling can bring to the culture of athletics. Sport Counseling: Past and Present The idea of a sport counseling specialty is hardly new. In 1985, the Counselors of Tomorrow Interest Network of the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) described a number of potential counseling specializations for exploration in their publication, Imagine: A Visionary Model for the Counselors of Tomorrow (Nejedlo, Arredondo, & Benjamin, 1985). This publication included a brief section that defined “athletic counseling” and listed associated skills (e.g., counseling, goal setting) and knowledge bases (e.g., NCAA regulations, group facilitation) necessary for practice (Nejedlo et al., 1985). Researchers and educators have since heralded the document as the foundation for defining sport counseling and the treatment of athletes. However, the purpose of this publication was not to establish fundamental principles and standards, but to outline trends, future work environments, and specialty roles in a number of different areas of counseling (Arredondo & Lewis, 2001). The authors did not intend for this list of knowledge bases and skills to serve as a rigorously developed set of