TPC Journal V7, Issue 4 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 4 381 when working with individual athletes on a professional or university team. Athletic departments responsible for paying for mental health services, as well as coaches and support staff, may assume that they should be made aware of an athlete’s mental health status. Etzel and Watson (2007) pointed out that athletes are perceived by their managers as controlled investments; there is an expectation of being informed and in control. Ethical guidelines must be made clear for sport counselors to negotiate such challenging situations. Additional challenges include navigating multiple roles (e.g., counselor, team consultant, advisor to coaches), impromptu consultations that occur outside of the counseling session, NCAA and professional rules and regulations, and the likely possibility that other parties will notice an athlete seeking the professional’s services if housed in a university or team setting, among countless other potential dual relationships. The establishment of competencies, training guidelines, and ethical standards that apply specifically to counselor–athlete and counselor– team relationships may appear to be a daunting task. Counselors and counselor educators interested in sport must collaborate and advocate for a strongly anchored position in athletics by committing to the development of these foundational elements of sport counseling practice. Counselors must acknowledge existing and potential outlets for collaboration if sport counseling is to evolve. The ACES Sports Counseling Interest Network, started by Hinkle in 1992, provides a space for counselors interested in discussing present challenges and supports to the growth of sport counseling. Utilization of this medium for collaboration on future research and presentations is vital to the health and expansion of this specialty. Counselors must consider the importance of offering psychoeducational workshops, connecting athletes to mentorship, and developing other organizational supports for athletes in need. These efforts will help to rightly justify counselors’ push for professional inclusion in sporting contexts. An early step will be to normalize the existence of sport counselors among other professionals advocating for improvements to athlete mental health. Counselor membership on the NCAA Mental Health Task Force is a necessary step to becoming a more widely known and respected entity. As sport counselors become more mainstream and accepted professionals in sport, licensed counselors could provide opportunities to counselors-in-training who require supervised internships before starting their careers as sport counselors. Without active networks for collaboration, counselors remain isolated and perhaps less likely to catalyze change. Developing these professional relationships is critical to gaining entry and contributing to change in sport. Collaborations with organizations committed to athlete health could encourage other like-minded organizations to consider the expertise of counselors. For example, the Institute to Promote Athlete Health and Wellness (IPAHW) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in collaboration with Prevention Strategies, LLC, is an organization committed to the improvement of athlete health and wellness through behavioral intervention programs, policy making, evidence-based training, and intervention evaluation. IPAHW has collaborated with the NCAA Sport Science Institute to ensure that student athletes have access to “myPlaybook: The Freshman Experience,” a catalog of web-based trainings that facilitate behavior change in student athletes across topics like: social norms related to alcohol and drug use, bystander intervention, mental health, time management, hazing, sleep wellness, and sport nutrition (IPAHW, 2017; J. J. Milroy, personal communication, October 3, 2017). Additionally, IPAHW and the NCAA Sport Science Institute are rolling out a new sexual violence prevention course in response to the NCAA’s new policy that requires coaches, student athletes, and administrators to receive sexual violence prevention education (NCAA, 2017a). Counselors have significant training and expertise that may enhance the work of these organizations advocating for health promotion among athlete populations. Sport counselors must aim to publish athlete mental health research and seek grant funding for experimental research to further establish this specialty. Though relatively new itself, sport