Pitch to Pro
Pitch to Pro is the official podcast of Ozark United FC. This will be our platform to tell our story about the club and the special place that we call home, Northwest Arkansas. This is a journey. We want to bring you along for the ride. We'll share what's going on behind the curtain, help educate the community at large about soccer, Our league, and give updates on the progress of the club along the way.
Together, we'll explore and unpack our journey to professional soccer, the magic that is NWA, our community, and talk all things soccer from on the pitch to behind the scenes, telling the story of our club.
Pitch to Pro
Stoppage Time Special: Mindset Over Matchday
Mental health has finally entered the sports conversation, but how much progress have we really made? Our latest Stoppage Time episode brings you powerful insights from sports psychology experts who are transforming how we think about the mental game.
Gone are the days when sports psychologists merely played "deficit detective." Today's approach balances identifying weaknesses with amplifying strengths, creating personalized strategies for athletes at every level. Our featured expert explains that mental health isn't just relevant to those with clinical diagnoses—it's a "five out of five thing" affecting everyone in varying degrees and frequencies.
Professional sports organizations are waking up to this reality, with courageous athletes like Naomi Osaka publicly prioritizing mental wellbeing. But creating environments where players don't suffer in silence remains challenging. When teams focus exclusively on winning, they risk creating transactional cultures where athletes hide their struggles. The most successful organizations now integrate wellbeing as a foundational element of their performance strategy.
Perhaps most urgently, we need to transform youth sports culture. While winning naturally becomes important at elite levels, our current system often places inappropriate competitive pressure on young children. Experts point to Canada's long-term athlete development model as a framework that properly balances technical skills with psychological and emotional growth across different developmental stages. Supporting coaches—who are typically enthusiastic about understanding these needs but may lack proper training—represents our best opportunity to create healthier sports environments from the ground up.
Ready to hear more conversations that push sports forward? Watch the full episode now, and don't forget to subscribe to the Pitch to Pro podcast, the official podcast of Ozark United FC, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast. This is a highlight reel of some of the best moments from the show so far, and every other week we will be bringing you a special five to seven minute segment featuring the best stories, tales and moments of the podcast.
Speaker 2:I think sports psych gets a little bit of a stereotype that people on my field are there to play deficit detective and look for what's wrong with a player from a mental skills perspective or what's wrong with the team. But I'm equally equally and a lot of times starting with looking for what's right and trying to pull and making sure players and teams are leaning into their strengths as well.
Speaker 3:No, that's so cool and I love your point about the individual one-on-one. It's really not a canned approach. I don't think it can be right, because everybody's different, every situation is different. You have to be able to adapt and be able to assess and diagnose and whatever. Here's the game plan and it's going to be so different for each player or coach or situation or team.
Speaker 3:Um, how has that kind of evolved?
Speaker 3:I think even in fairly recent share timelines, um, because and I you know whether it's a broader conversation, you know, as just society and mental health and wellbeing has come a lot more to the forefront and become, you know, less taboo and more part of our everyday conversation, and then making its way into sports and you know, either fortunately or unfortunately, you know, their lives are a lot of the time in the spotlight and so, whether they like it or not, they kind of get thrust up there on this platform and you know they're kind of guinea pigs in a way, in terms of kind of, what does it mean to talk about these things in the open forum and trying to make it normal and normalizing it? Um, you know, I don't want to steal your thunder, but like, all of these things kind of really interest me and intrigue me and kind of you watch the evolution of that space over the last few years, um, and you have, you know, I think of athletes like naomi osaka, uh, who took some time and just literally time off.
Speaker 3:Like I need to go work on me and just take a break, just for my own health, and mental health is health, all those things yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, stop my thunder, it's our responsibility. Yeah, you nailed it. This has been more normalized and we still have a long, long way to go.
Speaker 2:Yes, we do more normalized and we still have a long, long way to go. We're lucky that more and more athletes that are in the spotlight are stepping forward and normalizing with a lot of courage and vulnerability. This is what's going on in my life. It was some pretty real experiences that I had working with the Blue Jays that motivated me to add clinical mental health counseling to my education. So when I was going through to get my doctoral work it's a blended program, so it's a doctoral degree in sport and performance psychology with an emphasis in clinical mental health counseling.
Speaker 2:And, along the way, one of my mentors, who's a real legend in the field of psychology, dr Stephen Hayes. He reminded me mental health is not a one in five thing. Mental health is a five out of five thing five out of five people and it just varies in degree, intensity and frequency. Some people have diagnosed clinical mental health issues, disorders, and other people can experience some mental health challenges. That may not, and my goal and I learned this from my mentor, dr Hayes is that we don't suffer in silence, and so I think it's our responsibility to normalize this and give players a platform in team environments.
Speaker 2:That is part of why I get employed by those teams that I mentioned earlier is to make sure that well-being is a critical component, and if you're only a win-at-all-costs team, if the only conversations are about winning and performance, then the environment becomes very transactional and it can make it really tough for a player to be vocal about any challenges they may be experiencing. But if you're in an environment where you're ready to offer yes, we want to win. We're never going to take that off the table when this team gets stood up, you guys want to go unde success in looking at what type of to do work and to help players when they need help, and I think the more proactive we can be with this, the more we normalize it, the more players are going to feel like they're in an environment where they can be set up to bring their best out when it's time to perform, because they know they have people that are there to support them as well yeah, no, and I love this episode, I love this topic.
Speaker 3:Uh, I love you. Know, I could talk to you all day, man, how does this? I think it's also important to talk about how this translates into the youth game. Uh, and I think work that still needs to be done, because I think now we're starting to normalize it and talk about it in the professional space. But also there's a lot to be said about everything and the strains on a growing youth, a maturing youth, a teenager, all the things of life now, especially in this day and age, with all the technology, social media pressures and everything else, about just being a teenager. Oh, by the way, you're now a, a, you know, potentially a high level athlete trying to make it to the next level and the pressures that come with that. Um, you know, and, and you know, I think that there's a lot more room, uh, not just at the professional level, but especially even into the youth space within sports.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we need to be supporting coaches. It's been my experience that most of the coaches that I come across are as enthusiastic as you and I are about how to understand the psychological, social, emotional needs of athletes. There is a great model out there comes out of Canada in terms of long-term athlete development which is pretty prescriptive of what different ages and stages need and the athlete's journey. By the time athletes are putting on that, usl jersey winning is absolutely a priority. At nine years old it's not. And the challenge that we have, especially in our country, is we overemphasize the result and we underemphasize developmental opportunities technical developmental opportunities, psychological development opportunities, emotional development opportunities.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us for this stoppage time special of the Pitch to Pro podcast. If you've enjoyed the conversation, you can click watch the full episode here. Be sure to tune in next Thursday for a new episode of the Pitch to Pro podcast, the official podcast of Ozark United FC, Available on YouTube, Instagram and everywhere you get your podcasts.