Unlock Your Potential: Mental Health Secrets of Elite Athletes!

decided to start swimming, and I just kind of gave up the other sports and just focused on swimming and earned, you know, scholarship. And, uh, you know, like I said, compete at the highest level in this Olympic sport of swimming.

Oh man, that's, that's cool, man. That's what's up. So Doc, as the director of behavioral health and wellness for Rutgers University Athletics, what does this role entail?

So it's a comprehensive program. I mean, CJ, you know, the world's different today, and we talk about mental health in a way that we never did. And I, I'm sure, you know, no matter where you live in the world, you know, we're recognizing the importance of mental health. And, uh, so the role, uh, created it, um, in a way. Uh, there was one sports psychologist at, at the university, and I've, I'm also a sports psychologist at Seton Hall University and have a private practice, and we sort of consult and help other organizations build, uh, systems to provide both mental health and mental skills training, you know, for athletes. Um, but I started at Seton Hall when I was, uh, studying for my PhD. We built, we started to build a program there. At Rutgers, when I was a professor, there was one sports psychologist for many years, you know, 15, 20 years. There was one person. I, you know, it was 4 or 5 different people, but there was only one provider. And, um, right before COVID there was this gap because the person had to take leave. And, uh, I came in, like, the chief medical officer knew I was a professor and said, hey, can you fix this thing and build a system? You know, because obviously no system can function on one person. So, uh, that's the long answer to then say, like, this whole behavioral health and sports psychology unit I built, um, is— it's comprehensive. So it's mental health treatment, it's group therapy, it's group skills, like, you know, recovering from an injury, for example. Um, it's substance use, it's learning, and, you know, other psychological evaluations. So there's lots of things that psychologists do, and our team does all of it. And so we have a whole team of people that kind of oversee all these different areas.