Applied Association of Sport Psychology 2024: Las Vegas

I have presented three key take-home messages from this conference that would be of benefit to all working as either an academic and/or applied practitioner:

Be a champion for (applied) research

The keynote presented by Dr Mustafa Sarkar (UK Sport Psychology researcher) highlighted the need for applied researchers/practitioners to continue to reflect on their interaction with theory and science. I thought a helpful analogy presented was the ‘(small) s’ (science) and ‘(large)P’ (PRACTITIONER) of work being delivered in applied sport psychology conferences and that one should not be more powerful than the other. Both needed to be equal.

As academics there can often be a focus on publications to have an impact, writing for other researchers and for ‘h-indexes’. As a practitioner, there is often a requirement to be results-driven with no real incentive to publish research. From my experiences speaking to those only working within the applied field a challenge can also be to obtain academic literature due to publication fee’s! Therefore, this keynote did provoke all to consider how we can have ‘a foot in both camps’. As academics there needs to be a real strategy in disseminating research more effectively in non-traditional formats (e.g journal clubs, online videos) to ensure practitioners are obtaining your valuable research. There should also be a motivation to provide a forum for end users to discuss your research and know how they can use this to inform the work they do. It is also important that practitioners reflect on how beneficial their experiences are to research and consider how publishing experiences or case studies in applied journals has huge benefits in advancing knowledge too.

Evidenced based decision-making framework

Dr Marie Winter (UK Sport psychology practitioner) presented an engaging session on awareness in translating research into practical-evidenced based guidelines. This workshop session provided a collaborative step-by-step guide on how to make evidence-informed decisions in applied sport psychology. The session was highly interactive so allowed for various conversations with different practitioners across the world (which again was great for networking!) I found this helpful in providing a better strategy for how I draw upon both applied experience and research-based evidence to form the most appropriate intervention for athletes, coaches or organizations I may work with.

I have placed the reference here to support those who are operating within applied services as this is worth a read:

Winter, M. E., Freeman, P., Griffin, M., Soundy, A., & Maynard, I. (2024). Exploring the processes of evidence-informed decision-making in applied sport psychology. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 36(3), 499-518.

Practitioner well-being and self-care

Finally, a key theme that was discussed throughout this conference was self-care. Often we speak about ‘self-compassion’, ‘being kind to ourselves’ but how often do we adhere to this? It was great to be provided with an interactive session that enabled me to consider and discuss strategies to integrate into mentoring and supervision but also my own needs to maintain well-being. For those interested in this I am happy to send the slides from this session over to you.