Most people call me Coach Kos. I'll be honest with you -- this is my second career.

I played softball at the University of Utah. Three-sport athlete in high school. Then I got hurt. Retired early. Walked into a counseling office for the first time in my life, because nobody had warned me about the depression that follows an injury like that. Nobody had warned me. That's part of why I'm doing this.

I spent 15 years in college athletics before I went back for my master's in counseling. Here's what kept happening during those 15 years: student-athletes were showing up on my couch instead of at the campus counseling center. Not because the campus counselors weren't good -- but because they didn't speak the language. They didn't get the lifestyle. They didn't understand that telling an athlete to "rest more" without knowing what's at stake for them is like telling a surgeon to "just stop doing surgery for a while."

So I got the clinical degree. And then I built something I couldn't find anywhere else: a counseling practice that meets athletes where they actually live.

A few things I want you to know going in:

I'm probably not your traditional therapist. When I was in grad school they told me I was "very coachy." I said -- well, I am a coach. Athletes come in wanting to get better, fast. Most of mine are in and out in three to six sessions. Every day they aren't training at their best feels like a loss to them. I had to learn how to honor that and still do real clinical work. I'll show you how.

Performance is rarely the actual problem. Maybe 10% of my athletes come in just for performance. The rest of them come in because something else is on fire -- the injury, the parents, the coach, the eating, the identity. We work on their life before we ever get to sport psychology. That's the order. I'll show you why, and how.

Athletic counseling is the bridge -- and that's exactly what we'll build together. Sport psychology has decades of literature focused on performance. The clinical work you and I do with athletes -- the depression, the eating, the identity, the injury grief -- sits in a different lane. So what I've spent my career doing is taking the modalities you already know -- CBT, MI, DBT, mindfulness -- and translating them into the world of the athlete. I'll show you exactly how that translation works, and how the NCAA's 2024 Best Practices and the IOC's safeguarding consensus give us the clinical scaffolding to do this work with confidence.

You don't need to have been a varsity athlete to do this work well. You need a framework, a vocabulary, and the confidence to use them. By the end of two days, you'll have all three.

I'm not here to make you a sport psychologist. I'm here to make you the counselor that the 13-year-old gymnast, the injured collegian, the retiring pro, and the overbearing sports parent all walk away from feeling finally seen.

That's the work. Let's do it together.