Sport Psychology & Athletic Counseling Training
Athletes are seeking mental health support in growing numbers, and they're showing up in your caseload whether you feel ready or not. Performance anxiety, identity crises, career transitions, overtraining, disordered eating, concussion recovery, and the psychological toll of injury are just some of the challenges that bring athletes into clinical settings — often without any language for what they're experiencing.
General clinical training rarely covers the unique world of sport. The culture is different, the presenting concerns are different, and the therapeutic frame often needs to be, too.
PESI's sports psychology training for therapists is designed to close that gap. Through expert-led courses, athletic counseling workshops, and Sport and Performance Psychology for Clinicians programming, you'll gain the clinical framework and practical tools to work confidently and effectively with this often-underserved population.
More than ever, clients are seeking experts with sport and performance psychology training – because maximizing potential means tackling anxiety, burnout, and stress head-on, Dr. Carly Hunt will provi
In this crash course, Dr. Ashley Smith will make it simple for you to start using positive psychology with your clients.
Sport Psychology Popular Online Courses
Sport Psychology Learners Also Develop Skills In
A Complete Clinical Skill Set for Working with Athletes and High Performers
What You'll Learn
PESI's sports psychology continuing education moves well beyond mental performance coaching. These are clinical skills, grounded in research, designed for licensed professionals working with real athletes facing real psychological challenges.
Understand the Athletic Identity and Culture: Learn how sport shapes identity, relationships, and mental health — and why athletes often minimize distress, avoid help-seeking, and respond differently to traditional therapeutic approaches. This context is the foundation everything else builds on.
Assess and Treat Performance Anxiety: Apply evidence-based techniques drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and mindfulness-based approaches to help athletes manage pressure, develop mental resilience, and perform at their best.
Support Athletes Through Injury and Career Transition: Injury and retirement are among the most psychologically significant events in an athlete's life. Develop skills to address grief, loss of identity, fear of re-injury, and the complex emotional terrain of life after sport.
Address High-Risk Clinical Concerns in Athletic Populations: Recognize and treat the clinical presentations that disproportionately affect athletes: disordered eating and relative energy deficiency, substance use, overtraining syndrome, concussion-related mental health symptoms, and trauma from sports environments
Apply Sport-Informed Therapeutic Approaches: Adapt your existing clinical skills for the language, pace, and culture of sport. Learn how to engage athletes who are goal-oriented, action-focused, and conditioned to push through discomfort rather than talk about it.
Build Your Practice in This Growing Specialty: Earn CE credits through live seminars, online sports psychology courses, and athletic counseling continuing education programs while developing the credentials to specialize with athletes, coaches, and performance-driven clients.
Who is this Training For
PESI's sport and performance psychology training is designed for licensed and pre-licensed mental health professionals who work with, or want to work with, athletic populations. That includes psychotherapists, psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, licensed professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and school or college counselors.
You don't need a background in sport to benefit from this training. Whether athletes are already a significant part of your caseload or you're exploring a new clinical direction, PESI's sports psychology courses meet you where you are. Live seminars, live virtual webinars, self-paced online courses, and multi-day workshops are all available with CE credit included, giving you the flexibility to learn on your schedule without slowing down your practice.
Why is Sports Psychology Important?
Athletes are a clinically distinct population, and treating them effectively means understanding why.
The culture of sport rewards toughness, self-sufficiency, and pushing through pain. It often pathologizes vulnerability and frames asking for help as weakness. By the time an athlete walks into your office, they may have been minimizing distress for years, trained to perform regardless of what they're carrying internally.
At the same time, athletes face psychological stressors that general clinical training rarely addresses in depth: the identity foreclosure that comes with sport specialization, the grief of career-ending injury, the weight of team and coach expectations, the physiological effects of overtraining on mood and cognition, and the specific pressures facing youth, collegiate, and elite-level competitors.
Effective sports psychology training for therapists doesn't ask you to become a performance coach. It asks you to bring your full clinical skill set into a new context, with a deeper understanding of what makes that context different. PESI's sport and performance psychology continuing education gives you exactly that, so you can provide care that actually reaches the athletes who need it.