Candidate statement for President-elect: Rick McGuire

Dr. Rick McGuire is the director of sport psychology for Intercollegiate Athletics at the University of Missouri, and graduate professor of sport psychology in the counseling psychology program. For 27 years he was Missouri's head track and field coach. He was the founder and chairman for 27 years of the USA Track and Field Sport Psychology program, and served on the staff for 11 USATF national teams, including the 1992 and 1996 Olympic games in Barcelona and Atlanta. Rick was president of the NCAA Division 1 Track and Field Coaches Association.

As a professor, Rick established Missouri’s masters and doctoral programs in sport psychology.

He has been recognized with the Missouri Students Association Award for Outstanding Teaching, and the College of Education’s High Fliers and Pillar of Excellence Awards. He was most recently honored with the University of Missouri Alumni Association’s prestigious Faculty-Alumni Award.

Rick has been a significant contributor to the cause of coaches’ education, has written extensively, and is a prominent speaker. He has recently established the “Missouri Institute for Positive Coaching” to support, study, research, teach, promote and in all ways encourage the importance and the impact of highly effective positive coaching.

Rick is a founding member of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP), is an AASP certified consultant and an AASP fellow. He is a longstanding member of APA Division 47, as well as the USOC's Sport Psychology Registry.

Rick and his wife Jane live in Columbia, Mo.

Candidate Statement

Applied sport psychology’s greatest challenge: As professionals in the field of applied sport psychology, we face some very significant challenges if we are to become successful at fully establishing relevance, and eventually prominence, as essential and positive contributors within our culture of sport.

First, we obviously must complete the task of finally and firmly defining ourselves, both who we are and what we do. Closely related is the challenge to establish the requisite professional competencies, educational training, and the necessary credentialing to serve as professionals in the field.

Yet as important as these two are, they are not the greatest challenge facing the field of applied sport psychology. Our greatest challenge is getting sport psychology to the people of sport!

Within applied sport psychology, we believe that we have knowledge, understandings, theories, concepts, strategies, techniques and skills that will help coaches and athletes prepare better, perform better, achieve more, gain more fun, satisfaction and fulfillment, and to then be motivated to want even more. If we do, we must get much better at getting this delivered to the people of sport!

There are estimated to be more than 40 million athletes in America today. 90 percent or more of these athletes have coaches! Kids meet sport at the coach! The coach is the gatekeeper of sport! The coaches are the built in delivery system for getting sport psychology to and into sport! We must get past ourselves and get sport psychology to sport!

This is our greatest challenge!