by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Features Editor

July 31, 2008

In an effort to be the best at their respective games, modern elite athletes engage an extensive support system, including coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and massage therapists. But all that preparation can be rendered meaningless if they can’t find that mental focus.

New Jerseyan Dr. Marshall L. Mintz is part of a growing number of psychologists who assist world-class competitors. Prior to his departure for Beijing, where he will work with the U.S. rowing team, he spoke with NJ Jewish News.

Even though medals and personal bests are the goals of every athlete, the road to glory can take many paths, with “subtle differences” between athletes in different sports, Mintz said in a telephone interview.

“A diver and how he handles his pre-dive routine may be different from an individual medley swimmer’s…or oarsman’s pre-race routine. But concerns about energy conservation, intensity, rehabilitation from injury, inter-athletic conflicts, coach athlete conflicts, practice motivation, long-range goals...are all part of the mix.”

Mintz, who has offices in Springfield and Randolph, played baseball, basketball, and football in high school and was a member of the rowing team at Rutgers University. A practitioner since 1982, he began devoting more time to working with athletes about 15 years ago, applying the skills he used with performance psychology, which he described as any performance activity, not just those that are sports-related.

“You sort of become somebody whose name gets put out there, so a lot of the scholastic and collegiate athletes in the New York metropolitan area contact me when they’re seeking performance-enhancing services or related psychology,” Mintz said.

He will also work with coaches, who have the most contact with the athletes. In a sense, they also serve as amateur psychologists. “The best coaches…have a strong psychological understanding of their athletes.”

Mintz uses a combination of techniques — including relaxation training and visualization — to develop what may be needed in terms of positive images and “self-talk.” But, he said, “that’s not the ‘it’ of what I do. Throwing techniques at things can be useful for certain anxiety problems, particularly with events that have the possibility of injury.” Mintz receives many referrals for women’s gymnastics, particularly on the balance beam, where the routines are “pretty spooky” and the chance of injury is high.

“A lot of times, things that show up as anxiety are really about ambivalence about how much a commitment they want to make,” he said. Athletes who have been sacrificing for years may miss making the Olympic squad by inches or seconds and might question the desirability of putting in the hard work needed to try again in four years.

Head start?

Mintz, who lives in Chester and attends Temple Hatikvah in Flanders, has little patience for the stereotypical “little-league parents” who expect their kids to excel from the get-go.

“I get calls from parents of six-year-olds who are enrolled in junior golf programs, and they’re saying, ‘My kid gets too angry and we need to create more focus and better intensity.’

“I often say to them, ‘I don’t hear where your child is having fun.’” He refuses to deal with adults who “want to tighten the thumbscrews on their kids so they shape up and act more like Tiger.

“I can’t tell you the number [of kids] that are anxious because they’re not performing as well as their coaches and parents think they should. Then you find out they don’t want to be doing it anymore. They don’t want to be in the gym five hours a day. They want to be teenagers, they want to date, they want to socialize more. Those kind of processes have to be thought through.”

It’s no surprise that the burnout rate is so high. Mintz said he prefers to get youngsters “on a track where they’re enjoying themselves and then, maybe, they’re enjoying the sport.”

“I’m not interested in a 12-year-old becoming a great athlete; I want them to become a great person,” he said.

The end of a competition can also be a problem, bringing feelings of withdrawal and depression. Prior to his association with the U.S. rowing team, the squad had won a major competition, and then “it was over,” Mintz said. Coaches and athletes went their separate ways and later told him about “the great sense of sadness, loss, and disorganization.”

“That becomes part of something we try to anticipate and build into the equation,” said Mintz. Now, “there’s a team party where people can get together and a kind of punctuation of what goes on. It’s a way of acknowledging the end. Rituals exist not out of some haphazard phenomena, but [with] a purpose, and in this case it’s a way to punctuate the end of an intense period, a relationship with the other athletes. And it can promote a kind of letting go or mourning that almost has to happen at the end of training process leading up to a major competition.”

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