sports psychology – FasterSkier

“You Can’t Live Nervous”

Matthew VoisinDecember 22, 2025

Finals week has a way of compressing time. Days shrink into problem sets and exams; nights stretch just long enough to make sleep negotiable. When Jack Lange logged onto Zoom from Hanover in late November, he was finishing his senior fall at Dartmouth, a mechanical engineering major balancing equations while packing for a training block at Silver Star. The snow out west wasn’t cooperating. Races were being reformatted. Nothing felt settled. That uncertainty didn’t seem...

US Ski Team

Blueprinting Beliefs: Ben Ogden’s Mind, Mechanics, and the Engineering of a Community

Matthew VoisinNovember 24, 2025

Somewhere over the Atlantic, on a red-eye to another winter in Europe, Ben Ogden opens his laptop and stares at a grid of digital joinery. Tiny posts, miniature knee braces, angled mortises — a small timber-frame sauna, scaled down to the dimensions of an airline tray table. He sketches in precise strokes, clicking through angles and offsets, rotating the model the way he rotates race courses in his head: looking for structure, looking for flow....

General Interviews News

The Mind Makes a Winner: An Interview with Emotional Intelligence Researcher Sylvain Laborde

Chelsea LittleAugust 27, 2015

Dr. Sylvain Laborde of the German Sports University is researching how to develop emotional intelligence training specifically for athletes. "They understood after the first session that they could really get something out of this," Laborde said of working with an initially reluctant rugby team.

General News

All About Emotional Intelligence and How It Boosts Sports Performance

Chelsea LittleJuly 6, 2015

Emotional intelligence - how one perceives, understands, and manages emotions - can give athletes better coping strategies, more motivation, and the potential to be a team leader. Even on the recreational side of things, emotional intelligence is associated with the difference between inactivity and a healthy engagement with exercise. The good news is, you can train it.

General Interviews News

How Your Sports Psychology Research Gets Done: Based on Days Spent Ski Racing

Chelsea LittleJune 16, 2014

Dr. Blair Evans, whose work on group dynamics and competitive suffering (i.e. failure) we've highlighted twice in "This Month in Journals", chats about the process of doing sports psychology research. Evans' experience skiing in college informs almost all of his research, and he told us what he thinks makes skiing special from a psychological standpoint.

General Health Interviews Lifestyle News Training

Ask A Sports Psychologist: Making The Bigtime

FasterSkierNovember 14, 2013

In the second half of our "ask a psychologist" segment, we talk to Dartmouth sports psychologist Dr. Mark Hiatt about the pressure and stress that comes with qualifying for big races, and what happens once you do. Hiatt expands on suggestions for how to manage expectations, relax, and get in a positive and productive mindset.

General Health Interviews Lifestyle News Training

Ask a Sports Psychologist: How Do I Deal with My Team?

FasterSkierNovember 8, 2013

Coaches can't help with everything. We talked to Dr. Mark Hiatt, a sports psychologist at Dartmouth College, for how to deal with some common situations: what if your team is taking up too much time and eating into your life? How do you compete against your teammates? What if you hate your coach? His answers, which we hope will help you.