Women in Sports Scholarship

The mind is the key to success. Sports Psychology is the study of how psychological factors affect and influence sports and athletic performance. These are two things that I am extremely passionate about. As a devout and successful high school and collegiate athlete, I desire that success for others. I believe that this success, however, cannot be achieved without a strong mind and body connection. This is why I see the high importance of my degree in Sports Psychology before coaching my own athletes. My career choice came quite easily. Being a competitive gymnast for over ten years, had its innumerable amounts of challenging set backs. While there were physical set backs including broken bones, strained ligaments, pulled or torn muscles, or broken bones that required surgery and months of re-learning how to walk again. I realize it was much more than just a physical battle. I believe that if I were to have realized the significance of my psychological state, my recoveries could have been astoundingly better, as well as my gymnastics career as a whole. As I sat in self despair during recovery, wondering if I would ever be able to do what I love again, I realize now I had lost all my psychological strength. I had given up on the recovery and betterment of myself without even realizing it because my mind had not been connected. Being mentally ready is just as crucial as being physically ready. This is something that I really want to advocate during my career. While male coaches and psychologists seem to appear as more dominate or "strong" because women are simply vulnerable and emotional, I do not think that is the case. I want to step up as a woman, and yes be the emotional driven female from a mental standpoint, but also incorporating strength and perseverance through the physical component of sports and athletic performance. I want to push athletes be the best version of themselves on, and off the mat. Through this, as a woman, I feel empowered, and I hope that I can empower other woman to be strong and have control in what they want to do physically and mentally. I wish to use my lifelong passion and knowledge of the sport of gymnastics, in order to teach the sport as well as use my degree to learn to help my athletes further enhance their performance and athletic ability through psychological perspectives. As a woman, I think this is pretty spectacular, and the future is strong.