The United States

Abstract

While most published accounts of the history of sport psychology1 in the United States (U.S.) trace the field’s inception to the 1890s, its formal emergence as a discipline is relatively recent, with the bulk of primary source literature dating to around the mid-1960s. The intent of the present chapter is to construct a critical and analytical history (Booth, 2005; Struna, 1996) of two issues that have shaped the development of the field, and in so doing provide important “back story” to previous work (Gill, 1995, 1997; Gould & Pick, 1995; Kornspan, 2012; Silva, 2001). Specifically, we examine the persistent tension that has existed between (a) proponents of academic and applied approaches to sport psychology, and (b) professionals trained in departments of kinesiology and psychology.