Abstract

The editors have given me an opportunity to forecast a future for applied sport psychology. It may be that I am seen as an “old hand” with many personal observations of a trajectory of development of applied sport psychology in the USA and, in a more limited view, globally. In some statistical procedures, if we have many repetitions of measures over time, future data points along a projected time line can be predicted. It works reasonably well as long as the observed data points conform to a discernable pattern: straight line, curvilinear, and the like. It also helps if your observations take place in a setting that does not undergo wildly fluctuating conditions. Perhaps you can see that simply “being older” does not give much advantage to the predictor in our particular environment. I am going ahead with forecasting but not because of what has been seen in applied sport psychology in our past but rather because of what I see today and out ahead.