AASP Newsletter - January 2021

Drew Morgan

Drew Morgan, MA, MBA, CMPC, Mental Coach Morgan LLC

My first major sports injury resulted in Tommy John surgery. It happened during the last game of my senior year in high school, and I spent that summer in a sling, rehabbing my arm so as to be ready to play college ball at the Division III school I had committed to. When I showed up to the first day of practice, my arm still in a sling, I was effectively the new water boy. While I stuck with it for a while, I could not shake the humiliation, frustration, and isolation I was feeling. It was not long until I stopped showing up to practice. Before I knew it, I had distanced myself from the team enough that my baseball career was over. 

I share this story because I had no knowledge of sport psychology back then; no mental coach in my corner, and no mental skills to fall back on. As a freshman in college away from my normal support system, I felt like I had no one to rely on. Maybe if I had Carrie Jackson Cheadle and Cindy Kuzma’s book, Rebound: Train Your Mind to Bounce Back Stronger from Sports Injuries I would have been able to continue on with my baseball career (and likely signing my second MLB contract right about now, but I will not hold that against the authors). Carrie Cheadle, CMPC, is a mental skills coach and adjunct faculty member for Holy Names University’s Applied Sport and Performance Psychology master’s program, who specializes in working with injured athletes. Cindy Cuzma is a journalist specializing in fitness and health with numerous contributions to magazines such as Runner’s World. 

Where the Book Is Effective

What Rebound does exceptionally well is normalize and validate the experience of the injured athlete. All throughout the book, the authors reference numerous athletes and performers discussing their journey back to competition after injury. The short, one-page narratives are diverse, with examples not only from athletes involved in diverse sports such as climbing, CrossFit, basketball, football, and triathlons, but also musicians and other performers. A short section follows each narrative that begins with, “Did you catch that rebound?” explicitly outlining what the individual did to bounce back from injury, an effective means of recapping and underlining the important topics of the section. These sections encapsulate the core message of the book, which is to rebound by “increasing the energy from the ball to the bounce” (Cheadle & Cuzma, 2019, p.3). 

While the book brings in relevant research and cites specific evidence, it is consistently applied in nature. At the end of each chapter there are several different “mental drills” where the reader can reflect on and practice the content that was outlined in that chapter. These mental drills consist of some of the classics, such as performance profiles, and others that are unique to this book such as writing a letter to your injured body part. 

Where the Book Falls Short

Rebound is a wealth of information, which serves both as one of its strengths and simultaneously one of its pitfalls. The many different moving parts of the book – 15 different mental skills, 53 mental drills, athlete narratives, scientific explanations, key points at the end of the chapters, and corresponding website, has the potential to dilute the core messaging of the bookmaking it feel overwhelming at times. For instance, the mental drills provided at the end of the chapter are related back to the corresponding “15 essential mental skills for injury recovery” (p. 8). The 15 skills are divided into three categories—rookie, all-star, and hall-of-fame, so that next to each mental drill there are four to five mental skills listed according to their category. It was unclear if the mental drills should be interpreted differently depending on the level the athlete perceives themself to be at or if it even mattered. The sport psychology nerd in me loved connecting these dots, but I could see for the average injured athlete how these different aspects could become confusing. 

Summary

What is not lost in the mental-skills-forest of the book is the authors’ sincere aspiration to help the injured athlete, evidenced further by the authors’ invitation for the reader to join their virtual support group and listen to their podcast. For mental performance coaches, this book serves as a database of information to pull from that can be used not just with the injured, but any client. The minor critique notwithstanding, for athletes that may feel as if they are drowning in response to their injury, this book is not just a life raft, it is the Coast Guard.   

References

Cheadle, C., & Cuzma, C. (2019). Rebound: Train your mind to bounce back stronger from sports injuries. Bloomsbury.