Understanding the Athlete
Research in UT’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience aims to find interventions that will support high performers, from training through careers.
Swimmer Jillian Crooks twice represented the Cayman Islands in the Olympic Games before becoming a student-athlete at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ultimately, she plans to combine the “Cayman Kindness” ethos in which she was raised with a psychology degree so that she can support others.
A sophomore who is also minoring in nutrition, Crooks knows the value of mental health as well as physical health. “A lot of people don’t understand how hard, how taxing it is as a D1 athlete,” she said.
Her day typically starts with about two hours of practice at the Allan Jones Intercollegiate Aquatic Center before breakfast and classes, then there’s rehabilitation for her shoulder and two more hours of practice in the late afternoon, followed by homework and studying. “You have a few minutes just to FaceTime your family back home and quickly go to bed, and then repeat that cycle throughout the whole entire week,” she said.
Crooks’s dedication pays off. In her first year as a Lady Vol, she won an SEC bronze medal in the 200 Freestyle Relay.
Her self-care includes time for meditation and Bible study, and she takes advantage of the mental training UT provides to student-athletes.
Last year, in one of her psychology classes, she also found that learning about different parts of the brain allowed her to focus interventions to relax.
“In swimming, we use our brain for a lot of things,” Crooks noted, as it manages not only speed but technique. “If this part of the brain with this amount of stress is overloaded, I can use this breathing technique or other techniques in order to focus and bring that down, and use certain parts of the brain to help you recover.”
Psychology is currently the most common major for UT’s student-athletes in the College of Arts and Science, and many graduate students in the department are former athletes or musicians, another field with the high demands of public performance.
A Whole Life View
Researchers in the psychology department study the whole life experience among athletes and musicians. “We’re looking at clinical issues, we’re looking at general health and wellness, we’re looking at career transitions,” said Associate Professor Jacob Levy, an applied psychologist. “We’re asking meaningful questions, and we’re helping impact people.”
From basic to applied research, scholars at UT investigate the why, the what, and the how, or as Levy explains it, “Let’s make our understanding of the world better, and then let’s make the world better.”
Along with being a licensed psychologist, Levy holds a brown belt in jiu-jitsu, competes in the master’s division and has medaled twice in world competitions. “I do it because it helps me maintain my diet, it helps me maintain my accountability, it actually helps my job,” he said. “If I’m in better shape, I’m more active and more present when I’m doing work at UT.”
For Levy and his graduate students, their experience as athletes or musicians can inform their research too. “They appreciate the struggle, and they have their own questions. Some of them are personal, and some of them are things they’ve seen, or things that they’ve witnessed, and I think that breathes life into what we do.”
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, one of Levy’s training partners mentioned struggling without access to his usual training routine. “I was able to do a study with one of my graduate students examining the proximal impact of gym closures on combat sport athletes in terms of their depressive symptoms and anxious symptoms, trying to understand the phenomenon better,” said Levy. Their research included hundreds of athletes across 33 countries.
“Let’s make our understanding of the world better, and then let’s make the world better.”
Jacob Levy
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Life After Sport
The research isn’t confined to athletic performance.
A small percentage of college athletes will go on to professional careers, and in research published last year, fourth-year UT doctoral student Allyson Esielionis examined how personality traits of 86 NCAA student-athletes were related to readiness for work.
“We found that personality traits, especially openness and self-directed learning, were strongly associated with work readiness outcomes in student-athletes,” she said. “These findings can help guide program development in athletic departments that help strengthen these traits to promote curiosity, goal-setting, and initiative as part of athlete development.”
Esielionis played basketball as an undergraduate at Salve Regina University, and professionally in Ireland through an organization called Sport Changes Life. “While in Ireland, I also began coaching youth teams with my local club, and eventually went on to coach at the collegiate level as an assistant coach at Wellesley College before coming to UT,” she said. “Across those roles, I experienced firsthand how closely performance, identity, mental health, and life transitions are intertwined.”
She worked with athletes who felt confident on the court or field but completely unprepared and uncertain for life after sport. “I didn’t believe it myself until it happened to me, but those four years fly by in the blink of an eye,” she said. “And with the typical student-athlete schedule, there’s a whole lot of time dedicated to developing as an athlete, but much less time to think about or prepare for what comes next, or even who you are outside of sport.”
“Rarely were they given tools, language, or resources to address those challenges,” she said. “Those experiences pushed me to pursue counseling psychology through an athletic lens, with the goal of helping athletes develop as both performers and people.”
After earning her PhD, Esielionis plans to work with athletes, coaches, and athletic administrators to provide mental health services, team-based programming, and educational workshops that support well-being, holistic development, and sustainable performance.
“I chose UT because of its leading commitment to the scientist-practitioner-advocate model, the opportunity to train under Dr. Levy, and the program’s community clinical placements,” Esielionis said. “I’ve been able to work with a variety of settings, such as counseling departments and athletic departments, gaining experience in environments that reflect the real mental health needs of diverse populations. As a former basketball player and huge Pat Summitt fan growing up, the rich sports history and community here in Knoxville was the cherry on top.”
“I chose UT because of its leading commitment to the scientist-practitioner-advocate model, the opportunity to train under Dr. Levy, and the program’s community clinical placements.”
Allyson Esielionis
Doctoral Student
Department of Psychology
Theory to Intervention
Recent research at UT has laid the groundwork for further studies over the next two or three years. “We’re going to be able to test different modalities and work with different kinds of interventions and see the efficacy, running some true intervention-based studies,” Levy said.
For her doctoral dissertation, Esielionis is designing a movement-based mindfulness intervention for college music students that targets performance anxiety and other psychological factors that influence performance.
“Through this project, I hope to develop a scalable mental health intervention that can continue to be utilized after the project has concluded,” she said. “I’m excited to expand my work in performance psychology to a musical population, working towards my long-term goal of creating evidence-based and accessible interventions for performance populations, including athletics.”
By Amy Beth Miller
Select photos courtesy of UT Athletics