Preparing Portfolios for Student-Athletes

Good information about:

• Which athletic programs will value a student-athlete's skills;
• How to present their accomplishments; and
• Building an application strategy

is hard to come by.

CollegeLab uses the OptiMind program to help athletes:

• Assess their relative strengths in the national pool
• Build on sports that reflect their competitive strengths
• Find coaching & teaching styles that work for them
• Raise the level of their mental game
• And most importantly, integrate those strengths into a strategy for college applications and academic & athletic success.

The OptiMind Program

For years OptiMind and its founder, Mark Mobley, a noted Sports Psychology Consultant, have used the Learning Styles Profile (LSP) and the Competitive Styles Profile (CSP) together as an assessment tool to help high school & college student athletes determine a starting point for an individualized sport psychology-training program.

The LSP/CSP is an assessment questionnaire.  The LSP measures 20 separate categories of learning preferences grouped into four factors and measures how an athlete can best be supported in a learning environment. The CSP assesses 24 separate aspects of an athlete's mental game from their competitive confidence to their distractability and groups results into five major competitive factors. In this way, the CSP provides a guide to an athlete's mental (sports psychology) skills.

The LSP/CSP questionnaire has always provided OptiMind with invaluable information about its clients that allowed counselors to get right at the heart of students' competitive strengths and weaknesses.  Since the athlete consensually validates the results, the assessment and development review has always highlighted important areas that could be improved.  CollegeLab also believes that the LSP / CSP is also a great tool for coaches – allowing them to better understand the player they are coaching or recruiting. 

Using the LSP/CSP in the context of the OptiMind program provides:

• Insight into a student-athlete's athletic learning styles
• Guidance on how best to coach that student
• Specific action steps to imorve that student's mental game
• Guidance into the competitive potential of each student-athlete
  

at a level of detail and confidence that simply isn't available anywhere else.

Most college coaches will pass on a player who has more athletic ability for one who has more character and likely to a team player – thus a better fit for that squad. What coach wouldn't prefer an athlete who is openly working on developing team skills and the mental aspects of their game?