Mitch Lyons, ’73

President of GetPsychedSports.org

Mitch Lyons ’73 believes that sports offer important life lessons to teenage athletes. So he left the practice of law and started a non-profit organization to teach them mental skills that are useful on and off the playing field.

Lyons is president of GetPsychedSports.org, a Massachusetts-based organization that seeks to instill mental skills in high school athletes through a class and exercises to be done throughout the season, such as writing down goals for that day’s practice.

The SCU alum practiced law with a three-person firm for 26 years, before deciding to start GetPsychedSports.org. His program has been taught in the Newton, Mass., high schools for four years, and has also been taught at schools in Ohio and Baltimore. Boston’s high schools expect to offer it once funding is found. Lyons plans to take the program to more states in coming years.

Lyons’ interest in sports psychology grew out of his own coaching experiences. He coached a girls’ basketball team at a local high school for a time, and currently is an assistant coach of the men’s basketball team at Lasell College, a Division III school in Newton.

While sports psychology-using one’s mind to do well on the playing field-isn’t new, Lyons says having a written curriculum to teach high school students is. In the class he teaches, students learn such concepts as how to visualize outcomes, become task-oriented, and set goals. Positive thinking is emphasized, since it affects performance. The activities are equally useful whether a player is a star athlete or sitting on the bench, he says.

The class that the students take in Massachusetts is 90 minutes long, followed by a mid-season evaluation and daily exercises to keep the concepts alive during the season.

His goal is to get students to think about what they’re learning, and to approach it in a way that helps them remember and use these skills in other parts of life and in their future. For example, "Most kids don't have any idea what self-worth is," he says, noting that his organization targets this area as well.

The program has been called the first step in teaching "preventive mental health in our schools" by Dr. Louis Kruger, director of the School Psychology Program at Northeastern University in Boston.

But getting a new point of view into the locker room hasn’t been easy. "Coaches view their teams as personal fiefdoms," Lyons says. "Interference is not welcomed."

Lyons is a native of West Hartford, Conn., who came west to SCU for law school with his wife, Joanne, after both graduated from Adelphi University in New York. "I love Santa Clara," he says. "I loved my classmates. I had a wonderful time." He played intramural basketball while at SCU, and also was a student district attorney who appeared in court for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. After law school, the Lyons family returned to the East Coast, settling near Boston and raising two children, Genna and Matt.

Lyons is hopeful he can share his program with the 40 million American schoolchildren who participate in sports. "If we did it all across the country, it would make a huge difference," he says.