A blue-collar academic whose training was shaped in the classroom and tested in elite sport and high-pressure arenas.

Formation

My undergraduate education began in philosophy, studying meaning, consciousness, and human flourishing. I was the first person in my father’s family to finish high school, so education was never ornamental. It changed the room I could enter.

The body came next: applied physiology, strength and conditioning, and exercise science. Doctoral work in the psychology of movement, with a focus in applied sport and exercise psychology, gave me a formal language for performance.

I have tried to keep skin in the game throughout my training and career: coaching, consulting, and working with people while studying the theories meant to explain them. The ideas were never only academic. They were tested in the lab, in the field, and in the lives of people trying to perform, lead, recover, and change.

I was also a competitive athlete up through college, and baseball was one of the first places I learned how easily performance can become tangled with identity. I know what it is to care so much that you start talking yourself out of the game.

I remain close to the work personally: as an athlete, husband, father, and parent navigating the realities of development, competition, and family life.

The work became less about making the ordinary extraordinary, and more about making the extraordinary sustainable.

Clinical depth

Clinical training followed because the work kept reaching beneath performance. High performers rarely lack discipline. Often, the structure that helped them succeed has started to cost them something.

Training through the New Jersey Consultation Center, part of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis - NJ, an internship at the Lukin Center, and ongoing psychoanalytic study gave the work a deeper clinical base: symptoms, identity, defense, relational patterns, and the ways people protect themselves under pressure.

My approach is psychoanalytic and relational at its base, integrated with structured performance methods, applied physiology, and cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based tools when the work calls for them.

Training matters, but I do not assume the model comes before the person. The work is shaped by what the person in front of me needs: sometimes structure, sometimes more time and exploration, and often both.

Selected experience

Over twenty years across elite sport, senior leadership, law, finance, medicine, public service, tactical contexts, and the arts.

That includes four seasons directing mental performance in Major League Baseball with the Washington Nationals; directing mental performance for a national team; consulting with ownership and management in professional football and professional soccer; and working with athletes across MLB, MLS, NWSL, PGA-affiliated tours, Olympic-pathway sport, national teams, Division I NCAA programs, and junior elite development.

That work required more than one-on-one coaching. In elite environments, performance is shared across disciplines: sports medicine, strength and conditioning, physical therapy, physiology, coaching, psychology, and clinical care. Part of the work is knowing how to speak across those silos, collaborate when appropriate, and refer when another specialist belongs in the work without reducing the person to any one discipline.

It also includes senior leaders in business, law, finance, medicine, public-sector settings, tactical professionals, surgeons, Academy Award-winning artists, and Emmy and Golden Globe-winning performers.