Hi, my name is Aaron.
I’m a former athlete and coach who struggled with the mental side of sports. Since I stopped playing and coaching, I’ve learned and healed a lot, and now my mission is to use those lessons and experiences to help athletes and coaches embrace and solve the challenges that they face in their sports and daily lives.
I also look around the world of sports and see the de-humanization of athletes; in our demand for ever-higher levels of performance, we turn athletes into commodities and treat personal qualities as currency used to purchase our approval, love, and support as coaches, fans, and parents.
From the pros down to the most recreational youth sports, experiences are being reduced to transactions, leaving too many kids anxious, emotionally brittle, and with fixed mindsets that prevent growth and sabotage well-being.
My goal is to help the people involved in creating those spaces - coaches, administrators, parents, and of course the athletes themselves - gain the knowledge, perspective, skills, and mindsets that bring joy, self-awareness, belonging, connection, and fun back into sport environments at all levels.
Skills for sport. Tools for life.
In order to enable athletes to thrive, we must work to challenge and change the top-down, dehumanizing, reductive and transactional culture of sport. More than ever in today’s comparison-driven media environment, it is our mandate to embrace all people, celebrate their strengths, to put athletes in positions to succeed by creating spaces that foster self-determination, and to help each athlete, team, and community create the internal conditions that allow them to grow and thrive through their sport experiences.
Sports have the power to change a place, a life, or a person; it is up to us to make sure that transformation is a positive one.
MY JOURNEY THROUGH SPORT
I’ve been an athlete my whole life. I played every sport I could find, from t-ball and flag football to baseball, swimming, water polo, and skiing.
My first love, though, was basketball.
When I was a young kid growing up in Boston, my dad and a few of his friends split season tickets to the Celtics. I have vivid memories of the sounds, sights, and smells of the old Boston Garden, and the way the place literally vibrated with energy and excitement. I remember walking around courtside during pre-game shootaround and marveling at the sheer size and presence of the players. I’ve been hooked ever since.
When I was 8, my family moved to Oregon, and one of the things that helped me through that tough transition was playing sports. They provided structure, an outlet, and a place where being tall was an advantage rather than a discomfort. I played water polo and basketball in high school and college and then recreationally, and whatever time was left I spent on skis.
Looking back on my life as a multi-sport athlete - and later as a coach - I recognize a lot of strong positives in my experiences. I also see that there were a lot of things that could have been better, both in the sport environments and inside me.
Eventually, my questions about how to improve the sport experience for young athletes like I had been, and how to increase joy in sport while improving athlete mental health and performance, led me back to Boston for a Master’s degree in Positive Youth Development and Sport Psychology.
ALL PERFORMERS ARE HUMAN BEINGS FIRST…
Today, I use what I have learned throughout my life and my firm belief in the positive potential of self-aware, mindful human existence
to collaborate with athletes, teams, coaches, and parents in an effort to increase self-awareness, curiosity, and self-determination,
and to bring compassion, joy, intrinsic meaning, and developmentally supportive and transformational coaching and parenting practices back into the world of sport.
I hope that you will join me.
