#34 Closing the Research to Practice Gap - Dr. Mustafa Sarkar

This week’s episode is an AASP Special.

Dr. Mustafa Sarkar is Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent University as well as a consultant specialising in individual, team, and organisational resilience across many high performance domains. He’s also keen footballer and Liverpool fan – but he tells me he’s from the Roy Evans and Gerard Houlier era, not a modern day glory hunter, so we’ll let him off.

The Association for Applied Sport Psychology (or AASP)’s annual conference is coming up this week from the 15th – 18th October in Montreal, where there will be a host of great speakers and content.

Mustafa delivered the opening keynote to last year’s 2024 AASP conference in Las Vegas – titled “Bridging the Research to Practice Gap in Sport and Performance Psychology”. In this episode Mustafar unpacks some of the context behind this keynote, as well as six suggested starting points for how we can bridge this gap as a profession, as an industry and as individuals.

At this week’s AASP conference, we’ll get a complimentary roundtable entitled the “Practice to Research Gap’, chaired by Philadelphia Phillies’ Mental Performance Coordinator Traci Statler - what better time to reflect on Mustafa’s insights, experiences and provocations from 2024.

You can follow Mustafa here:

Social networks:

- LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mustafa-sarkar-b6370256

NYU Website:

- https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/science-technology/mustafa-sarkar

Our previous podcast episode covering ‘Resilience’..

- https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/1-resilience-in-people-and-organisations-dr-mustafa-sarkar/id1506560750?i=1000470629088

Research:

- Mustafa’s Research Gate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mustafa-Sarkar-2?ev=hdr_xprf

- Ben Ashdown’s research on resilience behaviours in academy football: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2024.2361701

- Richard Keegan’s paper in 2017 on bridging the research-practice gap: https://archives.rpd-online.com/article/view/v26-n6-keegan-cotteril-woolway-etal.html

- Dr Marie Winter’s work on evidence-informed decision making (paper 1): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2023.2286950

- Dr Marie Winter’s work on evidence-informed decision making (paper 2): https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/tsp/39/3/article-p200.xml

- Myths of Sport Coaching by Dr Amy Whitehead and Jenny Coe: https://www.sequoia-books.com/catalog/whiteheadcoe/

- Myths of Sport Performance by Dr Amy Whitehead and Jenny Coe: https://www.sequoia-books.com/catalog/sport/

Videos:

- Richard Keegan: closing the research to practi