Carr ’82 Finds Whirlwind Career in Psychology Niche
by Patrick McAlister '10
Dr. Chris Carr ’82 came from a line of Wabash men. His father Bob graduated in 1959. His brother Kyle ’85 was a biology major and Lilly Scholar. In contrast to his brother, one could describe Carr’s academic achievement at Wabash as average at best. "Kyle was one of those who graduated summa cum laude with honors," Carr said. "I graduated cumma homa soona."  Fortunately for Carr, that academic performance was not necessarily a decisive factor in future academic performance. Carr went on to get his MA and PhD in Counseling Psychology from Ball State University in his home town of Muncie, Indiana. After finding his niche in sports psychology, Carr’s academic performance drastically increased attaining a cumulative postgraduate GPA of 3.89.
Sports psychology has become an important field for both professional and amateur athletes alike as more and more athletic coaches and managers understand the important correlation between mental heath of their players and their performance. Consequently, those with Carr’s training have become coveted. He has worked with many colleges and universities including Washington State, Arizona State, Ohio State and most recently as a consultant with Purdue and Indiana. He has been a part of the Olympic Ski and Dive Teams as well as professional teams like the Kansas City Royals and the WNBA’s Indiana Fever. Carr has worked with St. Vincent’s Hospital since 2006, where he created a sports psychology program. Many coaches understand the importance of having a sports psychologist on staff for their players. The decidedly-gruff football coach Buddy Ryan, formerly of the Arizona Cardinals, had Carr on staff as team psychologist. Carr explained the importance of confidentiality to sometimes volatile coach and how he could not release player information unless that player signed a waiver. "I’ll never forget this to the day," Carr said. "He (Ryan) sat back and looked at me and said ‘Hell, I don’t want to know who you are talking to. I have you here so my players don’t have an excuse not to get help’. And in its simplicity, we are still way behind." Although sports psychology is a legitimate academic field with tangible athletic benefit, Carr still sees the archaic psychological stigmas existing in the sports world. Carr provides an example from his first day of work with his first job with Washington State. When he was talking to a coach he said "Coach, good to meet you, my name is Chris Carr.’ ‘Oh, good to meet you’ he said, ‘you must be our new shrink’ I said no coach, I am your new stretch." Even though sports psychology is still considered a stigmatized profession, there has been significant research into the most important psychological aspect of an elite athlete – his optimum performance. Carr stated that this excellent performance is in the context of an avenue of competition where excellence counts a great deal. Unfortunately, many athletes cannot reach this level of optimum performance because of what Carr states are performance "problems," namely performance anxiety due to lack of concentration and a focus on outcome-only goals. As credence to the academic advancements in the field of sports psychology, Carr was able to actually quantify performance anxiety. Drawing a bell curve he explained X axis to be what players call "butterflies" and the Y axis to be "performance". At a certain point during the physical performance the athlete has an optimum amount of "butterflies" to perform well yet not enough to overcome him and prevent performance. This is what athletes refer to as "The Zone." Over his 13-year career as a sports psychologist, Carr has had amazing opportunities to work with the some of the world’s top athletes from NCAA Division I Schools to the NFL to Olympic teams. He nonetheless credits Wabash, a place where his academic performance was less than stellar, as the place where he learned a valuable lessons he counsels to the athletes he works with every day. "I think one thing I learned at Wabash was always to test yourself and not be fearful of failure," Carr said. "It was the perfect fit and it’s still something hard to describe."
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