Re: Gordon Henry's suggestion and some others too.

Brent Rushall, at San Diego State U., has done more behavioral work
with elite sport teams than anybody in the world. He worked for
years with several Canadian olympic teams as well as teams and sport
organizations in Autralia and other countries. He has a long history
of publications regarding these activities.

Thom McKenzie, also at SDSU, was Brent's MA student and my doctoral
student. He was a "performance enhancement specialist" for years
with the USA Women's Volleyball Team. Martin Gipson of U. of
Pacific, another ABAer, also worked with Thom in that project. The
coach of the team for all that time was Terry Liskeyvych, another of
my students, who has used behavioral principles consistently with his
teams -- and, I might add, with himself. Thom created an
intervention for Terry one year that required him to give only that
feedback in post game analysis that was related to team and
individual goals for that game -- keep him from wandering.

Thom has also been the co-principal investigator on CATCH and SPARK
to federally funded projects to enhance physical activity among kids,
funded over the years at about $34M. Behavioral self management has
become a standard part of those interventions/programs. CATCH (Child
and Adolsecent Trial for Cardiovascular Health) was the largest
funded project of its kind in federal funding history. The current
new effort that Thom is a part of (the acronym escapes me at the
moment) is a physical activity intervention for adolescent girls,
particularly african-american girls, one of the most at-risk for
health populations in the nation.

You might also be interested to know that CDC now is very enamored of
behavioral self management as it seeks to promote programs that work
for increased physical activity. I just served on their Expert Panel
to develop criteria for filtering programs that would gain CDC
approval and behavioral self management appears to be central to most
of the programs that will or have applied.

The problem CDC faces is that their previous work with smoking
cessation and STD/AIDS education programs are that (1) they are
cognitively oriented and (2) they rely primarily on aversive
consequences for programmatic efforts. In efforts to develop
programs that aim to increase physical activity and reduce obesity,
neither of those approaches has any efficacy.


Daryl Siedentop
--
Daryl Siedentop
Director, OSU P-12 Project
153 Arps Hall
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210

Phone: (614) 247-6398
Fax: (614) 688-3942
e-mail: Siedentop.1@...