Angel City Sports is providing resources to athletes who are competing in the Tokyo Paralympic Games or the adapted sports National Championships. The organization has partnered with HeadSet Sports to provide programming that focuses on mental performance to Paralympians and other high-performing adaptive sports athletes.
HeadSet Sports is a mobile app that helps athletes improve their mental toughness. A commonality of the two organizations is their mission to help athletes be the best as competitors and as people.
“One of our interests at Angel City Sports has been to bring high-level support services to the everyday athlete,” said Angel City Sports founder Clayton Frech. “We came up with this program and we didn’t want to leave the aspiring athletes out of the picture.”
Along with a program for elite athletes, Angel City Sports will also have the “Future Champions Preparations Program” which is geared towards young athletes. That program gives young athletes the same tools and techniques as the elite athletes.
To begin the program, the athlete must take an assessment to ensure the program fits their needs. Participants have access of their video library, weekly mental workouts and pre-competition preparation tips.
Every two weeks, experts have a session with HeadSet athletes to discuss the details of mental preparation and mental focus as well as discuss how the HeadSet Sports app works. One of the experts is Jason Galea Ph.D who played Division I hockey in college. He and his partner Peter Papadogiannis Ph.D created HeadSet Sports.
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“What we’re trying to do is address any of the things that are coming up with them week to week, month to month as they prepare for their upcoming competitions and qualifications,” Galea said. “What we want to do is … help in any way we could.”
HeadSET originated from the idea of giving athletes mental strength service while creating data so they can track their progress. Then they took their skill set and teachings and put it in an app.
“We had to do was say to ourselves ‘Is there a way to take what we’re doing in private practice and bring it to technology?’” Galea said. “The challenge came into not so much how you recreate ourselves, but how do you create the tools and the work that we do.”
Athletes who signed up through Angel City Sports will have free access for the rest of the year. The programs began on April 14, 2021.
“The athletes that are in are really excited and really grateful,” Frech said. “Jason from HeadSet Sports is a really dynamic guy and I think everyone is gonna rally get a lot out of the class.”
