Background

I am currently an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology at Lakehead University. My path to this point has been driven by both academics and sport. I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and played a variety of sports before focusing on tennis in my early teens. After graduating high school, I went south to Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina) for a climate more hospitable to tennis. There I played on the varsity tennis team (actually, I practiced for the team way more than I actually competed) and discovered a strong interest in psychology (thanks Dr. Batson!). After graduating with my BSc in psychology, I decided to give tennis one last go and headed over to Europe to play professionally. To my chagrin, I quickly realized that there are a LOT of really good tennis players…and that I wasn’t one of them. I headed back to the US and decided to pursue my interest in psychology more formally. This took me to the Master’s program in General Psychology at Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff, Arizona). Working under the supervision of Dr. Heidi Wayment, I focused my thesis on perfectionism among athletes—an interest that continues to be represented in my research. I loved Flagstaff because there were so many new sports for me to try out, including downhill skiing, mountain biking, and ultimate (Frisbee)—a sport that I’m still passionate about and that is starting to inch into my research. After obtaining my MA, I decided to merge my interests in sport and psychology and headed up north to work towards my PhD in sport psychology under the supervision of Dr. John Dunn at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta). Six great years later, I had a new interest in psychometrics, a dissertation focused on development of the Sport Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale 2 (Sport-MPS-2), and a lot of cold-weather clothes. I didn’t need those clothes in my first academic position at Texas Christian University (Fort Worth, Texas), but they came in handy when I headed back up north and joined the School of Kinesiology at Lakehead University in 2008. Since then I’ve stuck with ultimate (e.g., helped found Thunder Bay Ultimate), discovered some new activities (e.g., nordic skiing, canoeing), and have grown to see Thunder Bay as home.