Erica Force supports Olympic athletes in their quest for gold

A lifelong equestrian athlete, Erica Force, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPS) who serves as a lead psychological services provider for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC). A former U.S. Air Force officer and military psychologist, she has worked with military, youth, NCAA Division I, Olympic and Paralympic, and professional athletes. She also serves as a team clinician for the Washington Commanders. With more than 2 decades of experience, she specializes in performance psychology, injury recovery, anxiety, and stress-related concerns. She is certified in animal-assisted therapy and integrates therapy dogs into her clinical and performance work.

My hope is always to meet people where they are. Each setting has such different demands, cultures, and types of pressure. For example, when I was in the U.S. Air Force as a military psychologist, my focus was on helping airmen function under extreme stress when the stakes were very real, high, and immediate. I also worked with younger airmen still adjusting to being in the military. That role also involved supporting special operations forces under high pressure and high-stakes conditions. In orthopedic sports medicine, it was all about helping athletes understand their injury and treatment plan, which included helping athletes cope with the shock of injury, providing pre- and postoperative education, understanding the injury rehab process and how to navigate it, and supporting athletes with the return to sport process. In the college setting, it is typically a younger population. I often help athletes balance school, sport, and some kind of social life while they’re continuing to grow as young adults and navigate their own identity development. In the professional setting, some of the unique demands many professional athletes experience are related to constant evaluation, feeling pressured by high expectations, and a lack of certainty about the future and job security.

Our team supports athletes by helping them in different areas such as managing pressure, uncertainty, and transitions, and making sure they have access to different types of resources. They have access to our internal team of licensed mental health professionals for clinical or performance-related sessions. Or if they want to work with someone outside USOPC, they can choose from our directory of vetted national and international providers. We also provide 24/7 on-call support for emergencies and have mental health emergency action plans in place. Beyond direct services, we look for ways to diversify resources. For example, we partner with platforms like Headspace and Optimize Mind Performance, which provide self-directed support options. On the day-to-day, we build relationships with athletes, coaches, and teams to support them throughout their preparation leading up to and during big events like the Games. That includes helping them manage the pressure of competition, dealing with travel, the stress of selection, and balancing family and social life with periods of separation. 

Integration is one of the things that helps the most. When mental health and performance services are embedded into a sport environment and team culture is when they are most successful. When leadership, coaches, and medical staff are all buying into them, then athletes see those services as part of the system and trust and use them more. The biggest barrier is disconnection—when mental health or performance support is treated as separate or as an add-on. That separation can make it harder for athletes to trust and access it. 

I grew up as an equestrian athlete. I was very interested in how I could perform better and manage my own performance struggles. My interest in mental performance comes from my own sport experience. As I started to think about going to school and navigating this career path, I realized I wanted to have the ability to support athletes in other areas of their life in addition to performance, such as anxiety, family issues, or other stressors. Becoming a psychologist allowed me to address an individual’s clinical and emotional needs. Becoming a CMPC gave me tools to work on the performance side. With both, I felt like I could help an athlete with the whole picture, as a whole person. Often, an athlete initially comes in to talk about what they are most comfortable with. It may be sport or performance issues, but once we build trust, other aspects of life emerge and those things are connected. If something isn’t going well in sport, it can affect well-being in other areas of their life and vice versa. Having both backgrounds helps me support the whole person and tailor what I provide to whatever balance that athlete needs—more performance focused at times and more clinical at others. 

I love animals. My sport growing up was equestrian show jumping, and I always had dogs as part of my life. When I was in grad school, one of my supervisors had a therapy dog, which introduced me to the concept of integrating a dog into therapy. While working with airmen experiencing PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] in the Air Force in Missouri, the clinic supported me pursuing training with my dog to be certified as a therapy dog team. I also wrote an Air Force instruction that was later approved by our medical commander to integrate this service into our clinic. At Georgetown, where there are 800 student athletes, having a dog helped me to build rapport. While therapy animals are not necessarily an intervention by themselves, when you use them appropriately in therapy with evidence-based care, they can really have some great results.