While most would consider him simply a sports psychologist, Dr. Jerry Lynch is a coach, mentor, and teacher who guides and coaches athletes and parents to explore the meaning and purpose of sport as a powerful vehicle to help us understand the mental-emotional-spiritual components of the athletic game and how they apply to the bigger game called LIFE. In the process of this exploration, overall athletic performance is greatly enhanced.
Dr. Lynch has a deep calling, one where his success is not measured by “making a living” but rather by “making a difference” in the athletic and personal lives of those with whom he works. He helps others to understand how sport is a microcosmic classroom for helping athletes, coaches, and parents of sports kids develop crucial capacities to love, respect, and care for each other while simultaneously learning to enhance the spiritual elements of courage, commitment, compassion, patience, perseverance, sacrifice, integrity, trust, belief, and selflessness: the values so absolutely essential to extraordinary performance in athletics and life.
Using an unconventional approach, he combines Eastern thought, Native American tradition, Christian mysticism, and Western psychology to help coaches, parents, and athletes to create confidence, mental toughness, inspiration, and empowerment for competitive events and to better navigate the uncharted waters of sports parenting and life.
Dr. Lynch has been recognized as one of the top five in his profession nationwide. He has worked with collegiate men’s and women’s basketball, lacrosse, soccer, tennis, golf, and other sports at North Carolina, Duke, Maryland, California, Syracuse, Stanford, Harvard, and Middlebury and continues to work with several teams and parent groups nationally. Several of his clients have participated in various summer and winter Olympic Games. Most recently, he has established a consultancy with Steve Kerr, head coach of the World Champion Golden State Warriors. In the past 30 years alone, he has been part of 54 Final Four and 36 National Championship teams at the collegiate and professional levels.
Dr. Lynch is a well-known and in-demand public speaker at leadership, coaching, athletic, and corporate conventions. He also presents conferences, clinics, and workshops for college and high school coaches, sports parents, and athletes. He is dynamic, entertaining, motivating, provocative, and humorous, presenting topics on Peak Performance and the Way of Champions in a practical, easy-to-apply manner. Some of his presentations include keynote talks at the New Zealand National Academy of Sport, Der Deutsche Schmerztog in Germany, the National Field Hockey Coaches Association convention, the Ironman Sports Medicine Conference in Hawaii, the US Lacrosse Convention, and the NIKE/China Leadership Summit in Lanai, Hawaii.
Dr. Lynch has had extensive media interview coverage including CBS, NBC, and PBS national television, The New York Times, The Oprah Magazine, Sports Illustrated, The Baltimore Sun, Outside magazine, and over 50 national radio broadcasts, podcasts, and webinars.
Dr. Lynch received his doctorate in psychology from Penn State University and has done extensive post-doctoral work in the area of philosophy, Taoist and Buddhist thought, comparative religions, leadership development, and performance enhancement. He has been a national class athlete, having been a member of a national championship team and, to this day, continues to run and bike. He has coached at the high school level as well as AAU sports.
He is the author of 13 books in as many as 10 languages on coaching, leadership, spirituality of sport, warrior spirit, peak performance, and sports psychology. He has nine DVDs on the Way of the Champion, as well as two six-CD audio boxes on Performance in Athletics.
Dr. Lynch is the founder and director of Way of Champions, a performance consulting group geared toward helping others master the inner game for peak performance in athletics and develop the essential spiritual qualities so necessary for the game of life. He maintains a private practice and an extensive sports psychology consultation service for athletes, coaches, and parents around the world.
In this coming year, Jerry is excited to announce that he will be merging his business with John O’Sullivan, CEO and Director of Changing the Game Project, to form a separate nationwide program that will focus on serving the needs of youth sports parents and coaches. Using podcasts, webinars, and “in-person” clinics as platforms, their mission is to create a paradigm shift, a sea change, in how we mentor, teach, and guide these young stars as well as their parents.
Jerry is the father of four high energy, athletic children. He divides his time between his offices in Santa Cruz, California, and Boulder, Colorado, where he works and writes in the spirit of what he teaches and coaches.