Performance Psychology for Junior Sport

Liquid Sport Psychology

Dr Callum Gowling provides sport psychology support for elite junior athletes, coaches, and parents to help performance and wellbeing grow together.

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About Liquid Sport Psychology

Support that connects performance, learning, and wellbeing

Liquid Sport Psychology helps junior performers understand the demands of sport, build confidence, manage pressure, and keep developing through strong, collaborative relationships with athletes, coaches, and parents.

The approach is reflective, practical, and research-informed. It is designed to help young athletes and the people around them better understand the psychological challenges that appear in competitive environments.

Who do I work with?

Athletes

I work with national and international athletes from youth sport to professional level. We develop the internal skills to cope with pressure and access their best under pressure.

Team / Organisations

Effective teams include strong individuals working towards a common goal. The performance of a team requires a strong culture and a supportive environment. We help lay the foundations of such environments.

Corporate Leaders

No plan gets executed perfectly and challenges will always arise. We work with leaders and their teams to manage stress and safeguard well-being along the way.

Services

For Athletes

Liquid Sport Psychology adopts a philosophy based on learning, understanding, and accepting sporting challenges. Initial consultation involves identifying the issues that impact an athlete’s sporting performance. We use a self-reflective approach to help athletes understand why mindset affects physical performance, and we work with junior athletes, coaches, and parents to create an individualised personal development programme.

Understanding Challenges

We help athletes gain clarity around the key challenges affecting performance, including motivation, fear of failure, managing expectations, confidence, emotion control, performance anxiety, and pre-performance planning.

Individual Development

Once athletes understand their challenges more clearly, we use a bespoke athlete development model to help them cope effectively and thrive in their chosen sport.

One-to-One Coaching

Personalised one-to-one sport psychology coaching, available face to face or via Zoom.

Tournament Visits

Practical performance support in competition environments through tournament visits.

Group Seminars

Classroom-based seminars designed to help junior athletes better understand performance psychology and personal development.

Free Gift Pack

Athletes working with Liquid Sport Psychology receive a free gift pack including a training top, wrist band, and stress ball.

For Coaches

Research into coaching elite junior tennis players is published by the International Tennis Federation. Coaches, like athletes, must get the best out of themselves so they can help athletes perform and develop. Liquid Sport Psychology supports coaches in understanding how the challenges of coaching influence effectiveness, motivation, and professional self-understanding.

Coaching Expertise Development

We use a model of expertise development to help coaches understand how and why the challenging nature of coaching affects effectiveness, motivation, and professional identity.

Athlete-Related Challenges

Including empathetic accuracy between coach and player, player meta-perspectives and their effect on behaviour, and talent development environment.

Parent-Related Challenges

Including unintentional pressure, reverse dependency, and power relations in the athlete-parent-coach triad.

Coach-Related Challenges

Including self-employment, competition between coaches, and professional self-understanding.

Education Workshops

We offer self-reflective coach education workshops with evidence-based insights into the psychology of coaching, sport pedagogy, coach-athlete relationships, coach-parent relationships, and professional self-understanding.

Research-Led Support

Our approach is informed by research and specialist analysis, helping coaches view performance from player, coach, and parent perspectives.

Challenges We Help With

Motivation
Fear of failure
Managing expectations
Confidence
Emotion control
Performance anxiety
Pre-performance planning

Published Work

Publications and peer-reviewed articles

Dr Gowling’s work has been published by the Lawn Tennis Association, International Tennis Federation, and Sport Coaching Review. The papers below can be downloaded and read at your convenience.