New England and North-west Region of NSW 

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... presentation describes how we have constructed sport psychology as mental equipment for adolescent athletes living in northwest New South Wales (NSW). Using local materials readily found in Moree, Gunnedah, Tenterfield and other towns in northwest NSW, we have been able to introduce adolescent athletes living in regional, rural, and remote NSW to basic sport psychology concepts using mental equipment packs. These low-tech, low-cost, and local resources contrast sharply with the high-tech, high-cost, and imported physical equipment required for most sports. We produced the first mental equipment packs for $1.06 in 2003, and we have continued to use them with athletes and their families and friends via the Northern Inland Academy of Sport (NIAS) Regional Athlete Coach Education (RACE) program. This high-cost/low-cost contrast is an important asset in constructing sport psychology as accessible to regional, rural, and remote athletes, and their families and communities. We understand that these packs, and the service delivery system that accompanies them, is the first program specifically designed for regional, rural, and remote athletes. This work is unconventional because it puts aside the orthodox view that equates basic sport psychology with mental skills. It does this by questioning the view that mental skills are the dialogical opposite to the physical skills needed for success in sport . Despite the developments in psychological skills training (PST) in recent years, there is a gap in literature describing how to service athletes living in regional, rural, and remote locations. Christensen, Lamont-Mills, and Annis-Brown (2007) have shown how the Australian and international sport psychology community have responded to Robin Vealey’s suggestions for advancing psychological skills training (PST) in her influential article, “Future directions in psychological skills training” (Vealey, 1988). A strong record of published works has since emerged that display a variety of approaches and delivery systems aiding a range of performers across many different domains of human activity (e.g., Dosil, 2006). However one group that has been overlooked in these developments has been adolescent pre-elite athletes living in regional, rural, and remote locations. In large countries, such as Australia, adolescent athletes can grow up in areas that are located hundreds of kilometres away from major metropolitan centres. What compounds this issue is that important social services such as health, education, and welfare can be absent or severely limited in these areas, and specialist sporting services rarely exist. Athletes from regional, rural, and remote areas have made a significant contribution to Australia’s sporting success (e.g., Don Bradman, Evonne Cawley [nee Goolagong], Greg Norman, Cathy Freeman, Glenn McGrath). Abernethy (2005) argues that Australian regional, rural, and remote athletes are disproportionately represented in elite athlete ranks. That is, these groups of athletes are overrepresented when considering the population, services, and resources of their home towns. Thus their representation and influence is far greater than what would be expected given their access to services, support, and competition. Not surprisingly, talented adolescent Australian athletes from regional, rural, and remote areas are highly regarded by leading coaches and talent scouts in a range of sports (Bennett, 2002; Charlesworth, 2001). Notwithstanding these findings, we were surprised that there is an absence of peer-reviewed articles specifically about providing sport psychological services to this particular group of athletes when we searched the sport psychology literature. So despite the developments in PST over the past 20 years, we feel that there is a gap in the sport psychology literature in describing how to provide sport psychology services to adolescent athletes living in regional, rural, and remote locations. In this paper we describe our experiences in developing and implementing a basic sport psychology program for NIAS athletes over the past seven years. Central to this program has been constructing sport psychology as mental equipment. NIAS is one of ten regional sports academies located throughout NSW. These regional academies are fully incorporated, autonomous, and community-based organisations that are administered by a Board of (unpaid) Directors and who are members of the local community. Each academy receives an annual operation grant from NSW Department of Sport and Recreation (NSW DSR), and then supplements this with sponsorship and fundraising activities to run various sport development programs. NIAS commenced in November 1992 and has two paid employees: an Executive Officer, Peter Annis-Brown, the third author of this article, and a Sports Administration Officer. NIAS offers between 150-180 scholarships to talented adolescent athletes aged between 14-18 years who live in the New England and North West region of NSW each year (see Figure 1 for a map of the region covered by NIAS). Adolescent athletes are offered a NIAS scholarship on the basis that they apply, submitting a resume of their sporting, school, and community accomplishments, and that they are recognised as talented and conscientious young athletes by their local teachers and community sport coaches. A panel comprising of the Executive Officer, the respective NIAS head coach, and a Board Member select scholarship recipients from these applications for each sport. These scholarships are for 12-months duration and provide opportunities for: (a) specialist sport skills training; (b) introductory sports medicine, nutrition, psychology and media training; (c) physiological testing conducted by the Sydney Academy of Sport mobile-testing laboratory; and (d) a short competition program, including participation in the Academy Games 1 . However NIAS is a small organisation. In 2006, it received an annual grant of $130K from NSW DSR and worked with an annual turnover of approximately $800K to provide ten different sports programs for athletes living in this large and sparsely populated region of NSW. The northwest region of NSW has a population of a little over 180,000 people that are spread across an area of over 98,000 km 2 . This region has a population density of between 0.5-1.1 persons per km 2 for most of the region, and between 1.1-2.8 persons per km 2 for some central areas, and includes three larger population centres in Glen Innes, Armidale, and Tamworth (NSW Government Department of Planning, 2005). But when this region of NSW is compared to Europe and North America, the area covered by NIAS is equivalent to the size of Greece and Oregon. Greece and Oregon each have population densities of 81 persons per km 2 and 35.6 persons per km 2 , respectively (Wikipedia, 2007). When compared to the area serviced by NIAS, this large area of NSW is closer to Alaska (0.42 persons per km 2 ) in North America, and to Namibia (2.2 persons per km 2 ) in Southern Africa (Wikipedia, 2007) than Greece or Oregon. Table 1 displays some of the key geographical and demographic characteristics of this region. As displayed earlier, athletes from regional, rural, and remote areas in Australia have made a significant contribution to the nation’s sporting success (e.g., Don Bradman, Evonne Cawley [nee Goolagong], Greg Norman, Cathy Freeman, Glenn McGrath). Australian regional, rural, and remote athletes are also disproportionately represented in elite athlete ranks (Abernethy, 2005). This is far from a unique Australian phenomenon. Côté and his colleagues have pointed to the disproportionate success of athletes from regional, rural, and remote areas in the United States and Canada across a range of sports (Côté, Macdonald, Baker, & Abernethy, 2006). Returning to the Australian context, Abernethy (2005, 2006) refers to the success of Australian athletes from regional, rural and remote locations as the Wagga-effect. He found that elite athletes from regional, rural, and remote areas have typically played many different sports before settling into their chosen sport, completed in multi-age and adult competitions from a young age, and were discouraged from an early or premature specialisation in one sport (see also Abernethy, Côté, & Baker, 2002). Abernethy argues that the above may be part of the reason for the regional, rural, and remote success story. These aspects are also recurrent themes in Coates’ (2005) book on raising (Australian) champions, and Atkinson’s book on great Australian Olympians (Atkinson, 1999). In July 1999, John Crampton, the then Manager of Athlete Management Services at the New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) contacted the first author to ask him whether he could help provide sport psychology services to NIAS athletes. Crampton who was based at Homebush, site of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, had been contacted by Peter Annis-Brown early in 1999 asking for help from NSWIS sport psychologists. Annis-Brown hoped to include sport psychology in the 2000 NIAS athlete development program. However Annis-Brown recognised that providing sport psychology to NIAS athletes would be complicated by several issues related to the tyranny of distance. The first most obvious issue was how to provide sport psychology services to approximately 150 adolescent athletes who came from such a large geographical area. The second issue was that these 150 athletes from, then, eight different sports were scattered sparsely across this area with no great critical mass of athletes from one sport being located in any one particular ...