International Women’s Day this year is March 8, 2022. To celebrate, CanPL.ca will be profiling some of the women working in Canadian soccer who help make the sport great.

In the course of a season, high-level athletes spend countless hours working on the physical attributes of their sport: their shooting ability, for instance, or their strength and agility.

More recently, though, teams and athletes have started to put similar focus on the psychological aspects of their game; particularly in a sport like soccer, where mental acuity and chemistry can make the difference between winning or losing, coaches are wise to ensure their players are in the best possible headspace to perform.

In Halifax, that’s where Danielle Poulos comes in. She recently began working regularly with the CPL’s HFX Wanderers FC as a mental performance coach, and she’ll be working regularly with players to help them find an edge.

“We’re looking to create high performance athletes from the mental standpoint,” Poulos told CanPL.ca. “Just like they might work with a strength and conditioning coach on their muscles and on their overall endurance, I work on the mental side of things. So we talk about things like mental strength, mental flexibility, mental endurance.”

Just as it’s important for athletes to warm up and recover their bodies around a game, Poulos explains that she’ll help players prepare mentally and then recharge following matchday.

“Lots of times when coaches first start to work (with me), they have no idea what I do,” she said. “It’s literally just another coach, with another yearly training plan, aligning with the other coaches so that the athletes can be the best that they can be in every area.”

Poulos, who is quick to point out that she’s not a clinical psychologist, but rather a coach, has a background across a variety of sports. Though originally involved with artistic swimming, she’s been coaching all kinds of athletes for the past 21 years.

That said, she does have plenty of experience with soccer, too; Poulos worked previously with the Dalhousie University team, as well as at the Canada Games. So, she understands well how to adapt her work to the idiosyncrasies of this particular game.

“Things like communication and teamwork are more important than in some individual sports, like racing sports or artistic sports; there’s kind of like three categories, I’ve worked quite a bit in game sports, in team sports like soccer.”

Since January, Poulos has been involved with the Wanderers as part of their Integrated Support Team — a group of professionals brought into the fold to help the club in a variety of ways. Poulos, along with several others, came aboard through her work with Canadian Sports Centre Atlantic (CSCA), a facility and organization that has already worked with the Wanderers previously but will now have a greater connection to the club.

According to Poulos, it was Danielle McNally — the Wanderers’ lead physiotherapist — who noticed during the pandemic lockdown that the club could benefit from mental performance coaching.

So, she arranged to meet with Stephen Hart and his staff to discuss what she could bring to the table. For Poulos, it was important to lay out clearly what the value of her work is — so, she turned to some soccer-adjacent pop culture for help.

“I was using the example of Ted Lasso, and Dr. Sharon that comes in with them,” Poulos recalled. “Ted’s super apprehensive of her, (coaches) see sports psychologists sometimes as somebody who will figure out what’s wrong with the coach, or place blame on the coach, so coaches don’t always see mental performance coaches as in the same boat. So I really did want to meet with Stephen, because I did recognize that this was the first year someone would be working with the team in that capacity.

“We met as a team, just the coaching staff and myself,” she added, “and we’ve been talking about what they kind of saw for my work with the team, and I gave them the framework of what I would be working with over the year. Very much like a yearly training plan that a strength and conditioning coach would create, I have a yearly training plan for the mental skills.”

Throughout training camp and the 2022 season, Poulos will meet regularly with the team, but she’ll also work one-on-one with players according to their own request. There’s no obligation for anyone to meet with her a set amount of times.

In general, players have been quite receptive to the idea of mental performance coaching once they learn about it. Poulos admits that soccer has, occasionally, been a little more difficult to crack, but usually once one player reaches out, the snowball effect of word of mouth leads a handful of others to do likewise.

“There’s been some apprehension in general to sports psychology in the past, I’d say on the men’s side maybe more than the women’s side,” Poulos said. “But what has typically happened is I’ve met with one athlete, and that athlete talks to another about what we met about, and then that other athlete reaches out. By simple word of mouth, without making it known that I’m there to work with them, I think I worked with five or six of the athletes, who totally came up and requested the meeting on their own.”

The perception around mental health and the psychological side of sports has certainly been changing in recent times, and the Wanderers will be hoping their modern approach to making their players better all-around athletes will pay off for them on the pitch.

With Poulos on board, perhaps the Wanderers can find the edge they need.