Back to the future: three myths about applied consultancy work

When Lew Hardy delivered the 1996 Colman Roberts Griffith address, the football premiership champions came from Manchester, the Cheltenham Gold Cup was won by a horse from Ireland and the man with his arms in the Green Jacket at Augusta came from Europe. Sixteen years later and you could be forgiven for thinking that some things never change. But if we reposition our lens, we can trace remarkable advances in science (e.g., mapping the human genome), technology (e.g., MP3, Wi-Fi) and social networking (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) that have transformed our social, economic and political lives. Borrowing this yardstick to measure advances in applied sport psychology (ASP), we question: how has our knowledge and understanding of ASP fared in the intervening years? We wanted to know if we could add more grist to ASP mill by examining the literature related to the three myths about applied consultancy work since 1996.