Barbara Meyer can’t help herself. Whether she’s working with Olympic athletes, advising a college soccer team or standing in line at the grocery store, she’s always analyzing performance.
“I’ll be in the checkout line and say to my husband, if the cashier and the bagger set up a system and were planning and communicating together, they could be so much more effective,” said Meyer, a professor of sport and performance psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “And my husband’s like, ‘Barbara, don’t bother them.’ But I see performance in everything.”
For Meyer, it’s not about perfection; it’s about potential and improvement. And honing every aspect — physical, mental and emotional — to help people perform.
“I’m just fascinated with performance,” she said. “How people become the best and stay the best.”
That fascination has taken her from university campuses to professional locker rooms and Olympic ski slopes. It’s enabled her to apply her approach not only to athletics but to anything that requires focus, resilience and excellence. As director of UWM’s Sport and Performance Psychology Laboratory, Meyer and her students advance new research to tackle real-world problems related to performance.
“There is nothing more energizing for me than getting in the trenches,” Meyer said. “I have the best job in the world.”
A passion for teaching and a talent for training
Raised in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, Meyer played tennis at UW-Eau Claire and planned to become a dentist. But a well-timed article her mother sent about the emerging field of sport psychology sparked her curiosity. Eventually, that interest led her to Michigan State, where she earned a master’s and a PhD in health education, counseling psychology and human performance.
In grad school, after she spent weeks preparing a single 50-minute statistics lecture, Meyer also discovered a passion for teaching.
“Once I got up there, I never wanted to sit down,” she said. “I loved the challenge of trying to make the complicated simple. If I could connect with students, reduce their anxiety and increase their confidence, I could help them perform better.”
Following her graduation in 1991, Meyer came to UWM as a visiting professor, and several years later a tenure track position opened up. “This has been my one and only real job ever since,” she says.
Meyer’s off-campus clients might disagree. Over the years, Meyer has provided services to world-class athletes, professional organizations and college teams in a dozen different sports, helping them gain a competitive edge and achieve success.
She’s also worked every Winter Olympics since 2002, when an Australian aerial skier who won a gold medal called Meyer her “secret weapon.” Meyer consults with athletes on returning from injury, concentrating under pressure, overcoming fear of failure and performing at their best.
“The most humbling thing is that people invite you on their journey,” she said. “Whether it’s a first-generation student pursuing their degree or an athlete chasing a lifelong dream, they’re trusting you to help.”
Meyer’s Olympic streak continues next month, when she’ll be working with the Australian team at the 2026 Winter Games in Italy.
Real problems, real solutions
At UWM, Meyer’s work extends beyond athletes to include tactical and corporate populations — police officers, military members, business leaders — who also operate in high-performance environments.
For example, Meyer and co-instructor Kyle Ebersole, a performance and sport physiologist, recently collaborated with the Milwaukee Fire Department to better understand the retirement transition of firefighters — many of whom face challenges related not only to career change, but shifts in identity and social support.
“There was nothing out there on the topic,” she said. “So, we used the sport research of professional athletes transitioning to retirement as our foundation and collected data on firefighters to see what their experiences were like.”
Another time, a college hockey player was looking for tips to mentally prepare to compete against his brother. Again, there was no existing body of work on the subject, so Meyer’s team created it, and the project resulted in three published studies. Through her integration of teaching, research and service, Meyer has helped position UWM as a leader in performance psychology.
“We aren’t in an ivory tower,” she said. “We’re out engaging in the community and doing the work, and I think that’s what makes our program unique.”
Written by James Carlton
Link to original story: https://uwm.edu/news/uwm-professor-uses-sport-psychology-research-to-solve-real-world-problems/