Sport Social Work Certificate Program

This section will explore the vulnerabilities and resiliencies of individuals who participate in youth, secondary, collegiate and professional sports as well as the hazards they encounter at the various levels of their sporting career. This course explores athletes as a vulnerable, historically oppressed, and marginalized populations, prior to, during, and/or, after their journey as athletes. 

This section will explore examples of social justice inside/outside sports and issues of fairness and equity in athletics. Potential social justice topics will include Title IX, equity in coach compensation, adequate compensation for college-athletes, concussion, prevention, awareness, intervention and gender, and athletes’ social movements.

This section provides content on the reciprocal relationships between athlete behavior and their social environments. It includes empirically based theories and knowledge that focus on the interactions between and within the athlete population, their families, their communities, athletic teams, athletic organizations, institutions overseeing athletics, and a global audience of sports enthusiasts. 

This section provides an in-depth examination of the helping process within the context of an ecosystems/developmental framework. The course presents an overview of assessment skills needed to determine the functioning of athletes using a psychodynamic developmental model and descriptive diagnosis, DSM 5. Particular attention is given to the dynamics of development and culture, and to the interrelationship among biological, psychological, and social/cultural systems that impact diagnosis within athletic cultural context.

This section provides an overview of possible interventions, triage options, and recommended courses of treatment for athletes. In particular, treatment modalities will focus on the examination of psychodynamic and cognitive theory. The course will also explore critical aspects of the therapeutic relationship between an athlete and their practitioner, which promotes growth and change. 

​This section outlines the tasks, skills, and values required for social workers to effectively influence athletic policies at the organizational and legislative level. This course aims to introduce the role of sport social workers as “policy practitioners”. This section also focuses on research methods and designs that may be utilized by sport social work practitioners and advocates for evaluating the safety and well-being of athletes of all ages and abilities. Research should enable sport social workers to develop and apply a scientific stance, to acquiring a working knowledge of selected research methods, and to incorporate these elements into the Sport Social Work practice.