I became interested in mental performance because I struggled with it myself. I competed in wrestling at a high level, including Division I competition, but I often felt my competitive results did not reflect what I was capable of in training.

I knew how to work hard, and I understood physical preparation and technical development. What I did not have was a deliberate framework for training confidence, focus, composure, response to adversity, and the mental demands of competition.

After wrestling, I kept putting myself into unfamiliar and demanding environments, partly because I wanted to understand what happened when I pushed outside my comfort zone and had to deal with uncertainty, discomfort, setbacks, and sustained challenge. In 2018 I left San Diego with my dog on a five-month bicycle journey toward Panama, beginning on the Baja Divide before continuing along a self-designed route through Central America. The ride also raised money for Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders. The physical challenge was significant, but the more enduring lessons were mental: managing discomfort, solving problems alone, adapting when plans failed, and continuing forward when motivation was not enough.

Those lessons continued through military service. As a Marine infantry officer, I met many of the same questions in different forms through infantry training, mountain warfare training, deployments, and leadership responsibilities—environments where preparation, judgment, adaptability, and composure mattered.

In 2022 I returned to endurance cycling on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route with a personal goal of finishing in fewer than forty days. A difficult start and an Achilles injury put that goal in doubt, and the second half required me to adapt, manage setbacks, and keep executing against something no longer guaranteed. I finished in 39 days.

The point of these experiences is not the mileage or the finish time. Across wrestling, military service, endurance challenges, and coaching, the same questions kept surfacing: Why do capable people sometimes struggle to access what they have trained when it matters? What changes when pressure rises? How do performers regain effective action after something goes wrong? How is confidence built before it is needed? How do we convert difficult experience into greater future capability?

Those questions eventually led me into the deliberate study of sport and performance psychology. Team SA Performance grew from that journey—the practical mental performance framework I wish I had understood when I was competing, and one I now use to approach my own challenges while sharing it with other performers, coaches, and leaders.