• Sports Psychology & Performance Coaching

    For competitive athletes at every level — from high school through professional sport — who understand that physical recovery and peak performance both start in the mind.

    Whether you're preparing for the next level, returning from injury, or competing at the highest level of your sport, the mental game is where performance is ultimately won or lost.

  • Phyiscal training without mental training is an incomplete preparation

    Every serious athlete invests in physical development — strength, conditioning, skill, technique. The athletes who consistently outperform their physical peers have one additional advantage: a deliberately trained psychological performance system.
    The mental demands of elite sport are specific and trainable. Yet most athletes arrive at the highest levels of competition without ever having worked on them directly.
    If any of these sound familiar, you're in the right place:
    ✓ Your physical preparation is strong but your performance under pressure doesn't reflect it.
    ✓ You're recovering from an injury and the psychological dimension of that recovery — fear of re-injury, loss of confidence, identity disruption — is as challenging as the physical rehabilitation.
    ✓ You're preparing for a significant transition — from high school to college sport, from collegiate to professional competition — and you want to arrive mentally ready, not just physically ready.
    ✓ You compete at a professional or elite level and you understand that the margin between you and your competition is increasingly psychological.
    ✓ Your performance is inconsistent in ways that physical training alone hasn't resolved.
    The mental performance gap is real, measurable, and addressable. That is exactly what this work is designed to do.

  • Who is this for:

    The athletes Dr. Ingersoll works with

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    High school athletes preparing for college sport

    The transition from high school to collegiate athletics is one of the most demanding performance shifts an athlete faces. New coaching staff, new competition level, new academic demands, and no established support system — all simultaneously. Pre-college sports psychology coaching builds the mental performance framework before that transition happens, not after the first difficult semester reveals the gap.
    Trusted by coaches and trainers at Freak Strength, Oakland NJ — one of the region's premier high-performance athletic training facilities.
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    College athletes managing the demands of elite sport & academics

    Competing at the collegiate level while meeting the academic demands of a serious institution is a performance challenge most people outside of it significantly underestimate. College athletes navigate practice schedules, travel, physical recovery, and competitive pressure simultaneously with coursework, exams, and career development — often without adequate psychological support from their programs.
    Dr. Ingersoll has worked with college athletes across more than 200 institutions at every division level — from Power Five programs to Division III at the country's most prestigious academic institutions. This is not unfamiliar territory. It is some of the most consistent and longstanding work of his career.
    If you're a college athlete whose performance — on the field, on the court, in the pool, or in the classroom — isn't reflecting what you're capable of, this is exactly the work that addresses it.
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    Athletes recovering from injury

    Injury recovery is not complete when the physical rehabilitation is complete. Fear of re-injury, loss of competitive confidence, disrupted athletic identify, and the psychological pressure of return to sport timelines are performance variables that physical therapy alone cannot address. Dr. Ingersoll works directly with althetes and their medical teams to ensure the psychological dimension of recovery receives tghe same rigorous attention as the physical one.
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    Professional and elite-level athletes

    At the professional and elite level, the psychological dimension of performance is no longer optional - it is the competitive edge. Dr. Ingersoll has worked with professional athletes across multiple sports, including in clinical and high performance settings where the stakes and psychological demands are at their highest. This work is private, confidential, and built entriely around the specific demands of your sport and situation.

  • What the work addresses:

    The specific mental performance skills we work on

    ✓ Performance under pressure — competing at your level when the stakes are highest and the margin for error is smallest.
    ✓ Pre-competition mental preparation — the psychological routines and systems that prime performance before competition begins.
    ✓ Injury recovery psychology — managing fear of re-injury, rebuilding competitive confidence, and navigating the identity challenges of being an athlete who cannot compete.
    ✓ Focus and concentration — sustaining attention and resetting quickly when it breaks, regardless of external conditions.
    ✓ Emotional regulation in competition — managing frustration, disappointment, and pressure in real time without derailing performance.
    ✓ Athletic identity and transition — understanding who you are as a competitor and building the psychological foundation that sustains performance through the inevitable transitions sport demands.
    ✓ Team dynamics and leadership — for athletes in leadership roles within their team, the psychological demands of leading peers under competitive pressure are specific and trainable.

  • Bio

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    My careeer has been spent at the intersection of two worlds most practicioners occupy separately: the clinical depth to understand what is actually driving underperformance and the performance coaching framework to do something about it quickly. I began my career at Lehigh University in 2002 as a Staff Psychologist and Coordinator of Alcohol & Other Drug Services, where my work with the university's D-1 athletic programs as a sports psychology consultant began. I later served as Associate Director of Counseling Services while simultaneously building my independent private practice which I founded in 2005 and have maintained as a full-time thriving private ever since. Throughout those years I also served as Affiliate and Adjunct Faculty teaching graduate level coursework in advanced psychopathology, psychopharmacology, and group theory and dynamics. I completed a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Fairleigh Dickinson University, one of a select number of APA-accredited doctoral programs in the country, and hold an MA in Applied Social and Community Psychology - a combination that informs how I work with individuals and the organizational systems they operate within. My research has been published in the Journal of Personality Assessment.

    I founded ClearMind Leadership Lab for people who have always performed at a high level and know they are capable of more. My work isn't therapy and isn't generic coaching. It's a rigorous, evidenced-based approach to performance built around what you speciafically need - whether you're an executive closing the gap between where you are and where your ambition points, an athlete whose mental game isn't matching your physical preparation or recovery, or a student with every capability but not yet the operating system to actualize strengths and talents..

    I'm also the author of Fix-It Fatigue: How Gen-X Parents Can Stop Fixing Everything and Start Raising Adults Who Can Handle Anything, and have been featured as a performance and mental health expert in People Magazine, Fox News, WPIX-11 News, and WFAN.

    If any of this sounds like where you are right now - I'd like to talk.

  • Featured expert in national and regional media

  • How sports psychology coaching with Dr. Ingersoll works:

    Every engagement begins with a thorough understanding of your sport, your specific performance challenges, your competitive history, and your goals. There are no generic programs applied wholesale. The work is built around you specifically.
    ✓ Private 1:1 sessions with Dr. Joel Ingersoll — 60 minutes, structured around your specific performance priorities and adjusted as the work evolves. In-person at Dr. Ingersoll's private office in northern New Jersey or remotely.
    ✓ Performance psychology assessment — a structured evaluation of how you respond to pressure, competition, setbacks, and high-stakes performance moments. This informs every aspect of the engagement.
    ✓ Mental performance systems — specific pre-competition routines, focus protocols, emotional regulation tools, and performance frameworks built around your sport and your psychological profile.
    ✓ Between-session integration — the work doesn't stay in the room. Specific practices and frameworks are applied directly to your training and competition between sessions.
    ✓ Coordination with your team — where appropriate and with your consent, Dr. Ingersoll can coordinate with your coaching staff, athletic trainers, or medical team to ensure psychological performance is integrated with your broader athletic development.
    ✓ Full confidentiality — everything discussed remains entirely private.

  • The investment

    Sports psychology coaching engagements are structured around your specific situation, sport, and goals.

    Single session: $600
    Three-month engagement — twelve weekly sessions: $6,000. Recommended for athletes in active competition or preparing for a significant transition.
    Injury recovery program — eight sessions over eight weeks: $4,400. Designed specifically for athletes navigating the psychological dimension of physical rehabilitation and return to sport.
    Pre-college preparation program — eight sessions over eight weeks: $2,800. For high school athletes preparing for the transition to collegiate sport.
    All engagements billed at the start of the program period.

  • The physical work is done. The mental work is where the edge is.

    The athletes who perform consistently at the highest level of their sport are not just physically superior to their competition. They have trained their psychological response to pressure, adversity, and high-stakes performance moments with the same deliberateness they bring to every other dimension of their preparation.

    That training is available to you.

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