Rick Aberman had an idea. An idea that some people found unnecessary. He wanted to use his Ph.D. in developmental psychology to help athletes at the University of Wisconsin deal with whatever issues they were experiencing.
This was 1986. Mental health wasn't a topic of conversation back then. Yet Aberman convinced the school to hire him as sports psychologist in the athletic department. Not everyone agreed with the decision. One department official openly wondered if they were setting themselves up for trouble.
"Now we're going to have all kinds of problems that we never had before," Aberman recalls the man saying.
