Explore every episode of the podcast Dr. MCB’s Curiosities

Episode 1 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: What is the landscape of professional sport?

Nadia has been a team's video coordinator for five seasons. A new head coach arrives with his own people, her work is quietly redone, and she stops flagging what only five years of watching one division can show you. By spring her contract isn't renewed. Dr. MCB opens the series with her story, then asks you to stop looking at the people for a minute and look at the building. Elite sport, she argues, is not a harder version of a normal workplace but a different kind of organization, and she maps the eight pressures that shape it, with one thing to watch in your own building for each: everyone on a different clock, more people than places, the body as the workplace, evaluation that never stops, power gaps, inherited habits, constant turnover, and what sustained stress does to the brain that's trying to cope. Along the way she tells two research stories: Emily Kroshus and colleagues' 2015 survey of college athletes, in which the pressure athletes felt from coaches, teammates, parents and fans to keep playing went with a lower intention to report a concussion, and Alfred University's national survey of college athletes in the late nineties, in which about eighty percent reported experiences that met the definition of hazing while twelve percent said they had been hazed. From there she explains the silence calculus, the quiet arithmetic people do before speaking up, names three different kinds of silence, shows why the training room is where athletes actually open up, and asks why nobody fixes any of this: the handcuffs are golden. The episode's answer: what we're dealing with is a different kind of organization under pressures that stack, which make silence, hidden injuries and short-term decisions the smart move and leave the most information with the people least able to use it. The first job isn't to fix that. It's to make an honest map of your own building, a map, not a score. The episode also lays out the seven questions the series will ask, in order.

This series draws on The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership by Dr. Marie Claire Bourque and Madeline Antony (Routledge). Find the book.

Sources mentioned

Research papers

• March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. DOI
• Nixon, H. L. (1992). A social network analysis of influences on athletes to play with pain and injuries. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 16(2), 127–135. DOI
• Kerr, Z. Y., Register-Mihalik, J. K., Marshall, S. W., Evenson, K. R., Mihalik, J. P., & Guskiewicz, K. M. (2014). Disclosure and non-disclosure of concussion and concussion symptoms in athletes: Review and application of the socio-ecological framework. Brain Injury, 28(8), 1009–1021. DOI
• Kroshus, E., Garnett, B., Hawrilenko, M., Baugh, C. M., & Calzo, J. P. (2015). Concussion under-reporting and pressure from coaches, teammates, fans, and parents. Social Science & Medicine, 134, 66–75. DOI
• Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1(1), 173–197. DOI
• Audas, R., Dobson, S., & Goddard, J. (2002). The impact of managerial change on team performance in professional sports. Journal of Economics and Business, 54(6), 633–650.
• Arnsten, A. F. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. DOI
• Woo, E., Sansing, L. H., Arnsten, A. F. T., & Datta, D. (2021). Chronic stress weakens connectivity in the prefrontal cortex: Architectural and molecular changes. Chronic Stress, 5, Article 24705470211029254. DOI
• Gouttebarge, V., Castaldelli-Maia, J. M., Gorczynski, P., Hainline, B., Hitchcock, M. E., Kerkhoffs, G. M., Rice, S. M., & Reardon, C. L. (2019). Occurrence of mental health symptoms and disorders in current and former elite athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 53(11), 700–706. DOI
• Pilkington, V., Rice, S. M., Walton, C. C., Gwyther, K., Olive, L., Butterworth, M., Clements, M., Cross, G., & Purcell, R. (2022). Prevalence and correlates of mental health symptoms and well-being among elite sport coaches and high-performance support staff. Sports Medicine—Open, 8, Article 89. DOI
• Bernier, M., Bagot, P., Sondt, N., Levillain, G., Vacher, P., Doron, J., Martinent, G., Fournier, J. F., & Kermarrec, G. (2025). The effectiveness of psychological interventions in elite sport: methodological issues and opportunities to gather evidence. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1516760. DOI

Books and reports

• Hoover, N. C. (1999). National survey: Initiation rites and athletics for NCAA sports teams. Alfred University. Report (PDF)
• Bridgewater, S. (2010). Football management. Palgrave Macmillan.

About the host

Dr. Marie Claire Bourque

Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.

Dr. MCB’s Curiosities starts with a question. Dr. Marie Claire Bourque (Dr. MCB), a psychiatrist, explores the research through a podcast episode or a connected series. Neuroscience, human behaviour and clinical medicine are some of the places those questions can lead.

Follow the search in plain language: what we know, how we know it, and what remains uncertain.

About the host: Dr. Marie Claire Bourque

Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.