The Intake Process: Establishing a Relationship, Aims, Expectations and Boundaries

Continuing the theme of identifying and then critically examining key tasks that every sport psychologist undeniably performs, we have the intake process. Technically, without performing some type of ‘intake’, the sport psychologist could not have any clients and would be reduced to simply writing for an unknown audience (i.e., blogs, books, etc.) or perhaps just theorizing in private. Intake really is an unavoidable, and therefore very important, component of the sport psychology process. In order to establish a helping relationship with a client (individual or team), there must be a phase in which a relationship is formed and formal/informal rules are agreed.