Contribution to
the International Forums

The achievements of SPAI have been simply outstanding on the international front. The Association played a key role in the formation of Asian South-Pacific Association of Sport Psychology during the 1988-Seoul Olympic Scientific Congress. There, M.L Kamlesh and Anand Kumar from India actively participated in the proceedings of the meeting of the representatives from Japan, South Korea, Malasia, Australia, Thailand, Taiwan, and others. On this occasion, Jitendra Mohan (president, SAPI) was given the position of a vice-president, M.L. Kamlesh taken on the managing council as a national representative.Both held their respective positions for two terms of four years each. In continuity, at 8th International Congress of Asian-South Pacific Association of Sport Psychology, June 29- July 3, 2018, organized by the Korean Society of Sport Psychology at Keimyung University, Deagu, Republic of Korea, on the 30th anniversary of the founding of ASPASP, M.L. Kamlesh was bestowed the ASPASP Fellowship Awardfor his contribution to the formation of ASPASP. While Dilip Dureha, and (late) Jayashree Acharya have been members of the ASPASP Managing Council for various periods, Jolly Roy is currently its member (2022-2026). Notably, Jitendra Mohan and Jolly Roy have had the privilege of being elected members of the Managing Council of the ISSPfor the periods 1989-1997 and 2017-2021 respectively. This apart, Jolly Roy was elected as a member of the Managing Council of the IAAP (International Association of Applied Psychology), Sport Psychology Division for the period 2010-2014. This has helped SPAI to enjoy several privileges and concessions during the international conferences and other scientific programmes.

Service to Sport

Commensurate with the objectives of the SPAI, quite a good number of members have been associated with the training of national athletes and teams. They fall into two categories – duly appointed through a selection process, and those offering voluntary service. In the first category fall H.A. Khan (hockey, boxing, weightlifting, golf), Manoranjini Khan (weightlifting, athletics), Sanjiv Sahni(shooting), Jolly Roy (athletics, hockey, volleyball), Reena Kaul (archery), Anuradha Solanki (weightlifting, hockey, netball, table tennis, volleyball), Deepak Mishra (psychological assessment of trainees under centre of excellence scheme), and others on the regular payroll of the Sports Authority of India. Conversely, there are those who have been rendering voluntary service to training of national and/or state level sportspersons at one time or the other include M.L. Kamlesh (archery), Avinash Sidhu (women’s field hockey), Jayashree Acharya (badminton, track & field), Anil Ramachandran (badminton, volleyball, fencing, football), Suresh Kutty (basketball, athletics, wrestling, kabaddi), Stalin (volleyball, athletics, kho-kho), Soni John (athletics, canoeing, rowing), and others.

Apart from this, there is a huge number of young enthusiastic sport psychologists employed by the government agencies, corporate sector organizations, and/or national sports federations on contractual basis to carry forward of mission of “psychologizing” sport by providing psychological inputs to all categories of sportspersons training for competitions at various centres or in camps.