Photo by: Michael Furman

Steve Portenga graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in engineering, but was destined to build character in student athletes, not design the structures of buildings.

“Engineering wasn’t what I wanted to do as a career,” Portenga said. “So I came out to Colorado to coach skiing in Vail and planned to get a degree in law from DU, but I ended up deciding to get a masters in sports psychology to become a better coach.”

Portenga, the University of Denver’s director of sport psychology for DU’s Division of Athletics and Recreation, admits his path isn’t one that should be modeled by others who dream to have a similar career.

He acknowledges that his initial plan was to work up the ranks of the ski world, where he one day imagined himself running a ski academy.

Portenga’s dreams never came to fruition, because he realized that it was the psychology of sports that was his favorite part of coaching.

He ended up earning his masters at the University of Utah in exercise science and followed that by getting his Ph.D in sports psychology from the University of Missouri. Portenga’s well-rounded background has allowed him to do a lot since his arrival at DU several years ago.

Portenga has been up to a lot since he has been at DU.

Originally he was in the counseling center, but in his second year at DU he switched positions.

He moved across campus, where he spent more than half his time developing the master’s program for University’s Graduate School of Professional Psychology (GSPP).

Portenga then became a full-time teacher at the school.

Now he supervises graduate students on a regular basis and still teaches one class a quarter as an adjunct professor. In the psychology office he is mentoring four doctoral students.

Although he has much influence academically, Portenga’s main influence can be seen in his program built for student athletes, which according to him makes DU one of 13 schools to offer a full-time sport and performance psychologist.

“There is a difference between therapy with a person who happens to be an athlete and sports psychology,” Portenga said.

He says that DU’s sports psychology program is unique compared to the other schools because other school’s programs are built for a group of 500 to 600 athletes and focus primarily on general therapy.

On the other hand, Portenga’s primary focus is to deal with life issues and goals.

“Sports psychology is all about learning what it takes to be great at the things you are invested in,” Portenga said. “We are not necessarily solving issues, rather figuring out all the pieces of the puzzle that go towards achieving one’s goals and dreams.”

Portenga says it is really rewarding to know that all the time he invests pays off when athletes are successful in their endeavors, but still feels challenged to make the field of sports psychology more prominent and available for more athletes.

“It would be better for our field and all the people involved with sports if there weren’t so few programs,” he said. “Because what we usually do is help the athlete with his or her existence of living and surroundings that form their sense of self.”

“To only have a sense of self that comes from athletics leaves an athlete fragile in some ways, because when they have a sense of failure they find a way to hide.”

Portenga feels that sports psychology presents him an ultimatum to get something accomplished in a short period of time.

“There is definitely a time pressure for a sports psychologists,” Portenga said. “This is because athletes come in before a big game or a big meet and  have a need to be met in a limited time, so when they come in the first thing we focus on is whatever they bring into the room.”

For Portenga the pressure of time is an issue he tries to prevent early on in an athlete’s career or a team’s season.

“What I try to do is build things right in the first place by getting to teams in the preseason and communicating with athletes early on in their careers so I can teach them how to approach success and deal with failure,” Portenga said.

Despite his work with individuals, Portenga also works with the team as a whole, whether it be developing coaching methods or placing teams in a situation where they have to work together on projects designed by the athletic administration.

Although his job is to create the right mind set for an athlete to help them yield positive results during competition, Portenga admits that what he cherishes about his job is not team success rather individual growth and maturation.

“If the right things are going on for the individual then the team improves,” he said. “That is the programs job, to help athletes use their interest in sport to help them learn how to become good leaders in sport as well as in life.”

“Ultimately it’s really exciting to see people succeed in sports, but its all about the stuff that you see in alumni athletes that have learned from their sport and have been successful after college because of it,” Portenga said.