Dr. Lenny Wiersma joined Cal Athletics as a Senior Mental Performance Consultant in 2022. He primarily works with Olympic sports, providing mental performance consultation to student-athletes, coaches, and teams.
Before arriving at Cal, Dr. Wiersma was the Director of Performance for a professional esports organization in Los Angeles, providing comprehensive performance consulting.
He also previously served as a Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton for more than twenty years. In this post, Dr. Wiersma taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in Sport and Performance Psychology, was the Director of the Performance Psychology Laboratory, and mentored several prominent mental performance consultants currently practicing in various high-level capacities. He retired from CSUF as an Emeritus Professor of Kinesiology in 2021.
Dr. Wiersma has extensive experience consulting with collegiate, Olympic, and professional athletes. Clients have included big-wave surfers, extreme backcountry skiers and snowboarders, ultramarathon runners, Crossfit Games champions, and UFC fighters. He is listed on the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee Mental Performance Directory and currently is a member of the High-Performance Committee of USA Surfing, working with national-level surfers in preparation for National and International competitions, including the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. He has also worked and traveled with the National Team of USA Swimming, specializing in Open Water. He has published over 50 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and over 50 articles or interviews in popular media outlets. He has served on the advisory boards of the Nike Sport Research Lab and USA Swimming's National Team Mental Health Council and Sports Medicine Committees.
Dr. Wiersma is certified in Neurotracker and Everything DiSC applications. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Kinesiology from Whitworth University and his Master's and Doctorate degrees in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Springfield College. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area."
