Olympic table tennis team turns to Warren Wilson psychology professor

Bob Swoap serves as sport psychologist for U.S. national team

Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
May 13, 2020

Warren Wilson College Professor of Psychology Bob Swoap was hired to serve as the sport psychologist for the U.S. Olympic table tennis team. Courtesy of Warren Wilson College

When the U.S. Olympic Table Tennis Team Trials tournament concluded in Santa Monica, California on March 1, six of the country’s top players were one step closer to realizing their dream of competing for a medal on a global stage. Just three weeks later, those aspirations were put on hold with the announcement that a global pandemic forced the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to be rescheduled for 2021, representing the first postponement of the modern games for reasons unrelated to war.

For the athletes focusing on representing their countries in the Summer Games, which were initially scheduled to open July 24, the move was a sudden pause in the years of dedication in pursuit of a goal as their reality shifted from intense face-to-face competition to social distancing in the era of COVID-19. 

The U.S. Olympic table tennis team turned to Warren Wilson College Professor of Psychology Bob Swoap for help. 

Sport psychology and table tennis have been of interest to Swoap long before he began his 22-year career with the Swannanoa liberal arts college.

“When I was in graduate school I did a one-year internship in sports science, specifically sport psychology,” he said. “I was working with all sorts of athletes and teams, but one of the teams I was assigned to was the residential table tennis team.”

In 1990, Swoap met Sean O’Neill, who was in the midst of a decorated career in the sport in which he earned eight Pan American Games medals and was a two-time Olympian. O’Neill, a member of the U.S. Team in the competition’s inaugural year as an Olympic event in the 1988 Seoul Games, is the high performance director for USA Table Tennis. 

The two worked together as O’Neill successfully pursued a return to the Summer Games in 1992 in Barcelona. 

“We’ve remained friends through the years and he’s come out and given a guest lecture for my sport psychology class at Warren Wilson,” Swoap said. “He reached out a few weeks ago and said he thought that during all of this craziness, the team could up its mental training and asked if I’d consider doing that.”

Much of Swoap’s remote work with the team focuses on providing support and teaching coping strategies for dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. He develops weekly lesson plans, revolving around a specific topic, for the athletes. 

“They practice that for the week and we come together on a live Zoom meeting to talk about how it’s going,” he said. “The lessons include some standardized sport psychology training, like visualization and goal-setting, but I think what makes it unique is that we’re also spending a good amount of time talking about how to deal with adversity and stress.”

As athletes continue to sharpen the skills needed to cope with living in a world in disarray, the social isolation also creates an opportunity to work on the mental aspect of their games. 

“Table tennis is extremely fast and takes extraordinary concentration, hand-eye coordination and the ability to immediately reset after every point,” Swoap said. “Of course, in table tennis you make a lot of mistakes. So your ability to rebound from those mistakes quickly, and come back to the present moment, is vital to your success.” 

Turning to the basics of mindfulness and attention control has allowed Swoap to offer practical tools for the athletes to use inside and outside of the competitive arena. 

“We’re focusing on how to stay in the present moment and not get worried about what just happened or what’s about to happen,” he said. “So, you can see that actually works for the competition, which they’re preparing for, but also for worrying about the future related to the pandemic.”

While Swoap has worked with athletes in more than 30 sports, his familiarity with table tennis offers him a unique perspective for his role with the U.S. Olympic Team. He began playing the sport as a young child and he still competes regularly with the Asheville Table Tennis Club. 

“I think I can speak the language and understand the technical concerns that the elite players have,” he said. “Even though I’m not at that level, we still play on the same size table and deal with spins, loops and blocks.”

While table tennis has long been part of his life, Swoap makes an effort to better understand the athletes he works with by participating in the sports in which they compete. 

“That helps me understand some of what they’re going through,” he said. “But, that has limits. For example, I don’t do gymnastics, even though I work with gymnasts. And, I’ve never been a place kicker, even though I’ve worked with place kickers.”

The Asheville resident also operates a website — robertswoap.com — which highlights athletes and offers his perspective from the field of sport psychology.