Swimming Australia Performance Psychology Delivery Specialist - Pathways
Swimming Australia (SA) is the peak governing body for swimming in Australia, from community participation through to elite performance. Swimming Australia’s High Performance (HP) vision is to win when it matters to inspire a nation.
To achieve this vision, our aim is to cultivate a High-Performance culture across our business and engage a team who are not only excited about our ambitions, but aligned to our Values of Courage, Unity and Excellence. We strive to have an operational and support team that is highly engaged, serious about leadership, and working through a lens of continuous improvement.
We are looking for a Performance Psychology Delivery Specialist - Pathways who is responsible for designing, leading and embedding performance psychology capability across the national pathways system (inclusive of para pathways), equipping athletes and coaches with practical mental skills for training and race execution, and integrating best-practice approaches within the Daily Performance Environment (DTE). The primary objective of the engagement is to deliver athlete education at camps, build coach capability to lead mental performance consistently, and conduct targeted program visits with pathway coaches to co-create pressure simulations, race-readiness routines, and feedback processes that transfer to competition.
What You’ll Do
- Design and deliver educational workshops and activities at NextGen-style camps (i.e. stroke/event-specific) and para pathways camps, teaching mental skills (attention control, imagery, self-talk, pre-performance routines, arousal regulation) linked to technical and tactical demands
- Integrate Athlete Wellbeing learning (self-regulation, resilience, values, integrity) to support holistic development and sustained performance
- Lead coach development sessions and on-deck mentoring to embed mental skills into session design (objectives, cues, feedback, constraints). Emphasise coach-led delivery for habit formation
- Co-design pressure simulations that reflect competition demands (e.g., consequence structures, judgment cues, selection stakes), ensuring transparency, collaboration, and structured review
- Support coaches to build race execution models and pre-race routines; align mental skills with technical speed/efficiency objectives
- Conduct full-week immersions with identified pathway coaches (approx. 4–6 coaches/year) to embed principles: message delivery, clear expectations, feedback quality, pressure acclimatisation, debriefing
What You Bring
- A minimum of five (5) years’ experience in High Performance sport with proven delivery in interdisciplinary High Performance teams to embed psychology services with coaches and athletes
- Proven delivery of mental skills training and pressure training integrated within training and competition contexts
- Demonstrated capability to coach coaches to embed psychology within the daily performance environment
- Demonstrated ability to design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure the effectiveness of performance psychology services, including analysis of athlete outcomes and coach feedback to achieve continuous improvement
- Demonstrated high level understanding of the standards and demands on High Performance athletes
- Strong communication (both verbal and written), negotiation and interpersonal skills
Service Commitment
This role is contracted on a flexible delivery model aligned to the High Performance calendar, equivalent to 80 days per year.
Swimming Australia, we celebrate diversity and champion inclusion. We believe innovation comes from different perspectives, and we’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued and empowered.
We are also committed to promoting and protecting the safety and wellbeing of children and young people through our safeguarding children practices. Candidates should be aware this includes a number of screening processes during the recruitment and selection process to ensure we uphold this commitment. All employees at Swimming Australia are required to hold a valid employee Working with Children and a satisfactory criminal history check.
