Everything the athletes at Hiroshi Allen’s Summerlin karate studio do, they do through the lens of a cutting-edge, widely used sports psychology philosophy developed just across town at UNLV.

Perry Woodward was gathering his belongings after officiating a recreational basketball game between teenagers on Tuesday night when he peeked onto the adjacent court at Doolittle Community Center to see the status of another game.

As a 22-year-old, amateur boxer, Bradley Donohue always burned out before the third round. As his muscles tightened, his mind would go into overdrive as he tried to plan his next move and guess his opponent's. Between rounds one day, a watching sports psychologist told him, essentially, he needed to chill: "The ring is your playground. Your playground. It's simple, hit. Hit and don't be hit."

There are some tools athletes use to harness their anger that might help the rest of us.

Sports psychologists deem Simone Biles's actions to prioritize her emotional well-being a huge win for mental health and a huge step forward for acknowledging what ‘healthy’ competition actually looks like.

Skip Bayless, perhaps the most hated media personality in all of sports, recently made some remarks about Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott that most people considered over-the-top insensitive — even for Bayless.

Unfortunately there is still the internalized perception that football is a “manly” sport and that “real men” don’t talk about their feelings — that to ask for help amounts to admitting weakness — and thus mental health issues are often brushed aside.

The pressures of modern youth sports are creating stress related mental health issues in young athletes. But there’s a non-traditional way of addressing this stress. That’s what we learned during our interview with Bradley Donohue, a psychology professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), and director of The Optimum Performance Program in Sports (TOPPS), a mental health program for athletes.