Professor Emeriti honoured with mentorship award naming

The Brawley and Elliott Award for Excellence in Supervision and Mentorship will be awarded to a supervisor or mentor attending the Canadian Society for Psychomotor Learning and Sport Psychology (SCAPPS) Conference.

“Frankly, it came as a pleasant surprise,” said professor emeritus, Dr. Larry Brawley. “Trying to do the best job you can with trainees and striving for excellence has always been my objective. At the same time, however, great collegial and friendship relationships develop because these people are under your formal guidance for a minimum of two to six years and beyond.”

Dr. Brawley and co-naming honouree, Dr. Digby Elliott, were notified by Dr. Tanya Berry on behalf of the Executive Board of the Society and asked to let their names stand. Once they accepted the honour, the announcement was made public to the entire membership.

“To be named along with Dr. Digby Elliott, who was also a Senior Canada Research Chair (McMaster) is also a great part of the honour because so much of his career was also dedicated to excellence in training and mentoring. To be together, to help present the first awardees at the inauguration of this award at SCAPPS 2019 in Vancouver this Fall will be pretty special and a great memory to have about the Society.”

Dr. Brawley has been involved with SCAPPS for his entire career as a presenter, both individually and collaboratively, a keynote speaker and in symposia. He held the position of program coordinator for the sport and exercise psychology division of the program for the annual conference for several years and served as a contributing member on numerous committees. An additional honour that Brawley cherishes is being named as a Fellow of SCAPPS, which only a few longstanding members and contributors hold.

"We believe Dr. Brawley and Dr. Elliott are the most deserved candidates for this dedication because the impacts of their supervision have spanned the last three decades of SCAPPS, and still continue to be impactful today,” said the SCAPPS Executive Board.

Giving credit to the Society, Dr. Brawley acknowledges that SCAPPS provided him with opportunities to put his research and his graduate students on the national stage for scientific peer review. “It served as a proving ground for my graduate students to gain experience presenting our research in front of a national audience of scientists and other trainees,” said Dr. Brawley.

SCAPPS held its initial meeting in 1969 in Edmonton, AB. The meeting was to bringing together scholars, faculty, and students who showed interest in research in psychomotor learning and sport psychology. In 1977, it was founded as a society in Banff, AB and quickly became the National Scientific conference to attend for anyone interested in the fields of exercise/sport psychology and psychomotor learning/motor control.

Currently, Dr. Brawley is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan after serving 14 years as the Senior Canada Research Chair in the College of Kinesiology.  He still remains involved in grant funded research and in publishing with former trainees and colleagues at other institutions.  In May, he was an invited visiting scholar at the University of Grenoble in France, to provide a keynote address and work with professors and graduate students.

https://www.scapps.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Brawley-and-Elliott-Award-for-Excellence-in-Supervision-and-Mentorship-Guidelines_lt.pdf