Discover how to improve your mental game, the next frontier in sports training, to become the Playmaker, no matter your age or experience. Coaches search for it. Parents dream of it. Fans love it. Athletes want it. The playmaker on any sports team possesses it: an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, avoid costly mental mistakes, and ultimately, hold the team together. Now, for the first time, top level coaches and trainers reveal their best practices and the cognitive science research that unlock the secrets of the playmaker's keen sense of awareness. Just as tests of speed, strength, and agility have provided a baseline of physiological biomarkers, coaches can now capture cognitive metrics including attention, pattern recognition, anticipation, and the ability to take quick, decisive action during the chaos of competition. Combining sports psychology with sports science, athletes of all ages, including youth, high school, college and professional, can learn to train their brain under pressure. The Playmaker's Advantage is a groundbreaking book that will educate developing, young athletes, along with their parents and coaches, about this essential creative capability in an accessible, easy to understand method. In this entertaining exploration of cutting-edge sports performance psychology, Dr. Len Zaichkowsky and Daniel Peterson examine the questions:* What is a Playmaker? * Why do current athlete development models and coaching methods not always produce this elusive skill set?* What is "athlete cognition" and how can it be identified, measured and grown?AND THE RESULTS WILL SURPRISE YOU.Featuring interviews and insights from a world-class line-up including:* Mike Sullivan (head coach and two-time Stanley Cup champion, Pittsburgh Penguins)* Brad Stevens (head coach, Boston Celtics* Sidney Crosby (captain and center, Pittsburgh Penguins)* K. Anders Ericsson, PhD, (professor of psychology at Florida State University)* Peter Vint, PhD, (sports performance expert and former high-performance director of the United States Olympic Committee)* Valter Di Salvo, PhD, (director of football performance and science at Aspire Academy)* Mark Newman (former SVP of player development for the New York Yankees)* David Epstein (journalist and author of The Sports Gene)* Steven Kotler (journalist, author and the cofounder of the Flow Genome Project) LEONARD ZAICHKOWSKY, PhD , a professor, researcher and consultant for almost four decades at Boston University, pioneered sport psychology by bringing cognitive neuroscience and sport performance together as an interdisciplinary science. His academic textbooks and research publications demonstrated the importance of an athlete's remarkable brain in anticipating and acting on opportunities during competition.  He has consulted with teams in the NBA,NHL, NFL, MLB, Australian Rules Football, the Spanish men's national soccer team, and Olympic sport organizations around the world. Len is a former president and a fellow of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, a member of the editorial board of the  Journal of Applied Sport Psychology , and currently section editor on psychology for the  International Journal of Health & Sport Science . Recently, the American Psychological Association honored Len with the "Distinguished Service to the Profession" award.  Today, Len is a co-founder and senior consultant at 80 Percent Mental Consulting, advising coaches, teams and sports organizations on developing athlete cognition. Len and his wife live in Fort Myers, Florida. DANIEL PETERSON, MS , is a writer and consultant specializing at the intersection of neuroscience and sports performance. He has combined twenty-five years of technology management experience with his second life as a sports dad and coach to explore how athletes make decisions. Now, ten years later, as co-founder and director of 80 Percent Mental Consulting, he works with coaches, trainers and teams to understand and improve their cognitive game. Dan and his wife live near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.