Things couldn’t have been more perfect for this U.S. skier.

Prior to a race at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, she had the ideal bib number. She had a great starting spot. She felt great. She felt confident. Then the wind came up just before the race, and it was canceled.

“Right away, I knew she was done,” said Sean McCann, the head of the United States Olympic Committee’s Sport Psychology Department. “She lost focus and could not adapt.”

McCann’s job is to help athletes avoid such pitfalls. The Waynflete School graduate and three other full time USOC staffers consider themselves the team behind the team. Their job is to help shape the mental approach.

McCann, who has worked with the USOC since 1991, has traveled to Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney and Salt Lake City. He left in late July for Athens.

Leading up to the games, his role is to help fine-tune that focus as the athletes prepare for one of their biggest moments.

“At this point, you’re shedding away the things that distract,” said McCann. “We hope at this point they can do that and perform. They have to concentrate on ‘what is it going to take for me to perform well.’ If they can control the anxiety and control the distractions, they can perform to their ability.”

McCann says it is important to provide a stable and supportive presence. He wants to be organized, positive, encouraging, focused and have a sense of humor.

“We have a list of things we think are important to do,” said McCann. “We ask, what does a good psychologist do?’ We try to be that person that an athlete can turn to and get support from.”

The Olympics are four years of work for McCann. Typically, the sports psychology department determines which teams in the USOC can commit to working with his department. With over 40 governing bodies around the country, some athletes and teams are referred to other experts. The ones that begin a relationship with McCann and his staff build on that for the next four years. McCann is currently working with the men’s gymnastics team, the boxers, the shooting team and the cyclists.

The first year is about building relationships, establishing a bond and a sense of trust.

“We call it face time,” said McCann. “So the athletes and coaches get accustomed to having you around them all the time.”

The second year they begin building general skills and later sharpen the individual skills. In the final year, they begin to specialize for the Olympics.

By this point, a pretty good plan is already in place, but McCann is all too aware that things change. Just before he left for Athens, the wife of a softball coach died suddenly.

“We try to plan as best as possible,” he said. “You have to have a game plan, and we work by that, but a lot of stuff is on the fly. We’ve had family members die in every Olympic Games I’ve been involved with.”

The unknown looms larger in Athens. While he’s a veteran of the Olympic experience, many of his athletes and coaches are not. Add in the concerns about security and the scrambling to finish construction, there’s still a great deal of uncertainty.

McCann is originally from Rhode Island. He attended Waynflete in Portland and then earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Brown and a Ph.D in clinical psychology from the University of Hawaii. He became interested in sports psychology while doing research for post-doctorate work. Being a bike racer himself, he was interested in researching pain and how athletes deal with it.

“I started looking at how anxiety plays into that,” he said. “I kind of got into how your thinking affects your performance and how your thinking affects your perceptions.”

He started working at the USOC in an internship in 1991 and has been there ever since. He has found the work fascinating and exciting. While treating dysfunctional families proved quite draining, working with athletes had a different atmosphere. They were positive and willing participants.

He has written a regular sports psychology column for Olympic Coach, a national journal for coaches, and leads workshops on mental skills training in addition to his work with coaches and teams.

“It’s wonderful to see someone you’ve worked with for awhile have success at the Olympics, but it’s also painful when they don’t,” he said. “As a coach support system, you feel the pain when they close in and then don’t get it.”

Still, as the Olympics approach, he is excited about the actual moment he and his teams have worked toward. He’s got three weeks of long and exhausting days, but it can also be a thrilling time.

“It’s really enjoyable as a psychologist,” he said. “This is it. This is where people’s true colors come out. It’s a fascinating study.”

kmills@sunjournal.com