About
Embedded inBig Ten athletics.
Dr. Julian Pino is a clinical and sport psychologist, and has been an Embedded Athletic Psychologist at a Big Ten university since August 2024. He provides individual therapy, sport performance services, and outreach across its athletic programs: baseball, tennis, golf, wrestling, track and field, cross-country, and soccer. He works most closely with baseball and with the men’s and women’s tennis and golf programs, where he is involved with all five squads through the competitive season. Inside the department he also serves as Substance Use Liaison, Testing Liaison, and staff liaison to the Black Student Athlete Association.
Pino Performance is his private practice. Sport psychology is the main focus, with athletes at every age and level of competition, in any sport. The programs named above are where he is placed inside a university department, not a limit on who he works with: pressure, attention, routine, and identity behave much the same whether a season is scored in innings, matches, meets, rounds, or bouts. For clients in Nebraska, where he is licensed, that extends to therapy and to people who are not athletes at all. Outside Nebraska the work is performance only, with clinical services expected to follow soon.
He earned his Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology from Nova Southeastern University in 2023, where he also completed his M.S. and B.S. in Psychology. Before Nebraska came a post-doctoral fellowship at Brighter Life Therapy in the Boston area, working with college students and working professionals and building services for athletes moving back into ordinary life, and a pre-doctoral internship with the Broward Sheriff’s Office, delivering crisis intervention to people facing severe mental illness. He trained and shadowed in the Boston Red Sox minor league system and with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
He played three years of Division II varsity baseball at Nova Southeastern and was a national champion there in 2016, so the pressure is familiar from the inside. He publishes and presents on trait anxiety and emotional self-regulation in professional mixed martial artists. The work draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), tailored to whatever the client actually walked in with: performance demands, a life transition, or emotional regulation.