Preaching what he practices
If he hadn’t been in the right place at the right time, Auburn University faculty member Ford Dyke knows his life might be very different.
“If I had attended or worked at any other institution, I wouldn’t be doing all the really cool work that I’ve done in the past 10 years,” he said. “It’s really humbling, and I am super grateful to have all these opportunities. That’s how things transpire when you’re connected to really good people.”
Getting started
Armed with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Dyke began his time at Auburn in 2012 as a graduate student studying kinesiology in the College of Education. Through his coursework, he began to realize how much the mind and body were connected, and it changed the trajectory of his future.
“When I came to Auburn, it opened a completely different perspective for me to start to study the vessel that carried the brain — that is, the body from the neck down,” Dyke said. “And then toward the end of that master’s program, I realized those two things don’t happen in isolation. So, I decided to study psychophysiology, which is the mind-body connection, for my Ph.D., and that opened yet another layer of perspective for me.”
“I was able to study the effects of outdoor environments on the brain from an attentional regulation and attentional restoration standpoint,” Dyke said. “That was nice because it was full circle to where I was from and how I grew up.”
Eventually, Dyke earned his doctorate and was hired as a full-time faculty member in kinesiology, where he currently teaches pillars of performance and health, motor learning and performance and exercise and sport psychology. With the help of Olympian Reita Clanton, kinesiology’s former performance and health optimization coordinator, he created an outreach program called Mindfulness@Auburn, and he now speaks about the mind-body connection to any group who invites him, whether it’s across campus or on the other side of the world.
Building Mindfulness@Auburn
Mindfulness@Auburn began as a class in 2013 and quickly expanded as word spread about the important lessons Dyke and Clanton were sharing.
“We just started to showcase the value of evidence-based constructs centered around kinesiology,” Dyke said. “We started teaching a class out of Human Resources Development and then it just kept going and expanding and opening up more opportunities. We’ve been to the Harbert College of Business, the College of Sciences and Mathematics’ (COSAM), the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Nursing — we’ve been all over the place.”
Dyke works closely with the Harbert College’s Executive MBA program, meeting with cohorts as soon as they begin and touching base with them any time they’re back on campus. He also welcomes students to Auburn through the COSAM graduate student orientation program, teaching them to utilize breathing to improve cognitive clarity, awareness and concentration. Using an evidence-based approach to performance, health and well-being, Dyke lectures on hydration, nutrition, movement and recovery and their ability to facilitate memory consolidation, retention and retrieval, as well as support health and well-being.
Dyke’s schedule is packed: he has a full-time teaching load, oversees more than 150 students, volunteers with Auburn Adapted Athletics and is the head coach for the Team USA Wheelchair Handball National Team. But when someone expresses an interest in learning about mindfulness, he can’t help but accept an invitation to speak.
“There’s a lot of things spinning, and I have to be careful when it comes to my own balance, but anytime someone reaches out for a speaking engagement, I love doing that,” he said. “I love connecting and sharing some of these constructs and techniques.”
The U.S. wheelchair handball team poses together after a medal ceremony, smiling in front of an American flag with medals around their necks inside a large indoor arena.
Performance coaching
A former Team USA athlete, Dyke was working for Auburn Adapted Athletics as a strength coach when Auburn wheelchair basketball Head Coach Robb Taylor asked him to transition into a larger role as a performance coach. Now, Dyke meets regularly with coaches and athletes. both individually and as teams. He considers himself a “bridge” between the two groups and works to optimize team performance and prioritize individual health and wellness.
“I’m always ready and available for calls or meetings or appointments just to try to serve our student-athletes as much as possible,” Dyke said. “Adapted athletics is not the same as a Division I athletic program, where you have all the bells and whistles available to you, and unfortunately, affordances are different. For me, it’s really important to continue that relationship, not only with Coach Taylor, but with the student-athletes as well.”
He travels with Auburn’s three adaptive athletics teams: wheelchair basketball, wheelchair tennis and power soccer. This past year, he journeyed to Australia with Auburn athlete Zach Dickey when he competed at the world championship with the U.S. Power Soccer National Team. Dyke thought that travel was exciting — until a single phone call brought forth an even bigger trip.
A whirlwind season and a silver medal
About a year ago, a former Team USA handball teammate called with an interesting proposition. He knew Dyke was an expert in adaptive athletics, a well-liked coach and a former handball athlete; would he be interested in creating a Team USA wheelchair handball national team from scratch? Dyke accepted without knowing quite what it would involve.
“Building that team is probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “We had to identify sponsors, partners, funding, resources, equipment, facilities, locations, staff, personnel — everything from A to Z. I learned more in four months than I learned in four years of doing my Ph.D. It was just the most compressed amount of time and focus.”
On May 16, Team USA was awarded the wild card slot for the World Championships. Dyke jumped into action and held training camps in July and August, narrowing the team to a roster of 10 athletes. In September, they traveled to the championship tournament in Cairo, Egypt, playing two “friendlies” and several preliminary matches before competing in the final championship game, where they placed second.
Though finishing runner-up was completely unexpected and a huge accomplishment, Dyke has even bigger plans. He hopes to reconvene the team later this year for training, possibly on Auburn’s campus, with an eye on international competition in 2025 and the next World Championships in 2026. Wheelchair handball will be a demonstration sport at the 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles and could very well be in the official sport lineup at the 2032 Paralympics in Brisbane, Australia.
“We obviously are really happy with the silver, but we’re not satisfied,” Dyke said. “We want to go for the gold in ’26, which then sets us up for demonstration games in L.A. in ’28 and puts us on the international docket for 2032 in Australia.”
Take a minute to recharge
With all that international travel, not to mention teaching, coaching and speaking, Dyke has to find time for mindfulness in his own life. He still spends as much time outside as he can, citing recent research on “grounding.”
“They’ve shown that, even if it’s for less than five minutes, you’re going to take your shoes off and just place yourself into the grass and be quiet,” he said. “I’ve always been a big proponent, even as a kid, that I don’t like to just say something and then not follow through with it. I don’t like to practice what I preach; I like to preach what I practice.”
He continues to share his message with others that mind and body are connected, telling his students, his athletes and anyone else who will listen that if they don’t take care of themselves, they’ll eventually burn out.
“I live the core principles of mindfulness 24/7, in my performance coaching, as a head coach, as a professor, a mentor, an advisor — all the different hats, all the different roles, I take them seriously,” he said. “And I don’t think I can perform at a high enough level if I don’t take care of myself. As a kinesiologist, I know the research behind the value of movement and sleep and hydration and nutrition and recovery, and so those are the things that I value the most, and I let everything else kind of take care of itself.”