Jodi Yambor enters her ninth year as Thomas University Athletics’ director of optimal performance training (OPT) in 2022-23.
In various capacities, Yambor has been employed at Thomas since 1993. She currently serves in the OPT unit and as a professor in the Department of Arts and Sciences. The OPT council meets twice a semester and holds injured student-athlete workshops twice a month. The unit also initiates leadership workshops and senior exit interviews.
Prior to the OPT, Yambor supervised the internship of the graduate students in the sports psychology department at Florida State University.
Before her time at FSU, Yambor served at the University of Miami’s athletic department as a performance enhancement specialist through the late 80's until the early '90s. Later, Yambor also coached the Hurricane swimming team and worked as a sport psychology consultant for the athletic department. Yambor was the first sport psychology consultant hired full-time by an NCAA Division I athletic department. While at the UM, Yambor worked with the football, basketball, baseball, tennis, swimming and diving, track & field, golf, and crew teams. In 1990, she was chosen as one of the sport psychology consultants for the U.S. Track and Field team.
As a collegiate swimmer, Yambor earned six individual All-American honors and nine as part of relay teams during her Hurricane career. She won consecutive national championship titles in 1976 and 1977 as part of the 200 meter medley relay team that set new American records each year. Yambor placed sixth in the nation in the 50 meter freestyle (24.55) at the 1977 Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) Championships and helped lead the Hurricanes to back-to-back national championships in 1975 and 1976. In 1998, Yambor was inducted into Miami’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
The Farmington Hills, Mich., native earned a bachelor of arts in Psychology, graduating Cum Laude, from the University of Miami in 1978 and obtained her master of science in Motor Learning (1980) and her doctorate of philosophy in Sports Psychology (1984) from FSU. Yambor is a certified AASP consultant and a member of the USOC Sport Psychology Registry.
Currently, Yambor resides in Tallahassee, Fla.
