Darren Treasure is a high performance sport consultant. Treasure's past and present clients include sport governing bodies and professional athletes in a variety of sports and in the entertainment field. He has worked as a sport psychology consultant with Olympic, World and NCAA national champions and all-American athletes at a number of different Universities. Treasure currently resides in Portland, Oregon, and serves as the High Performance Director for the Nike Oregon Project. In 2010, Treasure was featured in a Runner's World magazine article for his work with Kara Goucher and Alberto Salazar who received a lifetime ban from Safesport. [1] He's also been featured in a number of running periodicals for his work with, among others, the American record holder in the mile Alan Webb, [2] and American long-distance runner Galen Rupp, [3] both of whom were members of the discontinued Oregon Project.
From 2005 to 2009 Treasure was the author and lead consultant on a high performance initiative in the athletic department at the University of California, Berkeley that is designed to enhance coaching, sports medicine and sport science support systems. Dr. Treasure is the author of the National Federation of State High School Associations core coach education program "Fundamentals of Coaching" launched in 2007 that, as of September 2010, 130,000 coaches had completed.
A former tenured Associate Professor at Arizona State University with an appointment in the Department of Kinesiology and an adjunct position in the Department of Psychology, Darren has held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He has published over 50 scientific articles and book chapters on motivation and the psychology of peak performance and made invited keynote presentations at conferences in France, Norway, Finland and the United Kingdom.
In 2019 Sports Illustrated published an article about the toxic culture at the Nike Oregon Project that Treasure was a part of [4] :
In May 2015, Cain spiraled into depression and self-harm. This is when, she recounted to the Times, she struggled in a 1,500-meter race at Occidental College and Salazar weight-shamed her in front of other track-meet participants after the race. That same night, the 19-year-old informed Salazar and Darren Treasure that she was cutting herself. She says they ignored this cry for help.
The article also mentions that athletes in the project were told Treasure was a Sports Psychologist but learned later he was not a licensed. Runners in the group confided in him and later would learn he shared details from their sessions with Salazar and the other runners.
“Everything I told Darren in confidence, Alberto would talk to me about later,” Olympic distance runner Kara Goucher, who left the Oregon Project in 2011 before blowing the whistle on possible anti-doping offenses there, says. “Darren would tell me things that my teammates were saying to me in confidence. I was privy to other people’s personal thoughts and secrets that they would tell Darren, and I would be told about them. Openly, he and Alberto would laugh about stuff going on with other people. It makes me really ashamed, actually. Nothing was secret.”