NY Islanders make forward looking hire with new mental performance consultant

The New York Islanders made a forward-looking hire this week that speaks less to systems and rosters and more to the unseen layer that increasingly separates good teams from great ones. The organization announced the addition of Siana Sylvester as Mental Performance Consultant, a role that will span NHL, AHL and prospect levels — a signal that the club is investing in cognitive preparation the same way it invests in skill development, analytics and recovery.

Sylvester arrives with uncommon range. She is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, a Professional Certified Coach and a mentor within the AASP ecosystem. Her resume crosses sport, government, military and aerospace — including work with NASA leaders and military officers — which is precisely the kind of cross-domain background that modern high-performance teams seek.

Most recently, Sylvester spent seven years with HigherEchelon, a firm specializing in organizational and mental performance. There she led Army-wide Holistic Health & Fitness (H2F) and Ready & Resilient (R2) programs across five installations, managing more than 50 coaches and training soldiers in resilience, performance and pressure-management. Earlier in her career, she served as Mental Performance Coach for Harvard and Smith College women’s hockey programs and contributed to NFL Player Engagement’s inaugural Bridge to Success program.

That is the background now embedded inside the Islanders’ player pipeline — not as a consultant at arm’s length but as a direct resource embedded with players, coaches and management on both Long Island and in Bridgeport.

The timing is notable. The Islanders are young in key areas, leaning on rookies and emerging talent in a market unforgiving of any soft landing. They are also, under Patrick Roy and Mathieu Darche, openly modernizing infrastructure and process. Hiring a dedicated mind-performance specialist fits that shift. In a league where the talent gap is small and the readiness gap is large, the Isles just moved resources into the part of the game fans never see — the part that often decides what they do.