Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper

Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper is a registered psychologist, founder and boxing-based adolescent resilience coach who delivers physical activity-based resilience training for adolescents and trains facilitators to scale the program.

She moved from competitive kick-boxing and martial arts into coaching after a decade representing Ireland in kick-boxing and winning European and World titles; the gap she noticed was that young people needed practical, embodied skills for emotional regulation and connection rather than only talk-based interventions. That observation led her to develop a program that pairs combat-sport training with psychological skills teaching.

She brings over 35 years of presenting and coaching experience and formal academic credentials that include a BSc in Psychology, a first-class honours degree in Sports and Exercise Science, and a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from the University of Tasmania; she became a registered psychologist in 2010. CounterPunch was piloted as part of her Master’s thesis, was validated by the Menzies Research Institute during its Northern Territory trial, and since founding CounterPunch Pty Ltd in Mt Barker, South Australia, she has run recurring teen groups and built a facilitator training pathway.

Day-to-day she combines sports and exercise science with clinical psychology to run CounterPunch teen groups, deliver CounterPunch Facilitator training via an evolving online learning management system, tender and partner with local sports institutes, and provide supervision and course materials for facilitators. The program uses boxing and combat training to teach skills for connecting, relating and communicating under pressure; participants are adolescents and the clients are schools, community youth programs and trained facilitators.

Her central thesis is that resilience and mental fitness are best taught through embodied practice - structured physical skills, values-linked coaching and rehearsal - rather than solely through conversation; the program reframes combat sport as a scaffold for emotional regulation, social connection and life-skill rehearsal. She has intentionally designed a facilitator pathway so the model can be taught and quality-controlled rather than remaining a single-practitioner intervention.

As a podcast guest, Mercedas Taaffe-Cooper brings stories from elite sport, clinical psychology and community program design combined with practical, evidence-informed tools; podcast audiences receive concrete resilience techniques for teens, examples from a Menzies-validated pilot, and guidance on training facilitators to replicate the CounterPunch model.