Investigations of relationships between stress and athletic performance and stress and outcomes outside of sport psychology have a parallel evolution. Each area has advanced from early attempts to find simple, strong relationships to current strategies for evaluating the influences of individual differences and situational factors on more elusive relationships. However, the most common conceptualizations of stress are very different in research on sport psychology and stress, and most studies of stress and athletic performance do not involve the influences of stress outside athletics. We propose that the approaches used by sports psychologists and stress researchers could be combined to evaluate more fully the relationships between stress and athletic performance.