The Mental Side of a Winning Athlete

The Mental Side Of Winning

The most forgotten side of coaching athletics is mental.  Yet the mental side of coaching will yield the most positive results of any coaching you will do.  It will give positive results quicker with less coaching than any other single set of techniques.   Despite its great value, it is forgotten, often disregarded, not to mention lost and hidden behind teaching physical skills.

At its very foundation the mental side of any sport is being and thinking positive.  A word of warning: Beware of this simplistic definition because the negative often camouflages the positive.  Here is an example: In shooting free throws the athlete often approaches the task saying to himself, “I gotta make this shot” and he or she’s very positive in this affirmation.  This is, however, a negative, and is counter productive.  The chances are increased that the shot will be missed.  Instead of relaxing and letting the shot just happen, the muscles will invariably tense up and the difficulty of the exercise will increase.  “I gotta, I have to, If I don’t make this shot I’ll just die . . . “, are all negatives and are to be avoided.

On the positive side, the athlete will approach the foul line, receive the ball from the referee, then begin his or her ritual, by bouncing the ball a proscribed number of times or none at all, eye the basket, indeed, eye a particular part of the basket.  During this ritual, he will be reviewing in his mind exactly how he makes this shot, remembering successful feelings of making the shot, mentally saying “this is how I take this shot.”   He should then release the ball to the basket without allowing another thought to enter the mind.   The statistical probability of making the shot will increase dramatically depending in part on the particular skill level of the athlete.  Note, the mental side is taught.  It doesn’t just happen.  It, like all muscle memory exercises, must be repeated as often as possible.

The same mental preparedness is true of a soccer player about to kick a penalty shot or a batsman about to address a sixty-mile-an-hour curve ball.  The simple mental preparation is accomplished as the athlete reviews how he performs the task successfully.  This mental preparation in conjunction with physical repetition, i.e., doing a task perfectly, yields fantastic results.

The second and equally important portion of mental preparedness comes directly from the coach himself.  Praise profusely and loudly and do it sincerely.   Your athletes need to know you approve of them.  Every athlete has something to praise, even if it is merely showing up.  Find it, praise it loudly, and reap the results.  Athletes tend to perform up to or down to the coach’s announced expectations.

On The Importance Of Remembering Who You Are And What You Want

It has been my observation that a parents’ greatest strengths and greatest single weakness are in remembering who they are and what it is that they want for their youth.

In the course of thirty years I have seen some horrific instances of parental lack of foresight.  In the Montalvo Little League parents actually got into a physical confrontation–fists and elbows, and very loud, filthy talk between coaches, umpires and parents–at third base.   The police came to haul off the offenders and charged them with assault and battery.  I have seen the ramification of a mother getting romantically involved with the general manager of a baseball team, not her husband.  The experience can only be described as devastating.   I coached a set of twins in basketball.  They were beautiful girls except when they were on the court.  Then, with their  parents’ loud, vocal encouragement, their only job was to shoot and pass the ball to one another.  The other three players might as well not have been there.  They could have carried a sack lunch and sat with me on the bench.  I was accused of having a hidden agenda when I required the twins to at least acknowledge the presence of their team members.  These parents did not remember who they were nor what they wanted from their athlete’s team experience.

A story was repeatedly told ad nauseam in the soccer tournaments held in Camarillo, California.  Professionally, being a stickler for the quality of evidence, I admittedly never spoke to the participants, but the tellers of the story were so passionate in the telling that I do not doubt its authenticity.  It was the last match of the tournament for both teams and especially for one player.  He was a Downs Syndrome boy who, by reason of his age, was playing his last game.  He’d never scored a goal in all of those years but had played since he was six, loving and enjoying the companionship of his fellow teammates.  He was simply a happy kid, always on the back defensive line, as far out of the way as his coach could get him.  It was difficult for this man to give his team as much of a chance as he could to win with each player playing at least half a game.  It was truly a difficult, if not impossible, position but he managed it well.

In the last half of the match, one team up four goals to one, something happened that was significant, if nor singularly monumental in the lives of those young men who played on the field that afternoon.  By an arrangement among the players it was planned that the boy should score.  “Send Billy with the ball,”  was whispered among them, and so Billy came with the ball from the far back line, trotting through struggling forward and halfback,  past fullback, the best the league had to offer, and lastly through a diving goalie who’d allowed the fewest goals of all scored against him.   Billy buried that ball in the deepest portions of an open net.

Those young men, all twenty-two of them, on the field that afternoon, gave something worth giving, and  saw something worth remembering.  Billy scored twice.  Yes, the stronger team did win but in a larger, more profound sense they were all winners.  Billy experienced something he would always remember but so did the diving goalie and every player between who contributed something more important then winning to that game.    This was a reflection of wonderful parents who knew what they wanted for their sons.  That afternoon twenty-two athletes knew who their parents had taught them to be.