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Welcome to Episode 1 of the Coach Her Game Podcast!

If you’re tired of the old-school coaching playbook that prioritizes toughness and sacrifice over real leadership and mental training, this is for you. Today’s athletes need more—and so do coaches.

In this episode, you'll learn:
✅ Why the “old playbook” no longer works for today’s athletes
✅ How to build a championship mindset in your team
✅ What it’s really like coaching in a male-dominated space
✅ My journey from traditional coaching to becoming a mental performance coach
✅ What you can expect from the Coach Her Game Video Podcast—tangible strategies, real talk, and a supportive space for coaches who do things differently

00:00 Building an Elite Championship Culture
00:40 Meet Coach Bre: Your Guide to Mental Performance
00:53 The Birth of Coach Her Game
01:20 The Elite Competitor: Transforming Female Athletes
01:53 Addressing Coaches' Common Challenges
02:33 Launching the Podcast and Content for Coaches
03:33 Old Playbook vs. New Playbook
05:06 Mental Toughness and Emotional Regulation
06:56 Coach Bre's Journey and Lessons Learned
09:30 The Blueprint for Championship Programs
11:25 Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

Don’t miss Episode 2: How I won 4 state championships in 4 years—and what I’d do differently.

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Transcript

Welcome to Coach Her Game Podcast - The New Playbook for Coaches

[00:00:00] 

Building an Elite Championship Culture

You want to build an elite championship culture, but 

where's the actual playbook for that? 

We get handed a lot of drills, plays, conditioning plans when we become coaches, 

but no one teaches you how to build a winning culture, train confidence, or develop mentally tough athletes. 

And for years we've all been told as coaches that success comes from 

pushing harder, 

Demanding more and 

sacrificing everything.

But today's athletes need more than that.

They need a new kind of leadership. 

And if you have ever felt like something is missing, like there's a better way to do this better way to build an elite program. This is for you. 

Meet Coach Bre: Your Guide to Mental Performance

I'm Coach Bre I'm a Mental Performance Coach a longtime Head Volleyball Coach and a MOM 

and I know firsthand What it's like to juggle building an elite program while also balancing life as a woman and a mom in coaching.

The Birth of Coach Her Game

And that's why I've created Coach Her Game, for coaches who want to develop confident, mentally tough athletes [00:01:00] while staying true to who they are here, we are ditching the old school playbook to focus on what really works. Mental training, leadership, and culture so that you can build a program that you're proud of.

Without burning out. And to be totally honest, this exists because you might be familiar with The Elite Competitor. 

The Elite Competitor: Transforming Female Athletes

I am also the co founder of The Elite Competitor, and that is where we develop the mental side of the game for girl athletes. We have built an entire business, an entire program that has served over 4, 000 families, Who have gone through our signature mental training program, The Elite Mental Game.

So maybe you are stumbling across this because you came from there. And to be honest, we have seen an enormous transformation and we filled a huge need and huge gap for girl athletes who are looking to become more confident and train the mental side of the game. And. Here is what I've heard from years and years and years.

Addressing Coaches' Common Challenges

I hear from coaches all the time. And I mean, I'm a coach myself. I have been for 12 years and I have [00:02:00] trained the mental side of the game in my teams, in my championship teams, and it's really made a huge difference. So I get a lot of coaches who are reaching out and they're asking me things like, how do I teach my athletes to build mental toughness?

How do I build a culture that brings out the best in my team? How do I stay true to myself as a coach without burning out? I get these questions a lot. And for the past couple of years, we've kind of been trying to fill the need a little bit in the coaching space, but haven't done it completely because our time and our capacity has been spent building The Elite Mental Game.

Well, let's Friends, now's the time. 

Launching the Podcast and Content for Coaches

This podcast and our YouTube channel and our Instagram and all the content that we have been building in the background is finally ready. And we have created a space for coaches just like you to learn those things things that you want to know how to train the mental side of the game, how to build culture, also how to navigate being a mom and a female coach in a landscape that is often dominated by men and [00:03:00] facing the unique struggles of balancing motherhood and coaching if you are in that boat with me.

So that is why this podcast exists. We're taking everything that we've learned from working with thousands of female athletes and coaches. And also, like I said, from being a coach myself and creating the space just for you. So. Couldn't be more excited about this podcast and our YouTube channel and all of the content that we have ready and loaded for coaches.

But I do want to hit on a couple of things that we're really leaning into and really being intentional about when it comes to creating content for coaches. 

Old Playbook vs. New Playbook

And one of those things is this idea of an old playbook versus a new playbook. Now, to be honest, I didn't get any playbook when it came to like coaching other than You know, just the game of volleyball.

That's the sport that I coach. But when we talk about the old playbook, this is kind of like the things that we were told, maybe the things that we were taught. Um, a lot of us were athletes ourselves growing up. I played college volleyball. And so. So, you know, we just kind of are in this culture for a long time and we pick up these, [00:04:00] these things that we think are like, okay, this will work.

One of them being mental toughness, right? Mental toughness means yelling louder, pushing harder, expecting more, but not, not really expecting more, but really at the sacrifice of like self love. You know, physical or mental health winning is all about physical skill players to just get over mistakes and toughen up like no emotions out there.

Coaches sacrifice everything, family, health, personal life for the game. You don't really see like I didn't actually see a whole lot of examples growing up of what it really looked like to have a family and be a coach until I got to college really. And you know that that was that's tough for me as a coach.

We'll talk about that a little bit too is how do you do this? How do you do it all? How do you, how do you be a mom and, you know, give 100 percent to your kids and then also be a coach who cares a lot about your players and building this culture and all the things that come from coaching. Like I was kind of blindsided by trying to juggle that when I became a mom and was also a coach.

So, you [00:05:00] know, that's part of the old playbook as well. And that success is really about results only. And so we are doing it differently. 

Mental Toughness and Emotional Regulation

The new playbook and what actually works for today's athletes is talking about mental toughness being around actually knowing how to coach confidence in athletes, how to teach them emotional regulation skills, composure, trading the mental game like the skill that it is, winning, it's about culture, leadership, and mindset, just as much as it is about talent.

I have had very talented teams that I've coached, and, I've had talented teams who didn't make it to state like they should have air quotes because we fell apart when the pressure was on. And then I've had talented teams when I did incorporate mental training and they had the skills to deal with that pressure.

And then they actually did perform how they were quote, supposed to perform. And to be honest, talent actually doesn't get you very far if you don't know how to manage emotions and you don't know how to deal with the pressure that comes with playing at that level. So I'll talk a lot about that because championships.

Don't just come from talent [00:06:00] alone. How about this one? Athletes, they don't need to be tougher. They actually need the tools to manage pressure, mistakes, and self doubt. A lot of times we're like, Oh, you know, kids these days, athletes these days are so soft. I would beg to differ. Like they, the athletes in my gym are not soft.

They need skills to be able to face the challenges that are, that they're being faced with. They need. Actual emotional regulation skills. They need actual processing skills. They need mindfulness in order to actually deal with the things that they're being faced with as an athlete. And honestly, they are air quotes again, tougher because they're able to actually move through those things and not at the sacrifice of their physical or mental health coaches shouldn't have to choose between their team and their family.

All right. And success is long term growth, impact, and sustainable performance. And like I said, the best teams do not just have skill. They have championship mindsets, but no one teaches us how to do that until now. 

Coach Bre's Journey and Lessons Learned

Now my coaching journey. I had to learn a lot of things the hard way as we all [00:07:00] do as coaches, but I hope that this is a space where we can come back side by side and shoulder to shoulder and learn from each other and teach each other.

You know, this is, this is what's working. This is what I learned. This is what's not working. And I followed that old school playbook for years. I'm going to get into kind of the basics. Not, not the full background of my entire coaching journey, but I fell into coaching. I decided I wanted to be a coach because of the impact that my sport had on me through college.

And, um, I loved it. I became a teacher right away, became a coach right away out of, um, out of college. But I quickly realized that coaching volleyball and coaching teams. Uh, we're two totally different things, you know, we could teach him how to swing block. We teach him how to serve receive. But how do you actually have tough conversations with players?

How do you define their roles? How do you do with parents? How do you do with playing time? How do you actually build a culture where people want to come and they want to work hard for you and they want to win? How do you help players when they can't manage the pressure on their own, when they look really good in practice and then fall apart in a game?

I [00:08:00] didn't know how to do any of those things, and it took until, uh, you know, I was coaching a team, two teams in a row, two, two teams, two seasons, different teams, but very talented, expected to go far at state. We didn't even make it out of the winner to state loser out. play, like, game. We didn't, we just fell apart in the same manner, like five set reverse sweep style.

And I was like, okay, um, something's got to change here. And I'm, I'm going to be looking at myself in the mirror about what that is. And we had, we had trained volleyball a lot, but I had no idea how to train the mental side of the game. So I became a mental performance coach. about five years into my coaching career to try and teach these skills to my athletes.

And, um, I, I learned the skills, taught them to my athletes. They were skeptical at first, but eventually they started to buy in. It became ingrained as part of our culture. I took a deep dive into how to actually build culture in a program, how to build leaders, how to build accountability systems, all of those things, again, that weren't just like taught and given to you. And [00:09:00] it made a difference. Now we fast forward have won four state championships in the past four years. Yes, I have talented players on those teams, but really where it makes the difference is in those games and in those moments where they need to show up and they need to perform and they need to come back from a mistake fast.

And they need to deal with that bad ref call. And they've got the pressure of the target on their back from, you know, defending three state titles. That is where the mental training really shines through. And we've got story after story about how, how it has made a difference for us. 

The Blueprint for Championship Programs

And That is exactly what you're going to get in this podcast and what we've created for coaches the blueprint for how to build championship programs How to teach the mental side of the game how to develop a program that you're proud of and also This coach perspective of what it's like to be a woman in this space I know that some of you listening to this aren't and that's totally fine You're a coach You're totally welcome.

Some of you aren't moms and that is totally fine as well. But also I, I also craved a community that was like me, that [00:10:00] was a coach who, um, who knew what it was like to be a mom and juggle all of the things and feeling like I'm being pulled in a bunch of different ways and the dualities of what it's like to be a woman who can be competitive, but not too competitive, you know, leads with strong authority, but is not bossy, you know, holds players accountable, but isn't.

You know, there's all of these dualities that exist as a female coach in this field. And I want to create a space where you can explore that. You can be yourself and that you can relate with somebody who is in it with you. And that's the other thing is as I was looking for other coaches, other examples, and other resources to help me as a coach, I kept running into a lot of, Experts who I learned from, but they weren't coaching.

They weren't actually in it, dealing with athletes, like boots on the ground, actually in the trenches. Um, they didn't have families. So I was like, well, how do you do this when also you've got to get home and get food on the table? Right. You know, not that that always has to be the case. You can [00:11:00] absolutely learn from everybody, but.

I, I craved that, that connection, that mentorship from somebody who was also going through it with me and in a similar fashion. So if that's you, you're absolutely in the right place. Coaches, this is the resource that I wish I would have had. This is the podcast I wish I would have had on tap every week.

These are, um, you know, just, just the resources that, that I wish existed when I first started coaching. 

Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

So if this resonates, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast. We're going to be dropping episodes weekly here and on our YouTube channel. And if you're ready to not only transform the way you coach, but be in a space where you feel seen, you feel heard and you're like, yeah these are my people. Then Share this episode with another coach who needs to hear this. All right. In the next episode, I'm going to be breaking down how your leadership style and your coaching style is actually your superpower, not your weakness. I spent years trying to coach. Not like myself, I was coaching like the coaches who had [00:12:00] coached me and I felt like I was wearing a mask.

I felt like I had Bre who was in real life and then Bre who was with my team because I just for so long believed this is what you needed to sound like and look like in order to be a successful coach. 

So we're breaking that all apart and helping you realize what your superpower is in your coaching style and how that actually is your strength.

Not your weakness. All right, coaches. I am coach Bree. This is the coach your game podcast, and I will see you in the next episode