Drills to Build Mental Toughness in High School Athletes

When momentum shifts and your girls get rattled, what happens next is all on you. Here are three game-changing drills to help your team thrive under pressure! Grab more strategies → https://coachfreetraining.com
 
Coaches, building mental toughness isn’t a one-time thing—it's something you need to work on every day, especially in practice. In this video, I’m sharing three effective drills that will help your athletes develop focus, resilience, and the drive to compete at their highest level. These drills are perfect for high school and middle school athletes who need that extra edge.
 
🎯 Learn:
✔️ How to optimize pre-practice to get athletes in the right mindset
✔️ The power of a competitive cauldron system to foster mental toughness
✔️ Why you should create pressure situations in practice to simulate game stress
✔️ The mental training tools I use with my team to build focus and performance
 
🎙 I'm Coach Bre  mental performance coach for girl athletes, co-founder of The Elite Competitor, and four-time state championship-winning volleyball coach. I’ve made every coaching mistake in the book when it comes to pressure, and I’ve learned how to turn those into powerful, practical tools any coach can use to build mentally tough teams.
 
In this video, I also give a shoutout to Coach Tom, who successfully implemented our Plug & Play Elite Mental Game with his volleyball team, seeing amazing results!
 
🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to Mental Toughness
00:50 Optimizing Pre-Practice Time 
04:33 Daily Mindset Routine
07:36 Implementing the Competitive Cauldron 
13:25 Creating Pressure Situations
16:23 Mindset Mondays: Weekly Mental Training
18:34 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
 
📢 COACHES – What’s one pressure situation your team struggles with most? Let’s help each other grow in the comments. 👇
 
📌 Want more coaching tools to help you stay calm and strengthen your team’s mental game?
🔹 Grab our FREE training for coaches → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Learn more about Plug & Play Elite Mental Game → http://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach

Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

If you've got athletes who check out during hard drills, if it takes you half of the practice to even get them focused and ready to play, or you lack competition on your team, I hate to say it, but it's not a physical problem. It's a mental one. And as a head coach myself, for the past 14 years, I've won four state championships as a coach. And I'll tell you firsthand that mental toughness isn't something that you stumble upon. It's something that you train every single day. In your practices, and if you have no idea where to start or what drills to do, or what activities or skills to teach on how to get your athletes to compete and to focus and really have that drive in your gym, then stick around. This episode is for you. I'm going over three drill based strategies to incorporate mental toughness in your team, things that you can be doing in your gym. Right now, so I'm gonna get into it right away. Number one, the first thing that you need to do is to optimize your pre-practice time. So pre-practice in my gym looks a little something like this. Athletes come into the gym and it actually drives me crazy when athletes come in and they're like. Just kinda sitting around dilly ding, like not really moving with a sense of urgency or knowing like who's setting up the nuts, things like that. So I coach volleyball and so making sure that you have a system in place of when they come into the gym, who is responsible for setting things up. Like all of that from the moment they enter the gym and the vibe there and their sense of urgency is actually going to set the tone for your re the rest of practice. And it, it really does start as simple as like. Who is setting things up. And so we have a whole numbered system on like, you know, number one through four you are setting up the poles and the net. Um, five through seven, you're getting the balls, making sure they're pumped, like everyone has a job. And so they know exactly who's responsible for setting things up. And it also can eliminate some of this bitterness that comes on your team with like I set up yesterday or like, I'm the only one that is setting up and why isn't this person helping? Things like that. So that's like a little simple hack. That's actually not the thing, but pre-practice. Athletes come into the gym, they do their jobs, and then they come to the board. So I have a big whiteboard in my gym where I write pre-practice activities on the board, and I have like. Three different pre-practice things that they rotate through and they look at the board, they know exactly what to do. There's things that I just don't want to waste time doing in practice. So there's like footwork drills, there's blocking things, there's some fundamentals, things like that, that they just get those reps in early and get them out of the way. But some other really important things that I do in pre-practice is I. Make sure that there's some connection in there. So they're connecting with other teammates. We have a big little sister type mentorship program that we do. So they connect there. They connect with a coach. So I'm usually at the whiteboard like high fiving or giving fist bumps or checking in with athletes. Athletes also check in during their pre-practice, so they on the other side of the board are recording some information. I actually have another video if you wanna go check out exactly what I do for this like ten second connection hack checkin thing that I do at. Part of pre-practice, you can head there to see exactly what I do, but that's just part of this pre-practice. That kind of sets the tone because when athletes come in and they're like, you know, lagging and they're not really sure what to do, or they grab a ball and they just start hitting against the wall, or they do some arbitrary arm warmup, like it's really not setting the tone for how they're going to compete. So pre-practice is where you can actually like tighten things in. So come up with some pre-practice activities that you can rotate through if you practice on the field. I mean, you could have it on a clipboard, you could have your captains make sure that, you know, they're leading it. Like it's a very simple way for your athletes to get to work right away. Now the other thing that I do at the beginning of practice that helps kind of build in some of this mental toughness and this focus, because the problem that I was running into was that it would take me like half a practice for girls to really like. Wake up, meaning they're coming into practice after school. They've got like all sorts of things that they are, have been dealing with at school, with friendships in academics and all the things they're doing that's, they're coming in with all of that on their minds. And it would take a while for them to like get into the group. You know, we would start practices slow, you know, I would have to get on them a little bit, run a set of lines and, and I'd be like, why do we have to do this every day? For you guys to focus and it just got frustrating. Well, when we started implementing mental training in our program about six years ago, so I took the hard path. I became a mental performance coach because I saw the need and I didn't really know what else to do. So I like spent time and money to get a certification on like how to teach these skills to my team. Now you don't have to do that, by the way you, I've made it easy for you. You can go to our free training, it's at coach free training.com and. You can learn like the key essential skills that you can be doing with your team so that you don't have to be a sports psychologist or a mentor performance coach to learn these things. So coach free training is where you can check that out. But one of the things that we started implementing was a daily mindset routine at the beginning of practice. So they do their pre-practice activities, they're connecting, they're getting those like. Reps out of the way, and then I call my whole program together. There's 36 girls in my program. I coach high school varsity volleyball, so we've got three teams, three to four teams, depending on the season. They come to the whiteboard and they do something called 3, 2, 1, brave and 3, 2, 1. Brave is our daily mindset routine. That just helps focus them. It's three that stands like an acronym. So the three stands for three affirmations. They have a journal, they write their three affirmations in there. Now these are affirmations that they have found at the beginning of the season. They're based on goals. I have a whole like workshop on how to do that. I go over that at the coach free training. By the way. They then have two minutes of journaling. I usually give'em a prompt that is related to something that's going on in our season. So I'll have something like. What does it look like to be a good teammate today? Or what does it look like for you to show up and give a hundred percent today, something like that. They have two minutes also, just to kinda get stuff out. One thing that they're grateful for, because there's a lot of research around gratitude and when athletes are, you know, looking for the good in their environment, they find more of it. And then one piece of evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true. So they have these affirmations that they're kind of anchoring to all season and they're looking for evidence. They're hunting the good of finding. Evidence that they are coming true, that this is getting better for me, right? When an example of an affirmation might be, I'm a fast, aggressive defender, and they're finding evidence of. Them becoming that. And again, when they look for it, they find more of it. They create more of it when they're more aware of it. And then we do a short visualization that's called Brave, and that helps them visualize their affirmations. We've got some breath work in there so that they can regulate their nervous system. It gives them a chance to like check in with themselves and just kinda shift their energy to be ready for practice. Now that whole thing. Takes between five and seven minutes, and if you're like, ugh, five to seven minutes of, you know, focusing on their mindset, visualizing breath work seems like a waste of time. I'll tell you right now, what's a waste of time is spending half of practice trying to get your team to compete and to play, and so spending five to seven minutes. Is an investment that I choose to make in my athletes because I know that I'm gonna get more out of that than I actually put in. So now we can actually start practice and things are good from the beginning. They're competing, they're ready, they're focused, they're not, you know, worried or thinking about that thing from earlier in the day because they've already, they've already processed it, they've already dealt with it in our three, two, and brave little daily mindset routine. So that's another part of like pre-practice, it's going to help your team. Be more mentally tough because part of mentally mental toughness is focus. What are you focusing on? You know, mentally tough players can narrow their focus to the task at hand. Mentally weak players are all over the place and distracted and they can't focus themselves. And so this is a skill that athletes have and that we give them so that they can practice that focus. Okay, so that's pre-practice number two. Use a competitive cauldron system. Now, I say that a little bit like tongue in cheek because you don't have to use a competitive cauldron system if you have no idea what that means. I'll tell you in a second, but some sort of way to encourage competition in your gym because competition does allow for athletes to be more mentally tough and have that competitive drive. When you need it in a game. And that's one of our core values in our program is that we compete, but the way that we compete and it's easy in girl sports to go down this path of like, you know, we compete and we tear each other down. You really have to be intentional with what you mean by competition. Healthy competition means that I'm pushing you, you're pushing me, we're all getting better. And it can be tough to navigate when you have, you know, highly competitive girls in, in your program. And if you don't naturally have that competitiveness, this is a good way to start. So basically what the competitive cauldron is, and there's a lot of resources out there. Anson Dorrance, I believe that's how you say his name. He's a college soccer coach. He is kinda, I, I'm not sure if he's the one who originally came up with it, but he's the one who. Has a lot of information out there about it. It's basically a way to rank players so that they can see the progress that you know that they're doing in practice and how that translates to basically a point system. Now there's a very intense way to do it, and then there's a easier way to do it, and I have done both. And how I do it is now like a little bit of an easier way. So what I do for the competitive cauldron is I have all of their names on a whiteboard and each of the names has a number. So there's 12 girls on the varsity team. They all have a number and almost every single drill that we do in our gym is. Scored, unless we're doing some sort of like we're breaking down a skill, then we won't necessarily give a point to that and scoring to that. But, you know, warmup games, small group games, positional tournaments, six on six, everything has a score to it. And the way that the numbers come in is we also make sure that in our gym that athletes are competing with each other and against each other. It does no good to always do this, like starters versus non-starters thing because. Like your starters aren't gonna get great competition all the time. And then your non-starters are going to also like not really be pushed either because it's like the play is just over. Okay. And so we mix people up. Now obviously there's a place for non-starters versus non-starters if we're trying to like install something or. Replicate something, but for the most part we're mixing people up, especially in small group things, and that allows for a really accurate representation of where each athlete stands in the program. So how this would look is we do pre-practice, do our three, two, and brave. Then we would go off to our courts varsity, JV C team. A freshman team, they all go off to do their individual practices. And maybe the first thing that I'm going to do is a small group game. So let's see an example, if you're familiar with volleyball. Um, Neville's Pepper. Okay. And Neville's Pepper is like a defensive drill where it's time for three minutes. They're in groups of three on one side and waving through on the other. So I'm. Putting in balls is timed. They get, you know, a point for a good dig off the net. They get a point for a win. They get a point for like whatever you wanna emphasize to like a stuff block or something like that. And then at the end of three minutes, those three players get a point value. Okay? And another thing that we do is if you don't go for a ball, you automatically get your points wiped. So again, just adding in some of that competitiveness and also that like, that grit of like, like, I've gotta go for this, or I'm gonna let my team down. I'm gonna, my whole team's gonna go back into zero. And so at the end of those three minutes, those three players, maybe they got 20 points. So they go next to their name on the board and they write down 20. Okay. And then the next three go and they maybe they got 18 points there down 18. And so if we were starting the week fresh, then every player would have a number based on that small group drill. Okay. Then we would go maybe into some like other sort of. Uh, drill that would break down a skill emphasis that we have. Then we would, we typically end or spend a large amount of practice, depending on the point in the season that we are on six on six. So that's like game-like scenarios and those would be scored as well. But we give more weight to six on six drills because if you can win, basically what we wanna know is like, can you win with PE with a variety of people that you're playing with and against? So if you can win in a six on 6-year-old, that's like very valuable to us because. That's what we're playing most often. And so most of the time I multiply those scores by six. So say, you know, the winning team, the winning six people got five points in that, in that six on six drill, multiply it by six because we're gonna wait it more than a small group drill. So you're gonna put 30 up and you just keep adding your score. So say you got 20 points in Neville's pepper, you got 30 points in the six on six drill, you now have 50 points for the day. And these numbers or these, uh, names that are on the board. Are all kind of have, they're grouped by position. So I maybe have four outside hitters and they're grouped together. And then I've got my three middle hitters and they've got my opposites, my setters, my dss. And so you can kind of see within position group like, okay, today our outside hitter group, these four, like, you know, two people got 50 and then we've got some 48, 40 fours, whatever, like, so athletes can kind of see like, oh, here's where I. Here's where I ended up today against the other people in my position group. And then I usually keep the competitive cauldron for a week before I reset it. So I wipe the numbers so they can see at the end of the week, like, here's where, here's where I ended. And it's really important how you talk about this, like I said, so it's a snapshot. It's not like you're using this determined playing time, although it could be a factor. It's for motivation as well. Like here's where you are, this. Week, maybe set a goal for next week where you wanna be. And it just allows athletes to always be competing and develop that mental toughness because they're like, this matters. Every single thing that we do in our gym matters. Because in a game, every single play matters. Every single play in volleyball is awarded a point for you or the other team. And so that helps us kind of breed some of that competitiveness because mental toughness isn't just about effort, right? It's about performing when it counts and the cauldron makes that a real thing for them. Um, it emulates some of that pressure. Okay. But speaking of pressure, that leads me to the last thing that I wanna talk about today, which is create pressure situations for your athletes. Okay, so number one that we went over in developing mental health. So these like drill based strategies is make sure your pre-practice is intentional and that you incorporate some mental training in the sort of practice. Number two, have some sort of competitive system that in your gym. So we use the competitive call gym. Number three, create pressure situations for your athletes. Mentally tough teams don't just show up mentally tough, right? They practice these situations that you're going to be in and you can't just. You can't know every single situation that your team is going to be in, but you start to notice some patterns, right? There's gonna be situations where your team is gonna be down by a certain number of points and they've gotta battle back so you can recreate that score in your gym, okay? So you can score from a deficit. I do that often. I do a fun game that athletes love. It's like a little jeopardy situation where I have little note cards and each note card is worth different points. And on the other side, it's a situation that they have to get out of. So the, you know, they turn over one card and it's, the score is. 21, 24, your team has 21 and we gotta, we win at 25. Okay? And you're serving the ball game to 25. Alright? And they're like, okay, we're down. And if they win, if they accomplish that, they get the full amount of points for that. So say that is a 20 point card, but if they lose, then the other team gets to steal half those points. So like you're kind of putting them in pressure situations. Timed based challenges are another good thing. So, you know, we've gotta get certain number. Passes a certain number of things and under this amount of time, we do a lot of like seal the deal type things, meaning like you can only get a big point or a game point if you do these three things, you have to convert three free balls. So it puts a little bit more pressure on them. It's like, I've gotta do this. You know, three times in order to get this big point. I'm not a huge fan of exercises, punishment, this is the PE teacher in me speaking, but I do use it occasionally to add a little bit more pressure too. So, you know, I, I wouldn't say that I do that often and if I do add in exercise, like what I mean by that is like sprinting or something like that, or touch six, it's like short, it's, you know, it's very intentional. It's not like you miss your serve. Now you need to go run five lines. So it's not like that. It's like the whole team, like the non-winning team, losing team is doing this consequence and that's established ahead of time. You know, another pressure thing, like sometimes adding in this like. This peer pressure really does start to help emulate things. So sometimes I'll end practice just with like, Hey, as a team, we, everybody needs to get their serve in. And so we're lining up every single person needs to get it in. If somebody misses, we need, we start back over. Or I'll make it harder and say, we all need to serve to area one, one at a time in a row. Adds a lot of pressure, especially especially to those athletes that are at the end of the line, so, so yeah, creating those pressure situations, it's also key. Now the other big thing, like I said, we started doing mental training in our program six years ago, and honestly that was because I was chronically losing these games that were like winner state, loser out, and we would just fall apart. And I was like, we need more training in this area. I obviously am not providing it. My team doesn't have these skills. And so we intentionally infuse mental training, not just at the beginning of practices, but we do something called Mindset Mondays. And we introduce a new mental training topic every Monday. So that it helps them in those moments. I can actually like coach my players harder when they have these mental training skills. So they have a way to come back fast from mistakes. They have a snapback routine, they have productive self-talk. They know how to handle situations with perspective like. What I mean by that is they don't just automatically go into victim mentality when things are hard, and so incorporating some of these mental training skills so that they can handle hard better is actually really important for athletes. And so when we do our mindset Mondays, or the mental training Mondays, we don't spend more than 20 minutes doing something like this. So. I actually literally use my own program that hundreds of other teams have used throughout the nation. It's called Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for Teams, play videos for my team of me. Okay. And then I lead a short discussion afterwards and it's great for team bonding in that way. And then they go to practice and they've got that skill. So if you want to learn more about that, so you want, you're like, I just need a plug and play way to teach them these skills so that I can just like coach harder and get back to what I wanna do, which is just coach. The sport, then go to our free training coach free training.com. I talk about plug and play Elite mental game there. And you also get a discount on the program when you go to the training. So that's a really easy way to just infuse mental training intentionally. So you can do these things. You can do these drill based things. Make sure pre-practice is dialed in so that you're setting the tone early. Make sure you have some sort of competitive system like the competitive cauldron. Make sure you're like emulating pressure situations so that you can try and, you know, create some adaptability in your team so that when they're facing those things in real game-like situations, they're like, we've been here, but then it doesn't also hurt. In fact, it helps a lot to equip them ahead of time with skills that they need. So check that out@coachfreetraining.com. Um, that's where you learn exactly what I do and then also get a discount on the plug and play Elite mental game for teams. All right, coaches, I hope this was helpful. I know that practice is always. A tough thing sometimes, but honestly, it's now my favorite part of coaching is practice because that's where my players work the hardest, honestly. Like we create practices so that they're harder than a game. That's where they grow the most, and it's just where I love being because it's where the work happens. So I hope that that happens to you. Um, I'm Coach Bree. I am the host of the Coach Your Game podcast, and I'll see you in the next episode.