Mistakes Getting In Your Players' Heads? Use This Coaching Fix!

If your athletes struggle to bounce back from mistakes, you're not alone. 😣  Learn how sports psychology + mental training tools can help your team get consistent — fast. Grab our free in depth training here → https://coachfreetraining.com.

If you’re a girls’ sports coach tired of watching your team spiral after one mistake, or wondering “which team is going to show up tonight?” — this video is for you. 

👋🏼I’m Coach Bre — a mental performance coach for girl athletes, 4x state champ, and co-founder of The Elite Competitor — and I’ve coached through this exact challenge.

In this episode, I’ll show you:

✅ What’s really going on in your athletes’ brains after mistakes
✅ Why even your most talented players hesitate under pressure
✅ The exact method I use to help my team bounce back from mistakes — fast
✅ How to implement a Snapback Routine to build mental toughness
✅ Why “shake it off!” isn’t enough — and what to say instead
✅ These tools are rooted in sports psychology, specifically designed for the mental health of girl athletes — and they’re simple enough to plug right into practice this week.

If you want your team to stop shutting down after mistakes, get consistent, and stay mentally strong under pressure, this is where it starts.

✨ Want the exact Snapback Routine to teach your team?
👉 [https://coachfreetraining.com] – Free 45-min training that breaks it all down. No fluff, just tools.

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction: The Two Teams Dilemma
01:01 Understanding the Athlete's Brain
03:39 Recognizing the Warning Signs
05:53 Teaching the Snapback Routine
06:36 Implementing the Snapback Routine
07:56 Conclusion and Next Steps

➡️ Coach - How has your team been playing lately? Drop a comment below and let's chat!

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

Transcript

1:04

Coach ever feel like you have two completely different teams, One night things are going well, they're playing great. And you can see the potential in the post season. And then the next night you're wondering which team showed up tonight. They're letting little mistakes bother them. They're not communicating. They're hesitating. And then you wind up losing to teams that you shouldn't. And then you're left as a coach, wondering before every competition, wonder what team is going to show up tonight. Now, if you're in this boat, this video is for you. We're going to be breaking down what is happening in your players brains when they shut down and let this happen to them, how to help them recognize it before it gets too late, and also what you as a coach can do to train them to handle the pressure and come back from mistakes faster so that you're not on this terrible roller coaster of what team am I going to get tonight? And if I haven't met you. I'm coach Bre. I am a mental performance coach for athletes, but also a long time head volleyball coach and a four time state champion coach and believe me, I have been in your shoes. I have seen this very issue make or break seasons. So let's get into it. Number one, what's happening in your player's brain when they are shutting down after mistakes or letting the pressure get to them? It's actually not because They don't care. They really do. But the brain's number one job is to keep us safe. This is really important because it's not just designed to keep your athletes physically safe, obviously breathing and whatnot, but also psychologically safe this psychological safety is really important. So they're wondering at potentially a subconscious level when the pressure is on, or they make a mistake. Like, what does my coach now think of me? Do my teammates still like me? Like that is all kind of going through their brain. And when that's happening, their amygdala, the. Small part of their brain is actually picking up on a threat to their psychological safety. So when they're in these big pressure moments and they're making mistakes, or they feel like, oh my gosh, I have to perform, or else, now that threat is super relevant and the amygdala is like. warning, warning. There's a problem here. That's when their sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and they potentially are going into this fight or flight response. And the problem with this is that when athletes are playing their best, they're in something called flow state. This is where they're not actually thinking too much. They're just going out and they're playing. They're playing free, potentially like you see them in practice. You're like, Oh, this team is on fire. They're not really thinking about much. They're just doing their thing. So flow state is where we want our athletes. to be most of the time. But when their brain is picking up on threat in their environment again, it could be something simple. It could be like a rough, made a bad call, could be a teammate be like a coach yelled and they're like kind of jolted out of this flow state. This is a problem because often they end up shutting down. They don't have a skill. Typically we're going to talk about how you can help train this, but typically they don't have a skill to respond in those moments. And so they just kind of give in to this primal response of, I'm just going to freeze or like, you know, hesitate to all of these things that you see on the court where you're like, Oh my gosh, keep being aggressive. This always would happen to my players that I've coached volleyball. And typically what I see is, you know, they get blocked a couple of times or even once, and then they end up just playing it safe and tipping the ball over the net. And you're on the sideline, if you're anything like me on the coat. Um. And if you're anything like me on the sideline, you're like, hit the ball. Stop tipping. Oh my gosh. Like, you know, you sound like a crazy person, but that's, what's happening is that, you know, they made a mistake. They're afraid of doing it again. And so they're just going to play it safe, but it ends up winding up being worse because now we're giving the ball. To the other team, it's really easy. And now all of a sudden the team is gaining, um, an advantage on us, and the momentum is swinging in the wrong direction. All because they're not aggressive after a mistake. Instead, they are, they're hesitating. So what can we do as coaches? The first thing is that we can help athletes recognize the warning signs before it gets too late. And the key to this is awareness. Most athletes. are not aware. They go from like, you know, Hey, I'm playing pretty well too. Oh my gosh, I'm having the worst game of my life and I don't know how to stop it. And so what we teach athletes is kind of like a traffic light analogy. Green is a flow state. That's where they want to be and where they should be to play their best. Yellow is like something happens. Maybe they do make an error, making it, maybe a ref makes a bad call. Teammate says something. I don't know. They get distracted. They're not quite in flow state anymore, but it's not to the full on like, okay, I am hesitating so much that I'm making more errors. Red though is where they do get to that place where it's like their sympathetic nervous system is kicking in because their amygdala is sensing all this threat. They don't really have a way to respond. So all they can do is like basically just be almost a shell of themselves out there. They're playing it safe. They're hesitating. Often as a coach, you're like, shake it off. And then you end up having to pull them out and put somebody else in because they can't. Okay. So red is like, they're fully shut down. And this is typically what you're seeing when you're like, why are we not playing like ourselves? And so one thing that you can do is Breng that awareness to your athletes. You can actually use that traffic light and you can ask them like, Hey, are you in green? Are you in yellow? Are you in red right now? And the biggest. Key of this is really when athletes are recognizing that they get to yellow, they have to have a way to come back to green. If they get to red, it's typically too late. But the key takeaway here is this awareness. They have to be aware of what it feels like to be in green. Okay. Which most do. They're like, yeah, I know what that feels like to play my best. They need to know what it feels like to be in yellow. Like, okay, something happens. And now I have a chance to respond. Most don't have that pause. They just go directly to red. They're like, Oh my gosh, I don't want to ever do that again. So I'm just going to tip the ball over. I'm going to Serve really easy. I'm just gonna pass the ball now instead the shoot. Okay? And that's a problem because then it creates more and more errors and in the process, the other team is probably taking that advantage and momentum is swinging in the wrong direction. Okay, so what can we do What can we as coaches help our athletes with? This is the biggest thing. Most athletes go from green to red because they do not have a skill. When they get to yellow to come back down to green. So you need to teach your athletes a failure recovery system. Okay. We call ours the snapback routine, this routine for athletes. We teach it takes about 20 minutes to teach athletes. I do it at the very beginning of our season. So they have it as a tool that they can use the rest of their season takes three seconds or less. It's a combination of a breath to engage their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the opposite of their sympathetic. So their, their rest and digest to kind of help them get back to the present moment. They say a reset word at the top, and that is intentionally designed based on how they want to feel in that moment. And also based on past good playing experiences that they've had. And on their exhale, they're doing some sort of reset signal. So adjusting a hair tie, adjusting a sock, snapping a finger should be quick. Now, your athletes need to get over their mistakes faster than the game requires. This is one of the key elements to mental toughness, is that they can respond faster than their game requires. What I mean by that is, in volleyball, we've got 15 seconds between serves, so your athletes need to respond in 15 seconds or less. If you coach a different sport that requires less time, so like basketball, maybe unless there's a timeout, it's continuous, they need to respond Instantly, the snapback routine, the breath, the reset word, and the gesture should take no longer than two or three seconds. If you're a sport that you coach is continuous and they can't stop just the breath or just the reset word can be enough. The key is that they have a tool. They've recognized that they're in yellow and they have a tool to Breng them back down to green. And if you want more on how to teach this to your athletes, I break down the snapback method in our free training for coaches. So if you go to coach, free training. com. You can register for that. It's a free 45 minute training where I break down how to level up your athletes, mental game, how to quickly level up your team's mental game, because we don't have a lot of time as coaches. And in that I break down the snapback routine and how you can do that with your team. So coach free training. com is where you can go to register for that training, but you need to make sure that your athletes have. some way to respond, because if they don't, you're going to be stuck in this cycle. You'll be stuck in the cycle of, I wonder what team is going to show up tonight, and then something inevitably will happen in the match. Okay, maybe the other team gets a lead, um, they make, your best player makes a couple errors in a row and now she's in her head, that happens a lot. Okay, the momentum starts to shift and you're stuck in the cycle of yelling from the sidelines as a coach, shake it off, next play, let's go. And you're just spending your emotional energy and your physical energy on just trying to get your players heads back in the game. Let's get back to you. Cool. Doing what you love to do, which is coach, not sit there and try and get your athlete's head back in the game when they have a simple way that they can respond to mistakes to quickly Breng them back down to green very quickly. Okay. That is where they will build their confidence. So they're not going to be, you know, hesitating after mistakes because they have a way to respond and you're going to save your sanity as a coach and you're going to get back to just coaching. The other beautiful thing about this is you don't have a shared. language with your athletes. You can just ask them. I don't know all my athletes reset routines. I just ask them, what's your reset word? Okay, do your step back routine. And so they know exactly what that means. And when I say, Hey, next play or shake it off, they know how to actually do that. It's not just me saying like, you know, Get out of your head and move on. They actually have a way to do that. So if you really want to dive into how to teach that to your team, again, go to CoachFreeTraining.Com, that's where we break it down. Join me in the next video where we're going even more into how to build mental toughness in your players, because you probably have noticed that this generation of athletes is lacking mental toughness. And if you are like, well, it's not my job to teach mental toughness, then. Who's is it? Okay. Because no one else is teaching it to them and it's actually simpler than you think. So join me in the next video on simple ways that you can build mental toughness in your team. I'll see you there