Coaching Resilience in Young Athletes: The #1 Tool to Keep Them Mentally Tough

😩 If your team struggles to recover from mistakes and stay mentally tough, they might be missing one key thing. Learn the #1 sports psychology tool to build resilience in girl athletes and help them recover from mistakes fast → https://coachfreetraining.com

In this episode, we’re digging into why simply telling athletes “shake it off” doesn’t work—and what to do instead. 

Discover how to train mental toughness in your team using a system that’s simple, fast, and game-changing. Whether you coach volleyball, basketball, soccer, softball, or any other team or individual sport... this tool will help your athletes respond to mistakes like champions and stay in peak performance mode. 🧠💪

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre – a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach and 4x state champion. I’ve been in your shoes—and I’ve seen how one mental skill can transform a team’s confidence under pressure.

Today, we’re breaking down the “Snapback Routine,” why it works, how to teach it, and how to measure growth in the mental game.

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction: The Problem with Normalizing Mistakes
00:55 Why Telling Isn't Teaching
02:05 The Snapback Routine: A System for Recovery
03:26 Customizing the Snapback Routine
06:14 Practicing and Measuring Mental Toughness

💥 What You’ll Learn:
 ✔️ Why “mistakes are okay” isn’t enough
 ✔️ How to teach your team to recover from mistakes in 3 seconds or less
 ✔️ The science behind fight/flight/freeze and how it shows up in games
 ✔️ How to measure mental toughness over the course of a season
 ✔️ Real practice ideas to integrate this today

👇 Coaches – comment below:
 How long does it take your team to bounce back from mistakes?

🔗 Grab our in-depth free training → https://coachfreetraining.com
 📩 Subscribe & never miss a strategy that changes the game for your girls

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

Transcript

1:04

Telling your team mistakes are okay is not enough. In fact, it could be the very reason why your team struggles to come back from mistakes, hesitate, or shut down in pressure situations and lose to teams that they shouldn't. I've worked with thousands of athletes as a mental performance coach and as a head volleyball coach myself, I've seen it time and time again, athletes who are told from their coaches, shake it off. Next play. You're fine. actually are not fine, can't shake it off, and can't seem to stop focusing on the last play. If that sounds familiar, then you're in the right place. In this video, I'm going to be talking about how your efforts to normalize mistakes aren't working, why your athletes actually need a system to recover to get over mistakes in seconds. This is the number one skill that you can teach them to increase their mental toughness, and how you can teach and measure this skill in your own practice. program. So let's get into it. Let's first talk about what you're probably noticing is not working to help your athletes get over mistakes saying, shake it off next play, or you're fine. And let's be honest. These are not bad things to say to your athletes. I say these things to my athletes all the time, but the main problem with this is that telling isn't teaching. I wish this wasn't true. I wish I could just tell my athletes, do this, do that, and they would automatically just do it. Get over that mistake, pass this ball in this way, and I wouldn't have to do anything else. It'd be pretty easy, but unfortunately that's not how it is. So that means that just like any other skill that you teach your athletes, you also have to teach them how to get over mistakes. I. For a long time as a coach did not teach this part of the game because I didn't really think it was my responsibility. I was teaching a lot of the physical skills, but they say 90 percent of the sport is mental. And so if you're in that boat where you're like, ah, I don't know how to teach these skills. I know that they're important, but I don't have the time telling you right now, there are simple things that you can do that I'm going to be going over in this video that you can start right away to train your team's mental game so that it actually can pay off for them in those moments where they need it most. What athletes actually need in this moment is a process to recover trained ahead of time. That is key. So it becomes automatic. This process to recover is super important because it is trained in moments where they actually don't need it in lower stakes environments. And so what I'm going to teach you is how we train our failure recovery system called the snapback routine. But the key to this, no matter what you choose to teach your athletes on how to respond to mistakes, it needs to be practiced ahead of time. And so that means when they get into those pressure situations, it's automatic. They have a routine. You probably have seen some of the best athletes do this. Serena Williams, after an error, she actually wipes her face with a towel. This isn't random, it's actually her reset cue. Kobe Bryant, he was known to take a deep breath, bite his jersey, and recenter himself. Okay, Michael Jordan, you rarely saw him react to mistakes because he had actually trained himself to refocus. instantly these athletes aren't just mentally tough. They have trained this skill, and this is a skill that you can actually train your athletes as well so that it becomes automatic for them so how do you teach this skill to your athletes? I'm going to go over three steps. First, figure out what you want to use for a failure recovery system. We call ours a snapback routine if you want an in depth guide on how to teach this to your players, head to coach free training. com. I actually break all of this down so that you can know exactly how to teach this to your athletes, but overall, what it consists of are three things, a breath, a reset word, and a reset signal. Now, these three things are very intentional because When your athlete is in this state where she is making an error or something happens, she's kind of pushed out of what we call flow state or in the zone. Then she's in this place where she potentially doesn't know how to respond. And so she will revert back to what the primal and biological response is. And that typically is freeze, Or fight or flight. Okay. So this is like her primal sympathetic nervous system responding to a threat in her environment. And you're like threat, what threat? Well, there is a threat to her psychological safety when she makes a mistake because at the subconscious level, she is now wondering what is my coach? going to do? Are they going to be mad at me? What are my teammates thinking of me? I just messed up in front of like my parents and people in the stands. And so that is actually a threat to her psychological safety. And that embarrassment is actually something that causes her fight or fight response to kick in. That's why you see your athlete shutting down, hesitating. you know, now she's tipping or playing it safe instead of actually being aggressive. And so without a way to respond, that's what she's going to naturally resort to. And so the breath is actually a really intentional way for her to engage her parasympathetic nervous system so that she can calm down a bit and get to the present moment. The reset word is actually determined ahead of time. Obviously all of this is determined ahead of time, but her reset word is actually based on how she wants to feel in that moment. And it's found based on successful playing experiences, and it's something that she's connected to. So it's custom to her. Every athlete in my program and every athlete inside our mental training programs for teams have their own custom snapback routine that includes their own custom reset word. So this word isn't something that you just give them and say like, Hey, choose this word. Choose the word. Calm, brave, fierce. Those could be good reset words, but it has to connect to. her, it has to be personal to her and what she wants in that moment. The reset signal is that third piece and that is something to help ground her in the present moment. So it's like adjusting a hair tie, adjusting a sock. Um, if she has time to step on the line and come back to, um, her spot on the court, all of those would be good reset signals to help ground her in the present moment. Now, if you coach a sport that is ongoing and there's not enough time to do that, by the way, this takes like two seconds, but if there's not even two seconds, just the breath or just the reset word is enough to help get them back into the present moment. So again, if you want more of an in depth way on how we actually workshop this, go to coachfreetraining. com and that's where I give you the resources on how to actually teach this to your team the second piece to this is that it has to be practiced. It has to be sometimes, um, you know, we get frustrated as coaches because we're like, oh, well, you know, I, I said this one time I said, mistakes are okay. I said, mistakes are learning opportunities. I said, shake it off next play. Mistakes are how you learn. And then they go out there and they make a mistake and we're like freaking out on the sideline and they get pulled out. And, uh, you know, they don't actually like have any reps in this area. They don't have a rep to fall back on and how to actually reset. So this actually has to be practiced. in practice. And so when I teach the snapback routine, I introduce it and we workshop it. And then every water break after that, for that first practice, we are doing it in a water break is not like a stressful situation, but they're just building that capacity. They're getting their reps in. Um, we also create it like a station sometimes in part of pre practice, like you're going to practice your snapback routine at the station. There are times in practice where it gets tough and I put them in difficult situations, but I remind them of their snapback routine. So it has to be trained ahead of time. It can't just be something that's relied on in pressure situations because it won't, it won't come through for them in that situation, unfortunately. All right. The last piece of this is that it can be measured. A lot of times I hear like mental skills are hard because they can't be measured like physical skills. Well, this is one you can actually measure. Your athletes can reflect right now on how long it takes them to recover from mistakes. This is something that you can help them reflect on. They probably are aware of it themselves, but it also can be something that's very obvious in film if they watch themselves compete, they're probably noticing that when they make a mistake, maybe their body language changes and it changes for a while. And then the next couple of plays after they're not playing like themselves or they're hesitating. That's actually something that can be measured. And they can say, it takes me like five minutes to get over a mistake. Or for some athletes, if they're really honest with themselves, they're like, I don't get over my mistake for the whole game. It's not even until the next. game. And that actually can be something that can be measured over the course of the season. After introducing a failure recovery method or the snapback routine, now they can reflect and say, okay, in this match, how long on average do I think it took me to get over a mistake? Was it fast? Was it, you know, within seconds or was I still dwelling on it over and over? And so that is why it's really cool because your athletes can actually measure the effectiveness of this. And you can see it as a coach. Like, are we as a team moving on faster? How is our recovery from mistakes? Now, if you want other tips on how to do this, how you can actually train this in your practice, make sure to check out our video on how you can help your athletes recognize when they have been kind of bumped out of flow. date before it gets too late because there is a point where it becomes a little bit too late and it's really hard to come back down. So that is in our next video that you can check out and I'll see you there