Team Consequences for Late Players (Without Pointless Punishment)

🎯 Your player walks into practice late… now what? Should you make them run? Sit them out? 🤔 Let’s talk about how to hold athletes accountable without killing team culture. Grab more coaching tips → https://coachfreetraining.com

In this episode, I’m breaking down real coaching strategies for handling tardiness, setting expectations, and creating team consequences that actually build accountability — not resentment. You’ll learn how to use natural consequences like playing time, when to use (or not use) exercise as punishment, and how to create pressure situations that strengthen mental toughness instead of tearing it down.

💪 I’m Coach Bre, a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a 4x state-champion volleyball coach with 14+ years on the sidelines. Inside this video, I’ll share what I’ve learned from years of managing standards, handling unprepared athletes, and balancing consequences with compassion. Whether you’re coaching middle school, high school, or club, this episode will give you actionable coaching tips rooted in sports psychology, athlete mental training, and leadership development.

You’ll learn:
✅ How to co-create team standards and expectations your athletes actually buy into
✅ Why natural consequences (like loss of playing time) work better than punishment
✅ When and how to use exercise intentionally, not as a threat
✅ How to create pressure situations in practice that build resilience and focus
✅ The psychology behind accountability and the mental side of the game

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction and Scenario Setup
00:58 Establishing Team Standards and Expectations
02:40 Handling Tardiness and Unpreparedness
04:16 Consequences and Playing Time
06:13 Using Exercise as Punishment
09:39 Creating Pressure Situations and Mental Skills

💬 Coaches – comment below: How do you handle players being late or unprepared? What’s worked (or not worked) for your team?👇

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

Transcript

1:04

All right. Your player walks into practice late. What do you do? You put'em all on the line and make them run. Do you sit them out from the game? What is it? I know as a coach, this can be one of the toughest parts of coaching, is holding kids accountable to what the expectations of the team are. So we're gonna break down today some ideas for how you can hold your players accountable and what consequences might make sense for different situations. And I haven't met you. I'm Coach Bree. I'm a mental performance coach. For athletes, but I'm also a longtime head volleyball coach. Been coaching her the past 14 seasons, so I for sure have had been in this situation. In fact, just yesterday I had a player come into practice who forgot her binder, and one of the expectations is that you come to practice prepared for practice, and that means bringing your binder so. I'm gonna talk through what I did in this situation and how I handle team consequences and punishments just as a way for you to have some ideas of what you can be doing with your team as well. So first things first is that we have to first co-create standards and expectations for your team. This is what has to come right out the gate. If your players don't know what the expectations are and what the standards are for your team, then there's no way that they can actually. Do those things. And it might be common sense to think, well, you need to come on time to practice. But that might not be the case for a lot of athletes who don't have the sense of urgency or maybe they haven't been in this sort of structure before. Now I coach high school varsity and so, um, well, we have a whole program of 36 to 48 girls, but. When we start a season, we make it very clear on what the expectations are, even before the season starts. I sit down with the leaders of my team and we go over what are the standards of our team and uh, what are our core values. So we've had core, core values throughout our program for the past. You know, I've been coaching here for 10 years and, um, they get clear on what these core values look like. So attitude, effort, integrity, unity are our four that kind of carry with us from season to season. But we break it down like what does it look like in practice, in competition, um, in the hallways and. You know, in one of those situations comes practice and part of the expectation for practice is that players are on time and that they're prepared. And so when we have these standards set out on what it looks like to be a member of the river volleyball team, now we can talk from there. And so then I ask players like, okay, what happens when an athlete breaks one of these standards or doesn't, isn't showing, um, demonstrating the expectations. And obviously it depends on what the thing is, but some of the common ones are what if they come to practice unprepared, um, and they forget something, they forget the shirt that they're supposed to wear that day, or the binder, whatever. Um, or they come late. Now, when I first started coaching, I used to have a lot of rules. I used to have a lot of, like, you need to do this, you need to do that. And that just created more problems for me, to be honest, because then I had to remember what are all the things that I have to do when they break these expectations in rules? So I had to really, um, you know, be honest with myself. I'm like, what, what actually matters? What, like, what do we actually value? And so right now, 14 years later. Yes, I do value, um, promptness. And so you need to be on time for practice. And what's nice about our practices is that they're after school. So players are there. I rarely have an issue with tardiness and if it, if there is, I usually address that one-on-one before I. Create some sort of team consequence for people. So, um, it's very rare we talk about how you need to notify the coach at least 24 hours in advance if you're not gonna be outta practice. And then there's some consequences that come as a result from that. And, um, if there is somebody that is late to practice, I will. I will talk to them one-on-one and I'll say, Hey, I noticed you're late today. What's going on? Our standard is that we're on time for practice. And even if there is a, you know, there's typically a reason I usually don't have the whole program run for something like that. There usually is a good reason for them being late, you know, and it's one of those things where. Yeah, I get it. I'm glad you're here, is kind of what the message I send to them. You know, when athletes are sending me messages and they're like, there's a car crash on the way to practice and, you know, so I'm gonna be late. I, my message back is, be safe, please get here, um, in one piece, and I'm glad that you're here. So you wanna kind of create that culture. Through that. Now, if it's a chronic thing that continues to happen with one player, then we wanna make sure that we're looping in the parent and all, all of those things. Okay? So my first, um, point in all of this is that you have to be clear on what your expectations are, what your standards are, be clear on what matters to you as a coach, you cannot have I, and speaking from experience, every single little thing, um, because then you're gonna ha create this culture of like, now we're always just like in trouble for things because people are always like breaking the standards. So what actually matters? To you, and I'll tell you right now, tucking in their shirts, and you know how like all of those little things really don't matter to me anymore. As much as like, okay, I want you to be on time. I want you to be prepared for practice, and I just, I want you to give a hundred percent when you're here with us, okay? So co-create those standards, those expectations. Ask your team what should be the consequence for coming in, coming in late? What should be the consequence for missing practice, for missing practice and coming in late? I find the best consequence is the natural consequence of losing playing time. Okay. Um, because we say if you don't come to practice, you cannot play in the game. Now we have the difference between excuse and unexcused practices. Um, but so like, it kind of differs if there's an unexcused absence meeting, like they just skipped practice and they didn't let me know and they just weren't there. You can not play in the next game. You just still need to be there. But you, you're not gonna play because we're going to honor and respect the girls that did show up. Now if it's for an excused reason, so sickness, illness, things like that, um, then I say you can't start in the game and then it's KO's discretion after that. So they won't start in a varsity game, um, if they weren't, um, there at the practice for an excused reason. But after that, it's my discretion. So I will always communicate with the player on what it'll be like, Hey, you'll go in after the first set, or something like that. But again, we wanna give opportunities to the girls that are there. So that's just my stance. You don't have to do that. But I find that the best consequence is the natural consequence of losing, playing time, because that's really what they want is to play. And yeah, a quick set of lines. All right, now it's done. Um, I mean, it's not really gonna stick with them. So if you really care about something and you wanna emphasize it, loss of playing time is typically the consequence that, that we go with. Okay. The other thing about this is using exercise as punishment. Um, I have a thing about this because I was a PE teacher for lots of years, and I really don't like using exercise as punishment. That being said, I do from time to time, have my girls run lines for the girl who forgot her binder yesterday. We just have a team standard, and this was created with my team. They, um, they decided like, yeah, if somebody doesn't bring their binder or they bring the wrong color shirt for that day, we just run a set of lines. And so we do it as a program. It's just, you know, as soon as they check in, we're like, Hey, we got one set. They do their set. And we say, Hey, we got some extra conditioning in. Now let's make sure that we bring our binder. And I, for me, it's not that deep. It's not that that big of a deal. They run a set and it's kind of a reminder of like, Hey, let's make sure that we're we're prepared. You could, if you want, if you're like, I will not use exercises, punishment, you could say, if you forget your binder, you can't. Start in the next game. And that would probably be a little bit more like, oh wow, this is a, this is a big deal. Okay. But then you have to remember to follow through on that. So that's up to you if you wanna do that. I will never forget that, um, there was a girl who came late to the bus that she was like two minutes late to the bus when we were leaving for a district tournament. And, um, she was late for a good reason. I can't remember the reason now, but it wasn't like she just like overslept or something like that. But our standard, our expectation was if you are not on time for the bus. You cannot play in the first set. So I didn't have, and she was a libero, so she was my libero. She couldn't play in the first set. We ended up losing that set. And like in this dis important district match, everyone was discombobulated. Um, you know, I was even like, oh my gosh, why do I have this rule? You know, that's really hurting my team right now. Like, she was two minutes late. She had a good reason. Like, so you just have to be aware that when you set some of these things, you have to follow through with them. And so I actually got rid of that. Like, of course we want them to be on time for the bus. And if you're like, yep, no, we're gonna stick with it. But for us it was like, it wasn't worth what, like stress added, the stress that was added to the team. And you could, I guess say like, well, that's her fault. She should have been on time all this. But for me it's more of like, I'm gonna meet the person where they're at as a human and realize like, yeah, this was out of your control on why you were late. And if I, if you have that strict rule in there, then. You have the strict rule and you can't budge. And that's where I was at in that, that situation. So I, I default a lot more to like coach's discretion when it comes to these things now just from experience. So anyways, using exercise as punishment, use that sparingly. Um, I sometimes add it in to add some pressure in situations, which I'll talk about in a second. But there's other ways to add pressure than like the threat of physical punishment because. Ultimately we want athletes to enjoy exercising and, um, you know, if you're designing your practices appropriately, like my athletes are getting a lot of conditioning in practice anyways. And so we don't need to stop the skill development to go, like, get more conditioning in. We can do skill development and conditioning at the same time. So that's my stance. Use it sparingly. Um, use it like. Quickly don't spend a lot of time like making them run lines until they pass out, because that also really, from experience as a player, that kind of damages the the culture of your team too, and kind of pit people against each other. If it's constantly like, all right, we're running for this, we're running for this person, running for that person, running for that person. Okay. But I do use it every once in a while if we leave balls out. Um, if we're not taking care of our equipment, if we forget things like, um, you know, I use that from time to time. I will say it's more of the lazy way out. Um, so the more like, Hey, I'm serious about this is if you leave your balls out, we can't use it. We can't practice, we can't play. Like that would be actually the more intense way to go. Um, so ultimately you've gotta decide what you wanna do and, um, how you wanna handle it, but. For me, I, I use it sparingly. Okay. Now create pressure on purpose. Like I said, uh, it's important in margin that we're creating pressure situations, and sometimes I add in, um, some sort of sprinting or running to create a little bit more pressure. Um, yesterday I did it in a service receive drill where athletes, uh, like the service seat passers, had to get a 2.0 average for every point that they were under, that they ran a quick set of lines. If any point, um, any point they were over that, then the servers ran a quick set of lines, and I mean, it amounted to the most amount of time that athletes were working at a time. Sprinting was about 20 seconds, so it wasn't long. It was just one of those things like, you know, just adding in a little bit of pressure. I don't like doing that as much as manipulating the score. Um, you know, having like serving pressure where everybody has to make a serve in. And then if we don't, if somebody messes up, then we start back at, you know, start back over. So that pressure is kind of building and building and building. Um, like, I like creating pressure situations more like that. But regardless, you do wanna create pressure in your gym, but you need to give them mental skills to be able to handle that pressure. So this is one of the ways that. We help athletes with their mental training is that by giving them ways to manage pressure in those moments. So we use, um, mantras, we use a snapback routine, we use some breathwork stuff. What are they telling themselves in those pressure situations? So in order to. Be able to use mental skills in pressure situations, they have to have the situation to use it in. So whether that is adding on some sets of lines or, um, you know, manipulating the score where it's like, now you're down by this much and you have to, you know, the, the, the score is now flipped or you've gotta get these two points in a row or else. You lose the game, things like that. Opportunities to use their mental skills is really, really important. So if you wanna learn the skills that I teach athletes in those pressure situations, whether it is because they've got a set of lines right after that, or they're gonna lose the game, um, head to coach free training.com. That's where I teach, like the simple breath work techniques, snapback, routine, all of that I break down. There. So that is kind of my take on it. After, over the years, I will say that I started out very rigid and I had rules for everything and I had lines for everything. And I, you know, and I just couldn't keep track of it as a coach, it was not helpful for me. It was hurting my team. So now I am really clear about co-creating standards and expectations. I actually have my players come up with some of the consequences that, um, you know, they think are appropriate in certain situations. I use exercise as punishment, very sparingly. Um, I use it in situations where it's like a quick thing to get to get done, maybe to add a little bit of pressure, but I create pressure on purpose in other ways by manipulating the score, by having really tough, um, drills that they've gotta work their way out of. Earn the right is one of those drills. So I have a video all about earn the right that you can watch next. That's a really great mental training drill that incorporates a lot of physical training as well. But I will say overall. Running a bunch of lines will not make your kids better. Servers running a bunch of lines will not make them better passers or shooters or whatever. Um, because, and, and that's one thing is that if you're using exercise as punishment, please refrain from using it when it comes to skill development, because if they're missing their serves over and over and over again, more likely it's because they need more reps in that area, not because they. You know, they're not gonna be able to like run a set of lines and then all of a sudden get better at serving. I do get the case for like, well maybe it's a focus thing. Okay. Then we can give them skills to be able to focus. That's where the mental training skills come in and we have to teach them those skills, but they're not gonna get better just by running lines. Okay, hopefully this is helpful. Go check out the on the right video for more drills on pressure situations and mental toughness when it comes to developing skills as well, and I'll see you over there.