BTS: Mental Toughness Training Ideas for High School Coaches

I'm taking you behind the scenes of how I start practice with mental training. Learn more about this system here → https://coachfreetraining.com

Mental training doesn't have to take hours. I've been doing this with my high school volleyball team for six years, and we've won four consecutive state championships.

👋🏼 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 4-time state champion.

In this video, you're seeing exactly what I do. The whiteboard setup for pre-practice routines, how athletes engage with the daily mindset work, and how I structure it for easy implementation.

🧐What You'll Learn:
✅ Pre-practice setup to get athletes mentally checked in
✅ Our 3-2-1 BRAVE daily mindset routine (takes about 5 minutes)
✅ How I teach one mental training concept per week in just 15 minutes

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction & Mental Training Overview
00:20 Practice Setup & Routine
01:13 Pre-Practice & Whiteboard
02:36 Mindset Routine & Mental Skills
03:16 Notebooks & Next Steps

💬 Coaches - comment below: What's the biggest challenge you face trying to fit mental training into your already packed practice schedule?

📌 Build your team’s mental game confidently:
🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame 

🔔 Subscribe for More → Never miss an episode of Coach Her Game! 

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:

• Athletes who practice mental skills show 15-20% improvement in performance consistency under pressure (Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2022)
• Teams that implement structured mental training programs report 40% fewer in-game mental errors (International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2023)
• 85% of high school coaches believe mental training is important, but only 23% feel confident teaching it (National Federation of State High School Associations, 2023) 

The Coach Her Game YouTube channel is hosted by The Elite Competitor and is dedicated to helping coaches of girl athletes strengthen their mental game and team culture in order to develop a competitive edge.

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're a high school coach and you want to train the mental side of the game, but you're not really sure how this video is for you, I take you on a little BTS behind the scenes of one of my high school practices where I've been doing mental training for the past six years with my team. We've won state for the four consecutive, four consecutive seasons, and I'll tell you right now, mental training didn't hurt us and it actually doesn't take a whole lot of time. So I took you behind the scenes of how I start practice, what I put on the board, what it looks like for my team to come in. To do the mental training and to get off and on their way. Um, about once a week I go a little bit deeper for 15 minutes and teach a mental training concept with them. And all of those strategies are the same ones that coaches use inside our program. Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for teens. It's the same thing that I use as well. So if you wanna really easy. Plug and play way to do this with your team. I also talk about that in this video. So enjoy this BTS to kind of get a picture in your head of what this could actually look like and how it actually doesn't take a lot of time, especially once you get into a routine of it. And if you want more on what these strategies are, how to teach them and learn all about plug and play. So you can do this with your team. Head to coach free training.com. That's coach free training.com. That'll teach you everything you need to know about how to actually do this and implement it with your team. Okay, first things first. I've gotta unlock the snack closet at the beginning of practice. So we have this little snack cart. We ask for donations from parents at the beginning of the season, and it just makes it so that athletes don't head into practice on an empty stomach. So, got that all out in. Next step, do you even work at a high school if your equipment area doesn't look like this? So get in there, unlock the equipment cage, and then it's time to maneuver this ginormous whiteboard out. And it's always a challenge, but that's okay. I cannot coach a volleyball practice without a whiteboard, and you'll see why in a second. One of the ways that I ensure practice is sort of on time with G is having a pre-practice up on the board. So I write this up every day, and so athletes get into the gym, they know exactly what to do. Here's an example of a pre-practice that athletes would do when they come into the gym. On the other side of the board is our varsity practice. Each player comes and they record their focus for practice, how much water they had, and here's what our varsity practice looks like for today. So we've got everything up there and all the groupings. After pre-practice, we call everyone together. The whole program comes to the board and they do their daily mindset routine. It's called 3, 2, 1, brave. This was the prompt that they were doing for their 3, 2, 1, brave. And this is what we were talking about for mental training. So I take 15 minutes once a week to teach a mental training skill. All of these skills are also taught inside our plug and Play Elite Mental Game for Teams program for coaches to implement mental training with their teams. So take 15 minutes, talk about this. We do a little activity together. I finish with a visualization, so I read the script out loud. But inside our program, we also have the option just to play visualizations, and then we go off and do team practice with our team. So Varsity, JV, and C team. You might have noticed that my players had little notebooks that they brought with them to the board. If you wanna know how I structure these notebooks, including the templates and everything that's included, I have a video. All about that, that you can head to next. So I will see you over there.