Stop Your Team from Crumbling Under Pressure in Rivalry Games

💡 Coaches – tired of seeing your talented athletes crumble in rivalry games? Learn how to keep them confident and performing under pressure → https://coachfreetraining.com

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. Winning four state titles has its perks… and a lot of rivals now! Over 14 years of coaching high school athletes, I've learned that mental toughness wins games just as much as skill. 

In this episode, I break down the 3 simple mental game hacks I use to help my team thrive in rivalry games, big games, and other high-pressure moments.

Including the importance of:
 ✅ Normalizing pressure games so athletes focus on what they can control
 ✅ Implementing a snapback routine for quick recovery from mistakes 
 ✅ Using visualization to mentally prepare athletes for tough game scenarios
 ✅ Designing game-like practices that strengthen both physical and mental performance

Whether you’re preparing for rivalry matchups, playoff battles, or high-stakes competitions, these coaching strategies will help your athletes stay confident, calm, and consistent under pressure.

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to Rivalry Games
00:41 Hack #1: Normalize the Game
02:13 Game-Like Practices
02:46 Hack #2: Failure Recovery System
04:55 Hack #3: Visualization Techniques
05:46 Conclusion and Next Steps

📢 Coaches – comment below: What’s your go-to strategy to keep your team from crumbling under pressure? 👇
 
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Transcript

1:04

Rivalry games just feel different, and I've been in quite a few over my years as a head coach and I've made some mistakes and I'm here to help you not make the same mistakes as your team prepares for a rivalry game. So we're gonna talk about the three mental game hacks, if you will, that I have. Ingrained in my team as we lead up to these bigger games. And let me tell you, after winning four state titles, everyone is our rival now for some reason. And so it seems like we have a lot of these rivalry games throughout our season, and here is how we are preparing for them. Number one, we've gotta normalize it. Even though these games feel bigger and these games feel more important, and I'm not just talking rivalry, like pressure games in playoffs or in championships, things like that. They just, they have a different vibe to them. Um, but we've gotta ask coaches, make sure that we just get our team to realize that it's just the game. Okay, it's just volleyball. It's just basketball, it's just soccer. Whatever My college coach used to say it's just another Turkey dinner. And that reference is that, you know what, any day of the year you can eat. Mashed potatoes and stuffing and Turkey and all the things that come with a Thanksgiving dinner. But then on Thanksgiving, all of a sudden it's like special and magical. But when you look at the contents of the meal, it's just another Turkey dinner. So she used to say that to us all the time, and I bring that to my team as well. And I also help them focus on what they can control. This is like a simple mental game hack. Um, and that is what is in your control in this situation. You cannot control the crowd and the hype and what other people are saying about the game, and you know what other people's expectations are. Stop trying to. Figure those things out. What is in your control, your preparation, your energy, your attitude, all of those things are in your control and the fundamentals, like how good you are at just executing what you know how to do. Like, you know what, what does our team stand for? What are we good at? Like, let's just lean on that. So normalize the game. That's kind of my hack number one. We don't need to put these games on a big pedestal or anything like that. Now as we lead up to them. As always, I want to prepare my athletes for what they're going to experience in a game. So practices should be game-like they should be tough and they should put athletes in situations that they might be in, in tough games where maybe they're down by a couple of points, they've gotta battle back, um, they've gotta fight through under fatigue. So. I wouldn't say though that you have to do that special, you know, and different for rivalry games'cause you should be doing that all the time. But just a note, if you're not already, then maybe try and replicate a little bit more of those game-like scenarios as you lead to what might be a more mentally and physically challenging game. All right, hack number two, give them a failure recovery system. We call ours a snapback routine. It's a combination of a breath, a reset word. And a reset signal because I'll tell you right now, your athletes will not rise to the occasion. They will fall to the level of their training that goes physically, and also it goes for the mental gain. So if you think that they're just gonna rise to the level and be confident, right, when they get into that pressure field situation where there's more people watching and more expectations. Uh, you're setting them up for failure if you have not actually given them the mental skills that they need. So a simple mental skill that I give my athletes is a snapback routine, and they can use this when they make a mistake and they're kind of getting in their own heads. When the pressure becomes a little bit more, um, too much, and we practice this, we don't just say, all right, here you go, here's a routine, and then like, expect them to use it for the first time in a pressure situation. We practice it in practice, we practice it in lower stakes games, and so athletes understand and know how to use their snapback routine, and it's something that they can. Lean back on in those big games. And sometimes when you're training things like this, like the snapback routine, you wonder. Is it working? You know, we would, we would train it every day and it would be part of like our daily mindset routine before practice saying their, um, reset word, doing their breath, things like that. And the routine takes like two seconds. It's, it's not very long at all. Um, and you kind of wonder, but then you get into these bigger games and everything kind of gets revealed, right? The pressure reveals things. It doesn't actually like prepare them for, um, you know, rising to the occasion. So I've been in championship games specifically this last championship game where. You know, I had a sophomore serving to take us back from, um, being down championship point. And when the reporters asked her afterwards what were, you know, what was going through your head, she said, I was doing my breath, I was saying my reset word. And you know, that's what they fall back on. And if you haven't trained it, then they will typically fall back on what is normal. Which is going down a path of negative self-talk or, oh my gosh, I don't want the ball to come to me. I, I don't wanna be the server in this like, game point situation, and that's, that's normal, but we have to be able to train them for what's actually helpful in that situation. So snapback routine is just one of the easiest. Tools that I give them. If you wanna learn how to do this with your team, go to our free training@coachfreetraining.com. Um, I teach that and a couple other mental training skills that I do with my team. And then finally, the other hack is visualization. So, um, visualization is great because it is proven to help replicate the actual game scenarios. It puts their. Their brain and their body in that scenario and almost gives them extra reps. And so we just visualize like, you know, tough situations. We visualize some reps, we visualize being down, visualize, um, you know, making mistakes and coming back. And it's not very long. I do like 30 seconds to a minute, um, before practice or before the game. We do a specific pre-competition visualization. And so, um, really simple way to just help them prepare. It helps kind of calm their nervous system as well, gets them to be more confident because now they're kind of imagining, they're already imagining what it's gonna be like out there and it's probably not good. You know, they're imagining making a mistake in front of all their friends and family, and so now we're putting like a different image in their head so that they can. You know, hopefully replicate that instead of what you know, the worst case scenario might be. So if you wanna learn more about visualization and how to get started, head to my next video, the three simple visualization strategies that any coach can do with their team. That's where I break it all down for you. So head there and I will see you in that video.