Why Your Athletes Fall Apart Under Pressure (And 3 Ways to Fix It)

Your athletes freeze under pressure because they've never been taught how to respond. Get the full system here 🧠 → coachfreetraining.com

In this episode, I'm breaking down the exact 3 things I changed after watching my team blow a 21-17 lead in the third set of a semifinal match. Telling them to be mentally tough wasn't working. Telling them to shake it off wasn't working. Here's what did.

You'll learn:
✅ Why "shake it off" doesn't teach athletes anything (and what to say instead)
✅ How to design practice so athletes are actually training for pressure
✅ The Snapback Routine - a failure recovery tool your team can use in 30 seconds
✅ Why coaches need their own pre-planned response for momentum shifts
✅ How 5% of practice time can change everything in a championship moment

👋🏼 I'm Coach Bre, a 4-time state champion volleyball coach and Certified Mental Performance Coach. I've spent 14+ years coaching girl athletes and built The Elite Competitor to give coaches proven, plug-and-play mental training systems that actually work. 

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
00:19 Coach Bre's Story
00:59 The Semifinal Collapse
02:47 Why Telling Isn't Teaching
04:24 #1: Train for Pressure
06:05 #2: The Snapback Routine
10:02 #3: The Coach's Pre-Plan
14:30 Wrap-Up & Next Steps

💬 Drop a comment below - Which of these three are you trying first with your team? 

📩 Work with Coach Bre: coachfreetraining.com

📌 Free Tools & Next Steps
👉 Plug & Play Elite Mental Game System for High School Coaches → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
🎓 Free Mental Training Resource for Coaches: coachfreetraining.com
📲 Instagram: @coachhergame
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
🔹 Championship Program Membership: champions.elitecompetitor.com
🔹 Player Impact Plan: https://elitecompetitor.kit.com/6639eaaf9f|

🔔 Subscribe for weekly mental training strategies built specifically for coaches of girl athletes.

P.S. Here's what the research shows:
⚡️ Only 9% of high school coaches have received formal mental performance training, yet nearly all believe mental skills impact performance. (Association for Applied Sport Psychology, 2018)
⚡️ Athletes with pre-planned reset routines recover from errors significantly faster than those without a defined coping strategy. (Mesagno & Mullane-Grant, 2010)
⚡️Girls are 1.5x more likely than boys to drop out of sports by age 14, often citing confidence and fear of failure as primary reasons. (Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women, University of Minnesota, 2018)

Coach Her Game 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. 

#coachinggirls #mentalperformance #girlsinsports #highschoolcoach #athletemindset

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 athletes to be mentally tough. Does not make them mentally tough. And if you've ever stood on the sideline watching your team completely fall apart and have no idea how to stop it, that's not necessarily a you problem, but it is a system problem, and that's exactly what I'm gonna talk about in today's video. If I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bri. I am a mental performance coach for athletes, but I'm also a 14 year head volleyball coach. Won four state championships as a coach, but I've also. Lost a lot of, uh, championships or had seasons where we didn't even make it to the state championship. And in fact. I have been there as a coach more times than I can count where things are looking good. You know, maybe we even have the lead and then one thing leads to another and all of a sudden the wheels start to fall off and my team starts looking like not what they did, just moments before things are unraveling and it's really hard to turn the ship around. And in fact, I remember specifically. One year that I was coaching, we made it to the final four. We were playing this semi-final match and we had won the first two sets pretty easily. We were winning in the third set. This is volleyball by the way, so you have to win three outta five to win the game. We were up 2117 in the third set about this to beat this team in three to go to the state championship. We only needed four more points. The other team started to go on a run. And the lead started to narrow a little bit, little bit by little bit, and all of a sudden we were tied, and now it was 21 all, and I could see my team visibly just tighten up. People were like hesitating. They were making silly errors. I was calling timeouts. I was trying to switch people out. Then people started bickering. All of a sudden it wasn't a tie anymore. The other team had taken the lead, and now they were closing in on winning this set. They ended up winning that set. We went into the next set and we're like, okay, it's okay. It's all right. We can still win the next one and still win the match. Well, no, the, the momentum had swung to the other team. We were now bickering with each other and we lost that set and then we went on to lo lose the fifth set, lose the match. It was devastating and I remember after that season really having to look at myself as a coach and realize like what happened. And I could have easily blamed my players. You know, it was them. They didn't show up, they didn't do what they were supposed to do. But when I had to really look at it, I saw as a coach that I had not trained for that moment. I had tried to train them really well physically, and then just crossed my fingers that what happened out there was gonna be good. But we didn't really have a plan for when things. Didn't go good. Okay. When their nervous systems were flooded. And that really is what happens is that when athletes are in that situation where things are kind of going offline and things are happening that they're not expecting, their nervous system does kick into fight or flight mode. Their brain literally cannot access the skills that they have spent that whole season or years training. And us as coaches saying, you know, stay aggressive or be mentally tough or shake it off doesn't really work because telling isn't teaching. We can't just tell them to do those things just like a skill. We can't just tell them to go run a slide or do this jump shot, and if we haven't taught them how to do it, they're not gonna actually know how to do it. So the fix isn't a better speech as a coach. It's actually a system that's built before that moment arrives. And what I changed after that season, that was about seven years ago at this point, was I actually went back to become certified in how to teach mental training to my team. So I built a whole system. That I rolled out to my team seven years ago, and I'm gonna teach you some of the things that I started doing a little bit differently from that season. I will say we haven't missed a state tournament since we've won four consecutive championships. And I'll tell you right now that the mental side of the game did not hurt us. And in fact, it is the very thing it your team will fall back on when talent becomes equal, the further they go in the season, it doesn't actually become a. Issue of talent because everyone's talented. That's not the differentiator. It is who can actually perform when the pressure is on? What do they do in those situations where things kind of go off the rails? Okay. Now, if you wanna know the full system behind all this, I'm gonna hit on the three things right now. If you wanna know the whole system, you are gonna wanna check out my free training for coaches. That's at coach free training.com. That's where I break down, uh, things in a lot more detail. And I also show you how you can implement. My system called Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for teams with your team. So that's at coach free training.com if you wanna check that out after this video. But. Number one thing that I did differently is training better for pressure situations. You cannot expect your athletes to perform under pressure if they have not practiced performing under pressure. Mental toughness is not actually a personality trait, it's a skill and it has to be trained. So what does this actually look like? I will say that a lot of times, you know, in these seasons where our record was pretty good. You know, we would kind of fly through the season without a lot of adversity. So practices, I will, you know, practices would be good and games would be good, but we weren't really hitting a lot of adversity. And then when it happened, we weren't prepared for it. And so we actually have to deliberately train that in practice and the way that we. Do that in our gym. And again, this can apply to all sports, but for volleyball, what that looks like is we're putting them in specific situations where it's challenging. So we'll adjust the score and manipulate the score so that they have to come back from being down. Um, we'll throw in random, chaotic situations where you have to convert this, um, you know, crazy ball that is simulated going off of the block. You've gotta come it back. You gotta win that point and you have to win the next. To in order to get a big point. Okay. So there's things that you can adjust in your drills. You can adjust the scoring, um, to make it hard for them. I have another video on how I start my first week of practice, um, doing something called Earn the Right. And this is a series of really challenging drills that's designed to put them in tough situations so that they have to mentally respond. And the kicker is that you have to teach them how to mentally respond before you give them the opportunity to do it. So yeah, make it challenging. Make it hard. But again, if you haven't taught them a skill on how to respond. And then it's just gonna be challenging and they're gonna like, you know, not actually know what to do. So that leads me to point number two, which is have a predetermined way on how they're going to respond. Okay. So first, like design your practice so that it is game-like and it is challenging and that you're putting the pressure. I can't, I don't think you can. A hundred percent simulate all of the emotions that come with being in a big match with lots of people watching and the pressure of the moment in practice. But the more that you do, just try and simulate some of that pressure put, um, consequences on things. I'm not a proponent of, you know, exercise as consequences, but. You know, where are there things where we're, you know, we do something called the cauldron is where we're tracking their points. And so there is a direct correlation to their like, you know, points that they're getting in practice so that you're kind of like encouraging that competitiveness. So things like that, but then have a predetermined way on how they're going to respond. And one of the skills that I've started teaching in order for them to have a way to respond is something called the snapback routine. So the snapback routine is essentially a failure recovery system. So this is like the. When a mistake happens or a run starts and athletes kind of get shaken up, they have a tool that they can fall back on, not hope, not like, you know, just me saying, shake it off. Because again, that's telling is not teaching, but an actual trained response. And so the snapback routine is a combination of a breath to activate their parasympathetic nervous system, a reset word at the top of that breath. This is Prefo. It's all custom and individualized. Per athlete. They prefin this word. We do this within the first week of the season based on how they wanna feel in that moment. Also based on how they have played well in the past. So words such as fast, free, fun, next. Sometimes it's a funny word or a choice word, but they're saying it in their own head. And on their exhale, they're doing some sort of reset signal, so something really simple to ground them, like touching two fingers together, looking at a stationary object in the gym. Um, you know, adjusting a hair, tie a socks, something to like, that's very subtle, but helps ground them. And it's actually a skill. So when they're like, I don't know what to do, and I'm spiraling and I'm thinking about the mistake, I'm worried about what might happen. No, we're gonna do our Snap hacker team. And the other thing that happens is that now I have a common shared language with my team around this. I can say. During a timeout, like, Hey, let's do your snapback routine, or say your reset word and they actually have something to do that will help focus them and kind of narrow the moment and get them grounded. In the, here in, in the now. Okay. So they can do that in practice. In fact, I tell them, you have to practice this in practice. It's not gonna work for you in a state championship if you don't actually practice it first. And here's the thing, coaches, when we just say, shake it off, next play, um, you know, like, get over it. It's actually not teaching them how to do that. We are hoping that just by saying those things, they will be able to do it, but that is the outcome that we want. It's actually not teaching them a skill to get to that outcome. And so you have to intentionally teach them away to do those things. And sometimes when I hear coaches saying like, well, that's what I mean when I say shake it off, just like forget the last play. Most athletes don't do that. They don't know how to do it. Okay? So you're, it's not like you're saying something wrong, but you're expecting them to do something that you haven't taught them how to do. That's like coaching one-on-one. All right? So teach them a way to do that, and in my free training. Coach free training.com. I go more specifically in how you can implement the snapback routine with your team. So you're definitely gonna want to take a look at that. Okay. Now, the last, um, piece of this. So the kinda the big things that I changed aside from really implementing a full mental training system, so we have like a daily mindset routine. We do now before every practice that includes visualization. We do pre-game visualizations. Now we have our, everyone has a snapback routine. They have a pre-performance routine. Like there's a lot that we have implemented. And again, at coach free training, you can hear all of it. Um, and including plug and play Elite Mental Game for teams. That's basically my system that coaches across the nation are implementing with their high school teams as well. But one of the other things is that you as a coach have to have a plan for when this happens. Um, so we try and teach players on like, here's what you can do. In these situations, we even have them visualize, do them doing their snapback routine when they get in a situation that triggers them. But for you as a coach, you gotta pre-plan too. You have to have a response because it's going to happen. And so think of the situations that you're going to be in as a coach. The momentum switch, uh, shifts. You get down by a couple points, things like that. And I'll tell you right now. Um, I get flustered as a coach when those things happen and I don't have a plan. And that's, you know, 90% of what I was doing for the majority of my coaching career before I was like, oh, I should probably like pre-plan for some of these things that commonly happen too. And you know, so even just writing out, just like your athletes, I, we have our athletes write out what are common scenarios or situations that get you off track and cause you to spiral. What is that for you as a coach? Be honest with yourself. For me, it is when, when a run starts happening, and I'm like, what do I do? Do I call a timeout? Do I make a change? Do I say something? And so like, what? What is the situation? And then what are your options? So I even write down, like on the clipboard that I have as a coach, when I'm there to remind myself,'cause you know, the motions get high, you forget things, you get flustered, and then you look back, you know, a few hours later and you're like, oh, I should have done this. I should have done that. And not that we can plan for everything perfectly, but if you have kind of an idea of your options, you know, do you call a timeout if you have one? Do you make a, a shift in personnel? Do you make a shift in the configuration with volleyball, like in serve, receive, or something like that? Like just write down your options and then if it is a timeout, like what I wish I would've done. In that game when I didn't have any of the resources, my tool, my, my players didn't have the resources I'd called timeouts, but it wasn't really productive. I was just like, we gotta change this. We gotta, who's gonna make a change? You know, who's gonna step up and be a leader? And it's like, okay, I don't know. Um, but I wish I would've had a common language that I could use. I wish I could have said. Hey, let's take a breath and let's say our reset word right now. Okay. I wish I would've narrowed in on here's one specific thing that we can do in this play and then we'll turn it around from there. But instead, it was just like chaotic and I was just trying to like, you know, manage what was going on. And so we get ourselves in situations like that, and that's just part of sports, it's part of coaching. But the more that we can pre-plan for some of those situations, just like our players do, I think the better off we are as coaches as well. And one of the main things that has helped with that and what has helped actually in. The state championship that, um, that we were in just recently where it was kind of the opposite. You know, I, my team was down championship point, but we came back and what I did in that timeout when I called the timeout is I got everyone together and I said, we are gonna say our breath. Or sorry, we're gonna do our breath. We're gonna say our reset word. Okay. We're gonna go out there, we're gonna side out, and then we'll take it from there. And that's exactly what happened. And um, to be honest, watching my team come back from championship point because they had the tools to fall back on, you don't rise to a level of the challenge. You fall back on what you've trained. We had trained the snapback routine the whole season. We had trained for adversity situations, not that again, you can prevent or help e everything. But my players will tell you. And they told the reporters after, you know. All, all we were doing was doing our breath and saying our reset word, breath, a reset word. And those are the moments where that type of training shows up. And if you can't equip your team, whether or not you're like, okay, well you know, we get in this situation, maybe, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. But I'll tell you right now, it will not hurt you. It will not hurt you to train your athletes mental game. They say 90% of sports is mental. When I ask athletes that, when I ask. You know coaches that, how much of the game is mental? They'll say anywhere from like 50 to 90% is mental. How much of your practice are you training in? I don't train 90% of my practice mentally though, right? I train about 5%. Okay? We do five to seven minutes at the beginning of practice doing our daily mindset routine. We practice our snapback routines kind of throughout practice, so it's woven in, but I would say about 5% is what we do, but that 5% shows up when it matters. So if you wanna learn more about how to implement a. System to do this. Uh, we have a program for coaches called Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for Teams. Literally, you play videos from me to your team. You get your team together, play short videos for them. You lead a discussion afterwards. You don't need to become a sports psychologist. You don't need to spend a lot of time. You can literally just do this once a week called Mindset Mondays, do a little pre-game. Uh, visualization that you can either read or play for your team. Um, pre-practice routines as well that's baked in there. Uh, it's a really simple way for you to be able to actually employment mental training with your team without having to spend a lot of time. Or go back and use your time, money, and resources to become a mental performance coach. I, I did it the hard way. You know, you don't have to do that. So, um, I will link the information for that below. The best way for you to learn about it is at our free training@coachfreetraining.com. All right, coaches, I hope this was helpful. Remember telling your team to be mentally tough, telling them to shake it off, telling them next play. I mean, not bad things to say, but it's actually not teaching them anything. So actually have a system. And the three things that I have done to kind of help my team with this, number one, train for pressure situations in practice. Have a way that they are going to come back in those pressure situations and deal with it. So we, one of the tools that we use is called a snapback your team, and number three, as a coach, have your plan kind of laid out for when you get in those type situations as well. All right, coaches, I'll see you in the next episode of the Coach Game podcast.