How to Structure Practice for More Wins (4 Part System)

Your practice structure is either winning you games or costing you them. Here's the 4-part system I use every day. 🎯 Get the free training → https://coachfreetraining.com

Most coaches plan what they're going to run. They never plan how their athletes will actually show up to run it.

👋🏼 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.

In this episode, I break down the four parts of our daily practice structure:
✅ Pre-Practice: athletes moving, checked in, and connected before we ever run a drill
✅ Mental Training: 5 minutes of 321 BRAVE to train what you say you actually value
✅ Team Practice: game-like reps, adversity training, and the competitive cauldron
✅ Reflection: fighting the negativity bias so athletes leave knowing what went well

If it's not in your practice plan, it's not a value. It's just something you wish was true.

🕓 Key Moments:  
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Pre-Practice Setup
01:46 Whiteboard System & Player Jobs
03:10 Mental Training
04:10 3-2-1 Brave Daily Practice
05:25 Team Practice Structure
06:52 Competitive Cauldron
08:30 Reflection & Closing

💬 Comment below: which of these four parts is missing from your current practice structure?

📩 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
🎙 Podcast: Coach Her Game Podcast
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🔹 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:
⚡️ Athletes who use structured pre-performance routines are 22% more consistent under pressure. (University of Chicago)
⚡️ The human brain registers negative experiences roughly 3x more strongly than positive ones - which is exactly why the reflection close matters. (Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Hardwiring Happiness, 2013)
⚡️ Mental imagery activates the same neural pathways as physical practice and improves performance consistency by up to 23%. (Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology)

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.

#mentalperformance #coachinggirls #collegerecruitment

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

Transcript

Coach Bre 1:04

Your practice structure is either building your culture and making your players better or. It's not, it's making your players worse. And I spent too many years thinking that I had everything dialed in only to get to practice and have to spend the first 20 minutes trying to get everyone to focus. Ending practice feeling like, what did we just do? Did we get better? Did we get worse? And that stops for you today, I'm going over my practice structure. There's four main components that I have included in my practice structure that has led to a lot more focused practice. Um, athletes who are actually performing in games like they do in practice because there's a lot more mimicking of what's happening in an actual game, and athletes that are mentally strong, so they're actually able to show up. With confidence under pressure. So let's get into it. These four main things that need to be included in your practice structure. If you want to build your culture and build teams that are high performing, number one, they need to be moving when they get into the gym. Now, that might sound obvious, but here's how typically. Practices start. For most programs, athletes meander on in, at least this is the truth in my gym, um, we kind of set up the nets. It's usually the same, like three people who are doing it. Maybe they'll get a ball out of the cart and start doing some arbitrary arm warmup. But in reality, they're like sitting around chatting and stretching. It's like I couldn't, I couldn't stand it anymore. And so what I do now is I have something called a pre-practice. I have a whiteboard in my gym. If you do not coach with a whiteboard that is sub number one. Go get a whiteboard, and I put a pre-practice on the board every single day. So athletes come in, they also know who is setting up the net. I took that over right away and I was like, you know what? We're not wasting time figuring out like, oh, who's gonna do this? No numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4. You're setting up the nets on these days. 5, 6, 7, 8. You're setting up the nets on these days. It eliminates some team drama as well, and some bitterness that happens. So everybody has a job. They know what they're doing when they're doing it. So nets are set up. Okay? This applies to all sports. I'm talking about volleyball, but this, apply this to your sport. And then on the board they have our pre-practice, and these are things that I don't wanna waste time and practice doing. There's things like footwork, there's warmups. I usually just rotate through three different pre-practice activities that athletes do, um, so that they're getting some intentional reps included and baked in. Inside the pre-practice is some check-in, um, things that I have athletes do. So either they're checking in with each other, they're always checking in with me. And the way that I do that. Is on the other side of the whiteboard. I have two sides to the whiteboard. They are writing down, um, their water intake for the day, how much sleep they had the night before, and their goal for practice. And I'm standing on that side of the board, kind of finishing up the practice plan for varsity. And as they're doing that, as they're writing those things down, I'm checking in with them and it's just my like micro check in. With every single one of my athletes as they come into the gym, I'm not trying to micromanage them by knowing how much water and sleep they had, but it is, um, something that we wanna pay attention to, and if they are accountable to writing it down, then. Hopefully they're realizing that that impacts how they show up in their practice. So use your pre-practice time to check in with your athletes, have things baked in. Um, make sure that they're getting intentional reps. So that is number one. Don't let them just come into practice and just do whatever they want, because usually that leads to a slow start to practice. So have your pre-practice on the whiteboard. Number two, mental training. We do mental training. Every single practice. And why we do this is because they say that sports are 90% mental, right? And you see it, you see athletes who are very talented. Maybe you have good practice, um, the night before a game. And then when the game happens, you're like, what team is this? This is not the team that was at practice last night. And if you want mentally strong athletes who bounce back after mistakes and can handle pressure and can play and compete at a high level. You have to train that side of the game. I spent too many years with my head in the sand thinking, it's not my job to do this. It's a personality thing if they're mentally tough or not, or they just need to be more mentally tough, and it took back to back years of hard losses. When I had talented teams that should have gone far and we didn't because we were not mentally strong for me to realize I should probably start training this now. I did it the hard way. I went back to become a mental performance coach to teach these skills to my team. You don't have to do that. I, I took care of it for you. I actually have a free training where I break down exactly what I do in my gym when it comes to mental training. So every day before practice, we do something called 3, 2, 1. Brave. So athletes have journals, they come to the board after pre-practice. I spend about 10 minutes doing mindset. We do 3, 2, 1, brave, like I said, every day. It's a combination of. Three affirmations. They write down two minutes of journaling that I prompt one thing. They're grateful for one piece of evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true. We do a visualization every day called Brave, and these are the things that are rewiring their brain to get them checked into practice, but also. Our brain, it has a negativity bias. It's always looking for everything that's going wrong with what is happening in their own playing experience. And so we have to train the brain to hunt the good, to find what's going well, to really get good, good self-talk into their brain. So we train that every single day. And if you wanna know those on a deeper level, go to my free training. It's got coach free training.com. I break down how you can do this very easily with your team, but we do that every single day. The other thing about doing mental training is that. You have to train what you value in your program. You can't say that you value mentally tough athletes. You can't say that you value athletes who are connected to each other and show up for each other, and you know, all of these things, if you don't actually do it in your practice, and practice is the time that you train those things. We value that in our program and so I make it essential that every single practice, we're doing some mental training, so that's part two. Part three, now we transition into team practice. So for us, um, you know, I run a, a program of three to four teams, depending on the season. So that's about 36 to 48 girls in my gym. Um, we do all the pre-practice together, and then we do the mental training together, and then we break off into our team. So then I have my varsity team, uh, for a dedicated 90 minutes or so, a little bit longer on most days, and I block that 90. I mean, it is, it is planned out to the T. Okay. So we on the board. Um, everything is on the board, like what we're doing. I have player groupings. Every player has a number so that they know, um, exactly where they're going. I take the transition time out so that I'm not like, okay, you six over here, or just, you know, get on the court. You, you know, six on this side, six on that side, because it's so much wasted transition time. They're looking at each other like, where do I go? Where do I go? Where should I go? No, I am figuring that out all for them so that those transitions are really fast. I always ensure that I am doing, serving in passing for a good amount of time. That is a volleyball thing. Whatever that is for your sport. Okay. That is an essential skill that we have to train every single day, serving in passing. So I usually have like a block time where we're focusing on some sort of skill serving in passing. That is always a part of it. And then we go into more of game-like situations and we have also have to train for adversity. Part of practice is we have to put them in environments where they are competing, where things are hard. We've gotta, you know, and there's a variety of ways that I do this. I actually have a whole video on how we train. For adversity in practice, so you can head there next. Um, but the other thing is that we wanna compete in our gym. So I do something called the competitive cauldron. And um, I mentioned that I have, uh, player numbers for everybody. These player numbers are also. Assign different groupings depending on what we're doing when it comes to six on six stuff, game-like things. And we always have, um, I would say like 90% of our game-like things game-like drills that we do have a winner and a non winner, and we have it scored and they keep track of those scores in what's called a cauldron from week to week. And it's on the board. So they can kind of see where they're ending up when it comes to their position group. And I frame this really well at the beginning of the season because it can get a little sticky if, you know, we're like pitting players against each other if they take it like that. It's not like that. It's that we're either pushing somebody or we're pulling somebody in our position group. And we always want to be striving. To make that number better every single week. And so we're always putting numbers on things because that's what a game is as well. And so make things competitive. Um, manipulate the score, put pressure on your players by putting them in pressure situations. Um, again, I have a whole video about how I do that, but make sure that you have that in your team practice. Okay. I always say practice should be harder than the game, so we get into a game. They've already been there, right? And sometimes it's hard to recreate the exact situations, but that's also where the mental training comes in. So we train the mental side of the game at the beginning of practice, but then I'm bringing it up in practice as well as we're in tough situations. Or you know, I've got the team and they're down five points and I'm coming to that team and they're like, okay, what are we gonna do here? What's our mindset here? Are we playing to win or are we playing not to lose right now? Um, let's do our snapback routine right now. After we just made that, you know, we missed our serve when it was game point. And so we're bringing in mental training as well. During the practice. Okay. And then at the end, I love to end with reflection. I used to just be like, okay, practice is over. Break it out. Let's go. I now schedule in five minutes at the end of practice, where we literally circle up. So I'm lurking looking at each other eye level, and players go around and they say one thing that went well for them at that practice. That's because our brain, again, has this negativity bias. So we're bringing in some mental training at the end of practice as well, so that they're leaving with the image of what went well because they're gonna leave with. The thoughts in their heads of all of the million things that they did wrong. Okay? And they're overthinking. And we know that thoughts become things. Our thoughts create our reality. And so it's not like we're ignoring the ways that we want to improve or that we need to improve. We're always working on that. But we need to also fill our brain, and athletes need to fill their brain with what did go well so that we can recreate that. And so they're saying that and then they're giving a shout out to somebody else in. The circle, um, for what they saw and what they demonstrated in practice. And as a coach, you have to kind of make sure that you are keeping track of, okay, who's getting, who's getting the love. And I include myself in the co, in the, in the shout outs as well. To make sure that athletes are experiencing, um, recognition from, from their peers, but also from coaches, um, as well. And I think that's a really beautiful way to end practice so that we are creating that community and ending on a high note no matter how that practice went. So those are the four key things that we wanna make sure, um, kind of in the, the, the practice structure. And then what you fill in, in between is up to you, but pre-practice is a non-negotiable. They're doing something intentionally. When they come into the gym, you're also building in some connection during that time. Mental training has to be a priority if you actually want them to show up mentally strong in a game. If you wanna get off that rollercoaster of which team is gonna show up tonight, you've gotta train some of those skills in practice and it's not as hard as you think. So go to coach free training.com. I break that down. I teach the 3, 2, 1 Brave. In that training. I teach the snack back routine. That's our failure recovery system. So really simple ways that you can incorporate that into your practices without taking a lot out of your practice time. And then three, the actual bulk of the practice itself. Make sure that you are making things competitive. Making them game, like putting them in tough adverse situations where they have to respond because that's what they're going to be put in in an actual game. And then reflection at the end. So leaving with what went well and shouting out somebody else in that circle. All right, got a couple things for you before you go. You can head to that training, um, at coach free training.com. You can also head to the next video that is all about how to train for adversity and equip your athletes with skills to be able to show up strong. Show up adaptable in those situations as well. I'll see you in the next episode.