How to Give Athletes Role Clarity (Without Killing Confidence)

If your athletes are blindsiding you with playing time conversations, the Player Impact Plan changes everything. Free template linked below. More coaching resources at coachfreetraining.com 

Playing time talks don't have to blow up your team culture.

I spent years thinking I was communicating clearly. Turns out clarity and confidence are two completely different things and the gap between them is exactly where athletes start creating stories in their heads.

👋🏼 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'm sharing the system I now use with every single player on my roster:
✅ Why "here's your role" isn't enough (and what actually builds buy-in)
✅ The Player Impact Plan: what it is, what's in it, and how I use it
✅ How mental training reduces role resistance more than any conversation can
✅ Why I started sharing these plans with parents - and how it changed everything

🎯 Two girls quit my team after we won state. That moment changed how I communicate with athletes forever.

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
01:03 Clarity vs. Confidence
02:08 How Coach Bre Evolved
03:14 Defining Meaningful Roles
05:03 The Player Impact Plan
06:15 Biweekly Check-Ins
06:47 Mental Training & Self-Worth
11:23 Recap & Resources

👍 Found this helpful? Like, subscribe, and share with a coach who needs it.

Drop a comment below - what's your biggest challenge when it comes to role clarity?

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📌 Other Tools & Resources
Free training for coaches →coachfreetraining.com
👉 Plug & Play Elite Mental Game System for High School Coaches → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
📲 Instagram: @coachhergame
🎙 Podcast: Coach Her Game Podcast
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
🔹 Championship Program Membership: champions.elitecompetitor.com
🔹 Player Impact Plan: https://elitecompetitor.kit.com/6639eaaf9f|

P.S. Here's what the research shows: 
⚡️ Athletes who use structured reset routines recover from errors up to 40% faster during competition. (Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, Mesagno & Mullane-Grant, 2010)
⚡️ Visualization activates the same neural pathways as physical practice, meaning mental reps have measurable impact on skill execution. (Journal of Neurophysiology, Jeannerod, 2001)
⚡️ 95% of elite athletes report using mental training, yet fewer than 10% of high school coaches have a formal system for teaching it. (Association for Applied Sport Psychology, 2021)  

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 #highschoolcoach #mentaltoughness #girlsports

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

Transcript

0:00

If your coach has ever been a little blindsided by a request from an athlete to talk about playing time when you thought it was clear, then this episode is for you. I've been there lots of times where we think that our decisions that we make and the way that we communicate to athletes their role and their playing time is crystal clear, only to have that same athlete wanna talk to us about why they're not playing and why their role isn't what they thought it should be. So in this episode, I'm going to be clearing up what I do and a change that I've made in my program that has drastically reduced these meetings with players asking about playing time, and just overall improved the culture of my program and the athletes that make it up. And if I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bre. I'm a 14-year head volleyball coach. Won four consecutive state championships as a coach, but, you know, lost way more than that. And one of the things that made a big difference in a lot of those championship seasons was that all of my players knew what their contribution was to the team, and we had a system to make sure that everyone was informed. So number one thing that I got wrong as a coach in the beginning was that I thought clarity was the same thing as confidence when it came to talking about players' roles and where they stand on the team. What I mean by that is that even though you might be clear, you're like, "This is what your role is," that's not actually giving an athlete any confidence or autonomy in that role, to be honest. And that's where I started to see some issues pop up, is that I would say, you know, "Your role is a, a backup player." And let's be honest, it's mostly the players who either aren't in starting roles or in a position that they want to be in, those typically are the ones that are having some issues with it, right? And so if we say to our athletes, "You are a backup setter, outside hitter, DS," they get the message that, "I'm not good enough," right? "I, my coach doesn't like me." You know, they're creating all sorts of different stories in their head. And so just telling them, like the clarity around here's what your role is actually wasn't enough. And this improved for me as I continued to coach. I used to just kinda put in the lineup, and it was obvious who was starting and who wasn't, and I'm like, "Well, it's clear to me, so, uh, you know, it should be clear to you, too." Or like, "You're a freshman. You're not gonna play that much," you know? But I didn't actually, like communicate that. And then I moved into like, oh, I should probably communicate what the roles were, so then I would just I mean, one season I literally just like put it on a piece of paper and was like, "Here's everybody's roles." No conversation after that, you know? Like, your role is a backup outside. Your role is a whatever, whatever. And that actually was ruining some confidence among my players because they were like, "Well, what does this mean?" I'm like, "I just sit on the bench until it's time to go in." And yes, if you're like me, you kinda come from probably this thought pattern of your role is your role. You need to accept it and move on. And- I'm finding that that's not enough, and we have to be able to clearly communicate what contribution that role has on the team. Why do you have that player on your roster if you're not giving them a meaningful role? And a meaningful role doesn't mean that everybody gets playing time or everybody even plays in every game. But what I've started to develop into is what do these roles mean on my team? I started to define them differently. I started to even giving them different names that were more meaningful. I started to think more creatively as a coach on, like, how could a player contribute if they're not going to be in a starting role, and what are the success metrics for this role? What am I looking for? What... You know, all of those things contribute to more confidence in a player because now they know and they can see clearly what this contribution is and how the role is measured. And it doesn't mean the athletes stay in the same role for the whole season. I will even say a note on the word role. I read Betsy Butterick's book recently, Kids These Days, and she actually suggested that we move from calling it a role to what their contribution is. Now, I kind of use them interchangeably, but I'm leaning more a little bit m- towards this idea of their contribution to the team. So that's kind of big-picture key point number one is that what you think has clarity doesn't automatically mean confidence for players. We have to build their confidence, um, by defining what the role is and defining what it looks like and why it's important to the team. And it's not enough just to say, "All roles are important. Here's your role. You're a backup." Okay? Um, now, number two, the actual thing that I started to change- A few years ago, and honestly, this came after a couple girls quit my team, after we won state, mind you. And I can go down all the list reasons of why, like, they were at fault, but really had to look at myself and realize that these were players who didn't play, you know, key starting roles on the team, and I don't think I nurtured them enough to, you know, know what their contribution was. And I didn't empower them enough to know that they did matter to the team and found ways for them to actually contribute in a meaningful way. So I developed something called the Player Impact Plan, and this is a living document that I sit down with every one of my players at the beginning of the season. They fill out a little intake form, and I craft this plan for them. I have a template for it. I actually have it for free for you in the description if you wanna check that out. And I, um, sit down with them, and this template has what their contribution or their role is for that team, what that actually means, how I'm measuring that, what their strengths are, what they're working towards. Um, it has it all laid out there, and then there's a place for them to sign it, for me to sign it, and I share this document with their parents so that their parents also are on the same page with what this looks like. And I try to be specific as possible on, like, what playing time might look like. I, of course, give disclaimers that this, uh, this, this is not like, uh, you know, you will get this exact amount of minutes and this... You know, I just give them a general idea of, like, what I anticipate the playing time might look like for this role. So those Player Impact Plans have really changed the way that these conversations go because now I'm not just saying, like, "Here's what it is." I have more of a robust, you know, reasoning of, of why sh- they are where they are and that, you know what? Here's what you need to do to improve, potentially move into a different role. I'm not saying that's a guarantee. And then this is a living document that we check in with at our biweekly meetings. So I have biweekly meetings with my players where I'm checking in on how things are going and then reevaluating what their contribution is, and has it stayed the same? Are we changing roles? And sometimes things do change. I had to, um, make a change in one of our liberos, our defensive specialists, last year, and these Player Impact Plans and tracking their progress was huge in helping me have that conversation. So the Player Impact Plan is a really great starting place, and again, that's in the description If you wanna check that out. Now, number three, when it comes back to, you know, how to have these conversations and how to communicate this to players without destroying their confidence, um, what I already talked about was how you talk about the role and what the contribution is really does matter, and making sure that athletes are getting recognized. Like, every week we recognize athletes or player of the week, and it's not related to stats or anything like that. It's related to our program values and making sure that all roles are being recognized. Like, things like that go a long way, like peer recognition as well. But also mental training. So we do a lot of mental training in our program. That's what we're known for in our company as well. Um, so I utilize our own program called Mental- called Plug and Play: Elite Mental Game for Teams. We do it five to seven minutes before every practice. We also have, like, Mindset Mondays, where we go deeper into a topic. It's like 15 minutes. I press play on my own videos and then I lead a discussion afterwards, or I have my captains lead a discussion, and then they have a little mental training thing that they do in practice. And I've also noticed a really positive correlation to doing mental training in my program and players accepting their roles and playing hard and actually, like, contributing to the team even if they're not in a starting role. And here's why I think that is. When we do mental training, we talk a lot about, and athletes learn, where to place their self-worth and their confidence, um, beyond And here's why I think that is. When we do mental training, athletes, a big part of this is that athletes are de-linking who they are from what they do in their sport. We talk a lot in athletes practice that their self-worth and how they feel about themselves, their confidence, can't always be tied, and shouldn't be tied, to their stats, their role, how they did in practice, and how they did in a game. And this isn't to say that we shouldn't have goals for our athletes and athletes shouldn't want to do well. I'm not saying that at, at all. But you probably see this in your own gym or on the field, where athletes are tying a lot of their self-worth and how they feel about themselves to their performance. And so then when they're not doing well, or they make a mistake in the game, they then shrink and they hesitate, and they don't play as well, and they're beating themselves up. And you're like, "You're so much better than this. Why are you playing like this?" And it's because of that internal neg- negative narrative that they have in their brain because they're so connected to how they perform and what they do, like, that, that determines their confidence. And so by doing mental training, we are helping athletes de-link that. And again, it doesn't mean that they, they care less. It means that they're placing their sport and their performance in its correct place which is, "This is part of what I do, and my identity is not being a starter or getting a certain number of minutes. It's what can I contribute to a team? And I am enough just by showing up and working 100% and being a good teammate." And that improves your team culture as well. So this mental training that we do, like I said, is very simple. Athletes develop, like, routines to get over mistakes faster so they're not spiraling, and that increases their confidence. Um, we develop a daily mindset routine called the 3, 2, 1 Brave, where they're writing down three affirmations every day. And those affirmations alone are not just pulled out of thin air, like, "I'm smart, strong, confident." They're based in the athlete that they wanna be that season. And these affirmations are literally rewiring their brain to help them become that thing. So things like, "I am a, a connected, um, positive leader. Uh, every time I step on the court, I'm working hard." Like, there's all sorts of different examples of affirmations. But again, these are, like, developing their belief about themselves. Um, they do two minutes of journaling that I usually prompt that helps get them kind of to sort through some of these thoughts that are coming up. Uh, one thing that they're grateful for, one piece of evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true. So they're literally rewiring their brain to hunt the good, to make sure that they're showing up with the energy that you want them to to be honest. And, um, this also leaves less room for them to create stories that are not true or are negative about their contribution to the team or, you know, starting to look around and compare themselves. Like, when we actually can direct where their thoughts are going and being really intentional about the mental training- You're gonna notice that pop up in a lot of other areas. So if you wanna learn more about this and the system that I use, we have a free training at coachfreetraining.com. You can head there to learn our method, learn about our program. If you wanna head straight to Plug and Play, Elite Mental Game for Teams, this is the system that I use, um, where you can just get your team together, press play on the videos, lead a short discussion, and they've got the skills. Um, I'll also link that below and provide a little discount for you, so that's in the show notes. Okay. So kinda to recap this whole idea of how to help communicate playing time and roles without destroying your athlete's confidence, number one, just telling them their role isn't enough. Clarity is not the same as actually building their confidence around this. So have very specific roles, contribution, what does this role mean? Why is it important? Why do you even have it? Uh, be creative about what meaningful roles you can give your players. Like, I started to develop roles around serving specialists, blocking specialists, um, people who are going in in certain situations. Um, make sure you have metrics on how to track success in that role, okay? So that is point number one. Number two, communicate that through the Player Impact Plan. So I have that for free for you below. This is also something that we talk about, I, I wasn't gonna mention this, but inside our membership, I have a membership for coaches, it's called the Championship Program Mentorship, and I give you all of these templates, like the Player Impact Plan. We also have one for, like one-on-one meetings, pre-season, um, parent meeting templates. We have kids camp planning. All these things, like, as a coach, that you're like, "Why did no one te- teach me this?" So we talk about that inside our mentorship, so I will link that as well below. But the Player Impact Plan is one of those templates that I pulled out of our, um, mentorship, and I'm giving you it for free, that really has helped with these playing time conversations. And then three, mental training. Like, mental training has not only improved my players' ability to come back faster from mistakes, to deal with pressure, to deal with nerves, to be able to show up in big moments, but it's also improved my team culture. Because now athletes aren't tying as much of their self-worth into their role and what that means and thinking negatively about themselves if they don't have the role that they want. Um, it's improved our, teammate dynamics as well, because people are pulling each other down less 'cause they have a way to get over mistakes, so they're not blaming other people. Like, all of it has improved, my whole program has improved by dedicating 15 minutes a week to mental training. So if you wanna learn more about that, go to our free training. It's at coachfreetraining.com. Um, or you could just directly check out Plug and Play, which is our program that I use, and that will be in the description as well. All right, coaches, I'll see you in the next episode.