Pre-Season Mental Game Roadmap: Every Coach Needs This

Is your team falling apart under pressure? I'm breaking down my full season mental training system starting with pre-season. Grab the training → coachfreetraining.com

***Coaching Resources***
👉 Plug & Play Elite Mental Game for teams → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
🎓 Free Mental Training Resource for Coaches: https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Championship Program Membership: https://champions.elitecompetitor.com
🔹 Player Impact Plan: https://elitecompetitor.kit.com/6639eaaf9f
🎙 Podcast: Coach Her Game Podcast

***Connect with Me***
📩 Work with Coach Bre: coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
📲 Instagram: @coachhergame

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

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 The Wake-Up Call
00:41 Hitting Rock Bottom
01:25 Turning Point: Training the Mental Game
02:58 Pre-Season Foundation Building
06:47 Weekly Mindset Mondays
07:51 Resources & Closing

👋🏼 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.

I used to think talent was enough until my team fell apart in a state semifinal and I froze right along with them. 😳

That loss sent me down a rabbit trail that turned into an actual system, one I still run every single season. 

You'll learn how I use pre-season to set the foundation for mental training all season long including setting the vision, affirmations, and mindset Mondays.

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:
⚡️Athletes who train with visualization methods report real improvements in confidence and self-control while competing (Predoiu et al., 2020)
⚡️Mental imagery training has been shown to help athletes maintain and improve performance, especially at the pre-elite level (Dello Iacono et al., 2021)
⚡️My program hasn't missed a state tournament in 8 years since I started intentionally training the mental game (Coach Bre, personal coaching record)

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 #volleyballcoach #mentaltoughness #highschoolcoach #sports #headcoach

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

Transcript

1:04

I remember standing on the sideline watching my team completely fall apart in a winner to state, loser out match. We had won the first two sets. We were up in the third, and then ended up falling apart, losing the third, getting into the fourth, losing that as well. And as I was watching the wheels fall off of my team, I wasn't worried about timeouts. I couldn't make the adjustments that I needed to make because I wasn't thinking clearly. Because all I was thinking about was it felt like every single person in the gym was watching me. I was panicking. They weren't watching my team. They weren't watching anything else but me. It felt like it was just all eyes on me, and I was failing my team. And I remember after that match that we had lost, and again, this isn't the first time that this had happened, I went home and I was like, "What do I do?" I honestly considered walking away from coaching because I'm like, "Ah, maybe I'm not cut out for this." I ended up going down the rabbit trail of Google, searching mental performance, mindset, how to not fall apart under pressure, and I was going through just so much information coming at me. Like, how do I even do this? And if this hits home for you as a coach, if you're like, "I've seen my team do this. I've questioned myself as a coach. I've felt like all eyes were on me, and I had no idea what to do because this clearly is a mental game problem, because physically my talented team was good enough to win that match." And you're like, "What, where do I, where do I start?" That's exactly why I made this video. So I'm gonna walk you through what came out of that season, which was I made a huge change in my program. I decided to intentionally train the mental side of the game after that season. It's been eight years since then, and I mean, we haven't missed a state tournament since, so there's that. We've won four consecutive state championships, and my team will tell you that they would not be able to perform at the level that they are without the mental skills that they need. I'll also tell you, I've never met a championship team that doesn't have talent on it. You need talent to go far, right? However, I have coached plenty of talented teams that did not go far and fell apart when I needed them not to, and that's where these mental skills really come in. Here's the real problem here, as coaches, sometimes we have no idea how to do this. I won't even say sometimes. I sure didn't when I became a coach at 22 years old, right? And so we are told that the mental side is really important for athletes, but then we're not really told how to do it. So that's why I decided to make a change, and you don't have to do what I did. I actually went back to become a mental performance coach. Like, I did a deep dive, I did a certification, I used my team as beta testers, and then I developed a program for coaches so that they can do it with their team. So you get the shortcut of that. We have a whole program, that makes it really easy for you to do this. It's literally called Plug and Play: Elite Mental Game for Teams. So you plug and play, play things for your teams, and facilitate a discussion afterwards. So you don't have to do the hard part that I did. But in this episode, I'm gonna break down how my season looks, uh, pre-season and what I do for mental training Pre-season is where I build the foundation of mental skills for my team. For us, in the pre-season, when I say pre-season, our season has started. So we do tryouts, and then teams are formed, and then I typically spend the first week really ingraining the culture, the norms, which part of our norms is that we train the mental side of the game. And I get them bought into the idea of mental training. At this point, now that we've been doing it for eight years, it's such a staple in my program that athletes come to expect it. In fact, they look forward to it, because a lot of times they're not doing this in their off-season or their other sports or their club teams, and so they come back to really intentionally working on the mental side of the game and, they welcome it. What we do, what I do at the beginning, is not a traditional goal-setting activity. I do a vision setting of the athlete that they want to be. I have them look forward to the end of the season and think, "Okay, after, these 12 weeks, what athlete do you wanna be? What do you want to have had, accomplished this season?" And this is a really important reframe that's different than goals, because when we set an intention, we put our mind, our mindset, on a different version of who we wanna be and how we show up. This literally rewires our brain, the neuroplasticity allows this to happen, so that athletes can align their habits and their actions to meet that vision. And so I take them through a vision setting exercise where they're really exploring what they want for the season. From that, our daily mindset routine is formed. So based on what vision they have for themselves as an athlete, they pull out three affirmations that represent that. So I take them through this workshop of How to make affirmations really rooted in the emotion, that is elicited from this exercise where they're setting that vision for themselves. So they pull those out, and those become the anchors for their season. And from that, at the beginning of the season, we develop something called their 3, 2, 1 Brave daily mindset routine, and this is really what will anchor them in season as well. So that is one of the activities that right away at the beginning we are getting athletes bought into why mental training matters, and this actually isn't as hard as you think it is. A lot of, coaches get in their own way because they're like, "Well, I think my athletes will, think it's weird," or whatever. They don't. They want this. I was just talking to my team yesterday. I have a small group of leaders, it's called our leadership corps, where we meet regularly throughout the summer and in the season, and one of the prompts that came up in this conversation was, "What is holding you back from playing your best or being the teammate that you want to be and being the leader you want to be," and all of these things. And every single person said something around fear of failure, fear of judgment, "I want more confidence." They're looking for this, and so sometimes we get in our own ways because we're not educated in how to teach it, which this is why we make it simple for you by, watching episodes like this, by going to our free training at CoachFreeTraining, by utilizing Plug and Play. Like, all of these are what we've developed so that it makes it easy for you as a coach. But how I frame it to my team is that this gives you a competitive advantage You have a competitive advantage if you can stay steady in pressure situations. You have a competitive advantage if it takes you two seconds to get over a mistake versus two minutes to get over a mistake, 'cause a lot happens in two minutes, especially in volleyball. So this is the thing that gives our team an edge, and if we wanna go far in this season, and we have big goals, we have to have an edge over our opponents. Because when talent meets talent alone is not enough, and this is the thing that can set us apart. So getting the buy-in isn't as hard as you think it is once you frame it like that, that, hey, other teams aren't doing this. Like, this is actually something that's gonna give you an edge. So that's during, the first, chunk of the season. Within the first week, we are getting them bought into mental training, we're doing our vision setting, we have developed a three, two, one brave daily mindset routine, which I'll talk about more, in a little bit. Now, every week, I carve out 20 minutes to do, we call it Mindset Mondays, okay? And this is where I go a little bit deeper into a mental training strategy. If you wanna use our mental training curriculum, Plug and Play, you can literally just get your team together, press play, I teach them the skill. So every week, they're learning a little mental training skill that will help them. Things like self-talk, snap-back routine, that's a key one to help them get over mistakes fast, pre-performance routines, so breathing techniques and things like that to help them get to where they need to be before they compete. Um, post-competition routines and alter ego technique. There's all sorts of different things that I rotate through in this 20-minute little Mindset Mondays. Also on Mondays, my athletes get out of school two hours early, so we have a little bit more buffer time to be able to use some of the time. I don't wanna use all of it, because they're studying and meeting with teachers and things like that, but it does allow for that. That is what our focus is for The beginning of season, pre-season, if you will. So if you wanna learn more about how to do this with your team, two places you can go. Number one, our free training, so coachfreetraining.com. That just kinda breaks everything I've talked about down a little bit further. But if you wanna just dive right into plug and play, if you're like, "Yeah, I just need an easy way to do this with my team," m- that's that. So plug and play is our mental training curriculum that high school coaches use. Get your team together, press play, lead a short discussion afterwards, or have your team leaders do it. It's everything that I do in my program. So that is linked in the show notes as well. All right, coaches, I hope this was helpful. Do not leave the mental training to chance, because likely it won't happen if you're not doing it for them, if you're not helping them on this side of the game. And I don't want you to be on the sideline like I was, just questioning life and questioning if you should even be coaching again, because the mental side is so much of how they end up performing out there. All right, I will see you in the next episode of the Coach Your Game Podcast.