In-Season & Postseason Mental Game Roadmap: Every Coach Needs This

This is Part 2, here's exactly what my team does every practice, and how it held up at championship point. Grab the full training → https://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
🔹 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 Moment I Almost Quit Coaching
00:40 Searching for Answers
01:54 The Real Problem Coaches Face
02:35 In-Season Mental Training: 3, 2, 1 Brave
05:41 Why Consistency Beats Guest Speakers
07:03 Postseason: Training the Response to Pressure
10:35 How to Get Started

👋🏼 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.

In Part 1 I covered the pre-season setup. This time I'm showing you what actually runs every single day once the season starts. 🏐

And what happens when the pressure hits hardest, postseason.

What You'll Learn:
✅ The exact 3-2-1 BRAVE routine my team runs before every practice
✅ Why a one-time guest speaker can't do what a daily habit does
✅ How postseason pressure training is different from in-season training
✅ The real championship-point story where this routine made the difference

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:
⚡️Higher trait gratitude in athletes is linked to greater perceived social support and lower risk of burnout (Gabana et al., 2017)
⚡️Athletes who train with visualization methods report real improvements in confidence and self-control while competing (Predoiu et al., 2020)
⚡️My program hasn't missed a state tournament in 8 years, with 4 consecutive state championships since building this system (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 #highschoolcoaching

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. All I was thinking about was it felt like every single person in the gym was watching me. 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, 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. And you're like, "What, where do I, where do I start?" That's exactly why I made this video. 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. 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. 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, during season, post-season, and what I do for mental training during all phases of that. What really is anchoring us throughout the season is our 3, 2, 1 Brave. So I mentioned this briefly in the pre-season section because that's where I teach it. But where it's actually executed and where we do it every day is during the season. So how this looks in my gym is that athletes come in for a practice, and I have a pre-practice on the board, so they're doing some physical activity like, footwork and things like that, ball control, when they first get into the gym, and we train this in the first week of season as well. And then they do that for about 10 minutes, all the activities on the board, and then I bring my whole program together. So I have, depending on the year, anywhere from 36 to 48 athletes, and I coach volleyball in a gym. So we all come to the board as a program, and they do their 3, 2, 1 Brave. Three stands for three affirmations. So they write in their journal their three affirmations that they developed at the beginning of the season. Two stands for two minutes of journaling. So I usually throw a journal prompt up on the board that I have thought through when it comes to where we're at in our season or what we're experiencing. So to help them kind of rewire their brain to be thinking about what I want them to think about. And we know that journaling is also a really good way just to get some stuff out so that they're just clear mind. Um, one of the 3, 2, 1 Brave stands for one thing they're grateful for, so gratitude. There's a lot of research around gratitude and how that impacts how we show up in our lives and in our sport. One... The other is actually two ones in 3, 2, 1 Brave. The other one stands for one piece of evidence that one of your affirmations is coming through, or is coming true. And this is really important, because we're literally training our athletes to focus on the good, focus on how they're improving. So it's not just this mindset this is the athlete I wanna be. It's also putting in the work, the habits, and finding the evidence that this is becoming true. And that's how mindset works. Because if athletes are forced to look for evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true, so things like, "I'm a smart, confident leader." "I'm a fast, aggressive defender. I'm a first team all-state player." Now you can say that, that's like a really big outcome goal, but what are the habits of a first team all-state player? And what's the evidence that you are becoming that? Maybe you got a career-high kill, percentage last week, something like that. So all of... It could be a big piece of evidence like that, or it could be something small, like, "I'm just feeling more confident when I step onto the court." And so they're finding that evidence every single day, and that is building new neural pathways, and it's also training something in their brain called the reticular activating system to find the good. Find what's going well. Find evidence that we're improving because- If left to our own devices, our brain has a negativity bias, and it will find everything that's going wrong, and the reason why everybody doesn't like them, or that my coach is being unfair, or this... You know? That's just how it goes. So we are training the brain to do something different, and we do that every single day before practice. And sometimes we do it before games as well. I do, some different visualizations before games to help get their mind right, but this is a non-negotiable for us, and this is, where the consistency and mindset training comes from. A lot of times I talk with coaches, and I've done this too, we'll have, a guest speaker come in and, and talk about things to help them, get more motivated and focused, and things like that. And the guest speaker is great for a little bit, and then they leave, and a couple weeks later we're like, "What did they talk about again?" And the 3, 2, 1 Brave is a daily mindset routine that actually helps them every single day. It's not like a one and done thing. This is actually where mental reps are built. Mental reps aren't built through a motivational speaker. They're built through doing the work every single time they practice. And so this is where this comes in. And if you're like, "I don't have 10 minutes at the beginning of practice I'm gonna challenge you a little bit because you probably wasted more than 10 minutes trying to get your team to focus, and this helps, my team because now I can literally start practice and their minds are, like, ready to go. They're not worried about what happened in the hallway or what happened in math class. It's like they're just locked in and ready, and I'm getting that time back via more practice time that I don't have to spend wrangling them back in. Okay? So that's in season. 3, 2, 1, Brave. We're also continuing with the Mindset Mondays. I don't know about you, but it gets a little bit gritty the, you know, the middle of the season, and sometimes those Mindset Mondays I'm like, "Okay, games are adjusted, our schedule is weird, so we're not gonna do it this week, but we definitely are going to do 3, 2, 1, Brave." But that flexibility is built into our plug and play elite mental game for teams. So there's that. Okay. Once we head into postseason, this is where we kind of cash in, like this is where the pressure gets to be a little bit more. Athletes tend to put a lot more, pressure on themselves. They're harder on themselves. They're worried about outcomes. They're worried about letting people down, and so we need to really intentionally train this and train their response to adversity. Because you can be floating along through the season and not hit a lot of adversity until all of a sudden now we're seeing like teams that are stronger and things aren't going the way that they did before. And so we have to train their response to when things don't go well. So that's where we really cash in on, a lot of this mental training. They've built the foundation through their 3, 2, 1, Brave, through the vision of the athlete they want to become, their snapback routine, their skills that they have, and now it's okay, the pressure is going to be on, how are you going to deal with it? So we give them skills, to reframe pressure. We give them really tangible skills to help ground them in those moments, the snapback routine being one of them that we lean on a lot. So postseason really is where we, dial in on this, and that's where we see it, actually making a difference. In our last state championship in, 2024, we were in the state championship match and we ended up being down championship point. We were in this situation where we were going back and forth with this team that was actually more talented than us. And you'll find... I mean, obviously you've got to be talented to get to that point, but this other team was like... I mean they were strong. And on paper it was like, "Yep, okay, I can see the differences here." But those of you that have coached in those situations know that it's not always the most talented team that wins, right? And so we got down championship point, and I remember calling a timeout. Luckily, I had one, and I didn't do a lot of strategy. I didn't do a lot of, anything besides tell them, "Let's do our snapback routine together." So the snapback routine we had been practicing all season, we did our breath together. They said the reset word to themselves. On their exhale, they did their reset signal to just ground them in this, the, in the here and now because their brains are going all over the place. And I was like, "Hey, we're ready. We're gonna side out right here." We ended up going out We did side out, meaning we got the point to tie it up. Now we had to win by two. We were in the situation, it was tied 24 all. And my sophomore goes back to serve, and I'm like, "Yeah, okay. Love this for us. First time on, varsity, first time at state. Let's go." Uh, so she serves, really easy serve, but the other side, the other team, I mean, granted, they had just lost championship point, right? So now they had to battle back. Win just got taken out of them. They hadn't won state in 36 years, and they were that close to getting there, right? They were a little discombobulated, so we served at them. They set their best hitter, which I would have too, and she hits it out of bounds. Okay. All right. We're in it. We're gonna need one more point now. My sophomore serves again. Uh, she... Or on the other side of the net, they actually had this kind of botched play, and they free balled the ball, which is like an easy play, into the net. So two unforced errors from the other team to give us that fourth set so that we could stay alive to go into a fifth. We ended up winning the fifth because they were, the other side of the net, whereas they just couldn't respond to that situation where it didn't go their way. And that sophomore got interviewed afterwards, and the interviewer asked her like, "What were you thinking?" You know? Yeah, that's a lot of pressure. And she goes, "All I was doing was my breath and my reset word, my breath and my reset word." And that's where it makes a difference, coaches. You don't, you can't just hope that your team is gonna show up in those moments where it matters, and a lot of times we- that's what we do. We're like, "We'll just see what happens." You gotta train for, for those moments. We don't rise to the expectation, we fall to what we've trained, and if you haven't trained how to deal with it, then they have nothing to fall back on. 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.