We Train for Week 12 in Week 1 — Here's How

We train for week 12 in week 1. Here's how I build my team's mental game in before the season ever gets loud.  Learn more here, coach → https://coachfreetraining.com

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⏰ Key Timestamps:
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00:00 Introduction
00:23 First Week Overview
00:57 Culture
01:34 The Welcome Meal
01:45 Leadership Core
03:37 Norms & Expectations
04:54 Mental Training
06:12 Mental Training Tools
07:23 Recap & Resources

👋🏼 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 don't wait until playoffs to teach my team how to handle pressure. In this episode, I walk through my exact first week of the season, culture, norms and expectations, and mental training, and why building it all in early is what keeps me from putting out fires later.

🧐 What You'll Learn:

Why I say "we're training for week 12 in week one," and what that actually looks like in practice
How my Leadership Core runs our welcome meal instead of me
The 5-7 minute routine my team does before every single practice
Why unglamorous logistics like net setup protect your culture more than you'd think
The line I used to say about "whichever team shows up" and why I stopped saying it

💬 Coaches — comment below: What's the one thing you already have locked in for your own first week, and what's still up in the air?

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:

Team-building interventions lasting less than 2 weeks did not produce statistically significant improvements in team cohesion, while effects were strongest for interventions over 2 weeks with athletes ages 15-20. (Frontiers in Psychology, 2024)

A meta-analysis of 112 effect sizes across 15 sports found pre-performance routines produced moderate-to-large effects on performance under pressure. (International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2021)

A study of 255 U.S. high school coaches found nearly 90% believed formal captain leadership programs were beneficial, but only 12% actually used one. (Journal of Leadership Education, 2019)

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 #teamculture #highschoolcoaching #preseasonprep

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

My season starts in just a couple of weeks, and if you're a coach, you know the feeling. All of a sudden, we get hit with a fire hose of tryouts, teams, parent meetings, fundraisers, bus transportation requests, like, all of this. And amidst all of it, we actually have to coach the sport and build a team that has a strong culture that will outlast the four months of the season. So how do we do it all? I thought I'd take you behind the scenes of what my first week of my season looks like, because I think that your first week really sets the tone for the rest of the season. And speaking from experience, if you don't nail the first week you will be paying for it the rest of the season. So how I fit in culture, norms, expectations, mental training, all of these things that set the foundation that serve us for the weeks that follow. Let's get into it. First of all, there's three big buckets of things that I cover within the first week of the season that I think make a really big difference. Culture, and culture really, when we boil it down, is just what do you do in your team? But I'll talk about how I intentionally build and roll out the culture of what Columbia River Volleyball looks like. Norms and expectations and mental training. Those are kinda the three big pillars that I need to have in place within the first week, so that I can function the rest of the season without having to put out fires along the way. So culture. we have tryouts the first two days of the season. So we start practices on a Monday. We try out Monday, Tuesday. That's typically how it goes. Come Wednesday, teams are formed, and people are welcomed into our program. I kick things off with a welcome meal, so usually a lunch or a dinner, depending on what's going on that year, where I am really intentional about welcoming people into the program, and I don't do this alone. Our leadership core that has been working all summer, so these are identified leaders who are, serving our program and learning leadership skills, we actually meet right before the season starts. One of our last meetings is all about how this welcome meal is going to go. what are we gonna do? How are we gonna welcome new people, and how are we going to communicate what the norms and culture of our program are to everybody else? So we have that plan established. I actually have my leaders start our welcome lunch. I introduce them, and they are responsible for a station where they're explaining one part of our culture that we've identified and worked on over the summer and refined from the years past and what we really want to focus on this season. So peer-to-peer, I think, is really important for this, so that they are connecting. This leadership corps also is in charge of a small group of people throughout the whole season, and so they meet with that little group. That's where they start, and immediately they have connection. and then I also share a little bit, in this around, what the mission and the vision of our program is, but really a lot of this is driven by our leaders Now, obviously it's not enough just to talk about culture, and talk about what we stand for, and talk about our values, things like that. Put it on the back of our shirt. yeah. Okay, and so then although we need to establish it, but we have to then demonstrate this. It's those moments in between practices where players are connecting. It's what you allow when it comes to a value that you've identified for your program. Culture really comes in the moments that follow, not just a one-time conversation. I know you know that as a coach, okay? So culture, we really establish that within our welcome lunch, or meal, and then we also do a couple other things throughout the week. I actually outline this inside our championship program mentorship for coaches. I have my whole outline in there of exactly what I do within the first two weeks, of the season. If you wanna check that out, the championship program mentorship is where I hang out with coaches and we build our programs together. That's really where we hit that culture piece. Okay, onto the norms and the expectations. This one is unglamorous, okay, but, you've gotta do it. Like, how do we set up nets? How do we put away equipment? What does practice structure look like? I hate wasting time, and so our transition times are quick. As soon as athletes come into the gym, there's a pre-practice on the board that they know what they're doing, so they get going right away. Everybody knows their job when it comes to setting up the gym. I assign all of that. They know they do pre-practice. Then we come together before practice as a program. We do mental training, and then they go off to their practices with their teams. I do everything together so that I can communicate something, that is consistent across the program, and then they go off into their varsity, JV, and C teams to do their individual practice. All of these norms and expectations sometimes take a little bit, but I also involve my leaders in this. So they teach the underclassmen how to set up nets, how to put away equipment, where everything goes. And then I take a little bit of time to explain, "This is what pre-practice needs to look like." Typically only takes one practice to really lay it out. But the norms, the expectations around what the behavior is, you have to intentionally put that in within the first week, because if you don't, then they start to become bigger problems later. Especially when it comes to setting up stuff. I don't know what it is, but if you're not on that, then it's, the couple people who do it the whole season, then they get bitter, and everybody else is, causing problems because of something that could be solved very simply. And then finally, mental training. Mental training is a huge piece to our program because it doesn't matter how hard you train or how physically talented your team is, if they cannot show up when the pressure is on, then it doesn't matter. We are training for week 12 in week one, When I say week 12, that means we are training for playoffs, for districts, for state, for pressure moments week one. We don't wait until we get into those situations to somehow use skills that we have never developed. And so I build the foundation of mental training within the first week of the season so that we can make sure that we are intentional. You can't just say that you have mentally tough athletes or that you value athletes who can respond well to adversity and rise to challenges if you don't actually give them skills to do that. And one of my pet peeves as a coach, I used to say this all the time, is when somebody would ask me, "How do you feel like you guys are gonna do tonight?" And I'm like, "Well, it depends on which team is gonna show up." That is totally leaving the fate of the game into somebody else's hands or something that you can't actually control when you actually can control some of this. Obviously, you can't control the outcome of the game, but you can prepare your athletes to the best of your ability by giving them tools on the mental side of the game and not just hoping that they show up and then getting mad when they don't, or when the wheels fall off and they start spiraling. I start to teach mental training within the first week. I think this is really important. So I use our plug-and-play curriculum. It's called Plug and Play: Elite Mental Game for Teams. It's an easy way. I literally get my team together, press play on short videos. We do a little team discussion afterwards, and then they have the skill to use in practice. Some of the skills that we teach within the very first week are their snapback routine. So this is like a two-second routine for them to get over mistakes fast instead of spiral. We teach something called the 3, 2, 1 Bre- Brave. This is their daily mindset routine that they do before practice. So I mentioned my practice structure. They come in and do pre-practice, and then I bring everyone together. We do mental training. So what we do is 3, 2, 1 Brave. So it is a five to seven-minute, routine that they do before every single practice, where they're writing down in their journals three affirmations, two minutes of journaling that I prompt them with, one thing they're grateful for, one piece of evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true, and then we do a very short visualization. And this helps focus them. I'm not wasting 20 minutes of practice trying to get their attention back, and it allows them to keep their vision of what they want to accomplish that season top of mind by visualizing it, by writing it down so that their self-talk is improved. So that, laying that foundation within the first week is truly what serves us on the mental side of the game the rest of the season. If you want a really easy way to do this, because some coaches are like, "Yes, that's what I need, but, I don't have time to do this. I don't have a sports psychology degree." You don't need a lot of time. You don't need a sports psychology degree. Use what I have for you. I've made it easy for you. So Plug and Play: Elite Mental Game for Teams is what the solution is for that, our mental training curriculum. If you want to learn more about how it works, you can go to our free training at coachfreetraining.com, or you can check out the program itself just in the description. So that is what my first week of the season typically looks like. I make sure that I hit culture, norms and expectations, and mental training within that first week, so that I'm not putting out fires the rest of the week. Now, of course, we've got things that fit in there, like we have a parent meeting. We have a fundraiser. We've got tryouts. We've got team pictures. All of those things fill in the cracks. But if I get those big levers taken care of, then I find that everything else falls into place. All right, coaches, I'll see you in the next episode of the Coach Your Game Podcast.