Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

It’s a fact that young athletes are not being encouraged to develop their mental skills as much as their physical skills. A big reason for this is tradition. Coaches coach their athletes in the same way they were coached.

Since mental skills were not a big priority in years past, it’s challenging to change the coaching culture to break this cycle. As I have noted before, the typical youth or high school coach spends less than 5% of any given practice on developing mental skills.

Since I’m a big advocate of pursuing change through what’s called Minimum Viable Change (MVC), below are the MVCs I propose to address this problem. These ideas are all about making small changes that any coach could universally apply to a typical youth or high school sports practice.

1) Create a Team Mantra

Creating a team mantra is by far the easiest way to address mental skills in young athletes. A mantra is a memorable statement that is short and powerful. It should be no more than 4 or 5 words. The idea is to simplify a complex mental skill into something very concise that a young athlete can remember.

Coaches should have their athletes repeat the team mantra each practice multiple times for it to effectively sink in. It should also be something that works effectively on competition days as well. A few ideas on what mental skills the mantra could focus on include:

• Encouraging positive thinking
• Motivating
• Keeping the team aligned on the goal for the season
• Recentering focus and concentration

2) Make Gratitude a Routine

Gratitude is probably the most underrated mental skill of them all. As we have all know, gratitude is an attitude and attitude is everything. Furthermore, attitude is a choice. The first step in making that choice is to start with gratitude.

The easiest way to incorporate gratitude as part of the practice routine is to have the athletes thank their coaches, teammates, and parents at the end of each practice. In the youth wrestling club my sons wrestle with, our head coach requires each wrestler to shake the coaches hand after the end of each practice.  Each wrestler must look the coaches in the eyes, thank them, and give a firm handshake. The coaches respond with the same firm handshake, look in the eyes, and an acknowledgement that the wrestler had a good practice.  This is a small lesson of gratitude to teach young athletes. 

Coaches can take this even further by also encouraging athletes to thank their teammates and parents in a similar way.

3) Assign Homework

Practice schedules are tight. Coaches must get a lot done with little time and resources. As a result, assigning young athletes homework may be the best way to get them to develop their mental skills with the least amount of disruption to the normal practice routine.

Specifically, there are 5 mental skills coaches should use homework to reinforce:

• Focus and concentration
• Regulating emotions
• Self-Awareness
• Positive self-talk
• Goal Setting

Coaches can assign homework in the form of worksheets, video review, or conducting interviews. For example, the coach could select a snippet of a historic professional or college competition for the athletes to watch on youtube. The coach could direct the athletes to watch for a specific mental skill( such as focus or regulating emotions) that either helped or hurt the outcome of the event. Then at the next practice, the coach could spend 5 or so minutes discussing that mental skill with their athletes using a Q&A format.

In addition, coaches could:

• Create worksheets for setting goals and review the completed worksheets with each athlete one or one or in a group.
• Have their athletes interview each other to ask what their teammates think their biggest opportunity for development is.
• Request their athletes search youtube for the best motivational videos or pick out the best motivational songs and email those ideas to the coach. Then the coach can play some of those suggestions during practice.