Build a Mentally Tough Team with This Simple Player Notebook Routine

Your athletes struggling to stay focused or consistent? This simple player notebook routine changed everything for my team. For more coaching tips, grab our free training → https://coachfreetraining.com

If you’ve ever wished your players took more ownership of their growth, both mentally and physically, this video is your blueprint. Here I breakdown exactly how I use player notebooks and the 3-2-1 BRAVE mindset routine to help my athletes train the mental game daily, build consistency, and prepare for peak performance on and off the court.

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× state champion🏆 

I’ve spent the last 14 years figuring out how to blend culture, leadership, and mental training into my practice structure and this routine has been one of the most powerful tools for building a mentally tough team.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
✨ How to build simple, effective player notebooks that boost focus and accountability 
🧠 The 3-2-1 BRAVE mindset routine your team can do in minutes a day 
📓 How to use vision boards, reflections, and journaling to build confidence 
🏐 Ways to organize sections for mental game, volleyball IQ, and match prep 
🔥 How this routine helps athletes take ownership of their growth

This is the mental training system my team uses every day before practice, the same system that helped us compete with focus, confidence, and grit under pressure. 🙌

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to Player Notebooks
00:43 About Coach Bre
01:19 Notebook Structure & Vision Boards
02:12 Volleyball IQ & Match Sections
02:59 Notes Section & Mental Training
03:32 The 3-2-1 BRAVE Daily Routine
05:26 BRAVE Visualization Breakdown
06:21 Practice Structure & Next Steps

👇 Coaches — comment below: What’s one thing you’d add to your team’s player notebooks this season?

📌 Build your team’s mental game confidently:
 🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
 🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
 🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame
 
🔔 Subscribe for More → Never miss an episode of Coach Her Game!

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

Transcript

1:04

About six years ago, I started implementing player notebooks and journals with my team. And it's a little thing that's made a big difference in their focus, in their consistency and just them taking ownership of the growth that they want to experience over the course of the season. And I've had a lot of questions about what's inside this thing and how do you have it organized and how do you use this tool on your team? So we breaking that all down today. If I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I'm a mental performance coach for athletes and I'm also a head volleyball coach. I have been one for the past. 14 years, and so I get to help coaches figure this out too. All the things that they don't teach you how to do when you become a head coach, like the mental side of the game, the culture, the leadership, all of that. This is what this channel is all about. Now, let's get into it. Is this just an example? Of the notebook. This looks pretty plain because what we do with my players is I do a little vision board workshop at the beginning of the season. So, um, that activity is actually inside our mental training program for coaches called Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for teams. So I actually just press play on that and they go through a little workshop where they're determining their goals for the season, what they want to have happen, and then they go to town on, um. On magazines and they clip out things that, that resonate with them. And then they actually put that on the front of their notebooks that they're looking at it every single day. So if you wanna check out that, um, workshop plus a lot of other skills that I teach on the mental side of the game, go to our free training. It's. At coach free training.com. I tell you just the really simple mental training skills that I do with my team and also tell you about Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for teams. That's our program for coaches that I use to just make mental training really easy throughout the season. So anyways, that is the front of it. On the inside I've got some tabs. Um, well first we have our calendar kind of outlining everything and then. I had four tabs this year. I kind of mix it up from year to year depending on what we need. So I have mental game matches, volleyball, IQ, and notes. And I'm not actually gonna go in order here. I'm gonna go in a little bit of a different order. So, um, volleyball, iq, that's going to be, you know, whatever sport that you coach. That's where we just have our, our offensive systems, defensive systems, terminology, things like that, so that we are all on the same page. Put those things in there, and those are great also so that coaches know what everything is and they can refer to them and there's diagrams and, and other things like that, um, matches. So that section there is actually for pre-game prep and post-game prep. So if we have any, um, any like scouting reports that we do, or pre-game prep. Prep when it comes. To like, what are your goals for this match and what is your intention for this match? What do we already know about the team if we have played them before? And then post-game reflection. So the things that they can reflect on, um, on what they did well, what they need to improve on. Anything we wanna remember when we see that team again.'cause we play everybody twice in our league. So that thought section notes is, you know, as you would expect, there's just some blank, um, paper back there so that if we do any sort of workshop or. Once a week we do plug and play Elite mental game for teams. So we do a dedicated like 15 to 20 minute lesson, um, on mental, anything to do with mental training, so self-talk. Um, we also throw in things like body language leadership. When you think of sports psychology and, and everything related to that, that is kind of the bulk of what we do. And again, that's in plug and play. Elite men's looking for teams. If they're taking notes and doing their, their work on that, on that section, and then mental game. So the mental game section is something that they do every single day. So under that tab, I actually have. Sheets printed out with them for our, the structure of our daily mindset routine. That's called 3, 2, 1, brave. So 3, 2, 1. BRAVE stands for three affirmations. So they come up for the season and the same workshop that they do, their vision board, they come up with three affirmations that are going to kind of be their foundation, these mantras that are going to guide them through the season. And these aren't just random affirmations that just are like, I'm smart, I'm strong, I'm beautiful. Those are great, but they're not really kind of surfacey, so they're really rooted in what they want for the season, and they're written in first person positive, present tense statements, so they write those down every day. So that's a three. The two is two minutes of journaling. So I put a prompt on the board every day and it's designed to really help them reflect and um, sometimes it's also related to kinda what's going on in our season. So yesterday's prompt I had practice was, what can you do to be a more trustworthy teammates? We're talking a lot about trust and what's in your control. When it comes to your teammates trusting you. So it's allowing them to reflect. Another prompt that I put out was, was an example of, um, where you've been mentally tough recently. So they're finding kind of evidence of, you know, I'm using my mental training skills in my practices or in my games. So I kinda have a list of things that I go through depending on what we're going through in the season. So that's the two of the 3, 2, 1, brave. But one, there's actually two parts to the one, one thing that they're grateful for. There's a lot of research on, you know, gratitude and finding the good in their environment and how. When we do that, we actually create more good for ourselves. And then the other one is one piece of evidence that one of your affirmations is coming true. Like I said, they have three affirmations and they're gonna pick one of the three and they're just gonna find one piece of evidence in their last training session or their last competition of that coming true. And again, that is rewiring their brain to find the evidence that they're growing, that they're getting closer, they're getting mentally tougher. All of those things because our brain will go to the negative if, if left with some devices is actually, um. It's normal. It's what our brain is designed to do. So we really have to train our brain to not do that, to find actually the good and the evidence and the brave section of 3, 2, 1, brave is actually visualization that I lead my team through. So BRAVE is also an acronym. Um, it stands for the B stands for Breath. So we do five breaths. The R stands for reset words. So they say the reset word at the top of each breath, which is again, found through another training that we do in Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for teams. Um, and then they exhale. Uh, the A stands for affirmation and the V stands for visualization. So they actually say each of their affirmations to themselves and I prompt them to visualize that affirmation for about 10 seconds. And then the E stands for just energy shifts. So at the end of Brave, um, which is about a two minute visualization, they are ready to go to practice and, um, and then we take it, we take it from there. So. That section on mental game is where they have their three, two and brave, um, little, little sheets that I printed out for them so that they are doing that on a daily basis. And that is always what we do before we go off to team practice. Now, if you wanna see exactly how I structure my practices and when this comes in, um, because we don't do it actually right away, we do something right before this and then we go into team practice. Head to my next video on how. I think the best way to structure a high school practice is to get the most outta your time and make sure that your, your players are focused from the get and you're not spending 20 minutes trying to get them to focus. So I'll see you in that next video.