Top Tools for High School Coaches to Build a Mentally Tough Team

🔥Your team’s culture is either your secret weapon—or your biggest weakness. Discover my top 3 tools to build leadership & a winning mindset! Get more strategies here → https://coachfreetraining.com

If you’re a coach who cares about more than just wins and stats—if you want to build resilient, confident, and mentally strong athletes—this episode is for you. In this talk, I’m sharing the top 3 tools every high school and middle school coach should be using to develop leadership, strengthen team culture, and integrate mindset training without adding more to your plate. 

👋 I'm Coach Bre – a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach with 4 state championships. I’ve spent the last 14+ seasons learning what actually works when it comes to the mental game.

You'll learn:
✅ The leadership resource I give to every captain
✅ The culture-building system that helped me recover after a tough season
✅ The exact mental training method I use with my team weekly (20–30 min!)
✅ Why most coaches avoid teaching mindset—and how to make it simple
✅ How to build systems that actually support what you say you value

🎯 Real leadership shows up in how your athletes respond under pressure, in conflict, and when no one's watching. Let’s give them the tools that actually last. 

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction: Top 3 Resources for Developing Good Culture
00:40 Resource #1: Bruce Brown’s Leadership Resources
01:59 Resource #2: JP Nerbun’s Culture System
03:28 Resource #3: Plug & Play Elite Mental Game for Teams
05:20 Conclusion: Why All This Matters

💬 Coaches – comment below: Which of the 3 areas do YOU want to strengthen most—leadership, culture, or mental game?

📌 Want to build the mental game without adding hours to your plate?
🔹 Grab our FREE training for coaches → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
🔹 Check out our plug & play elite mental game system → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
🔹More of our secrets in this playlist! → https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYeP0oZHlVGnxJfK4m7ViFejx8r3hnHWL&si=2dTJGyqzt0aGyR-r
🎥 YouTube videos here → https://www.youtube.com/@CoachHerGame

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

Transcript

1:04

Hey, coach, today I'm gonna be going over my top three resources when it comes to developing a culture that athletes actually wanna come back to. So when it comes to leadership, culture, mental game, like all the things that actually they don't teach you when you become a coach. I remember when I did, I was like, yeah, I know how to coach the game of volleyball, but what about all these other things like. Why do they fall apart when the pressure's on? How come everyone's just following the loudest person on the team and not actually like the real leader? So these are the top three resources that I recommend for each of those buckets. Culture, leadership, and mental game, um, that have listed the test of time. I've been coaching for the past 14 seasons. Um, I've won four state championships and these are my go-to resources. Number one. Anything by Bruce Brown. So you're familiar with Bruce Brown. He is nationally known as a, I mean, he was a former football coach, but he does a lot around culture, leadership, things like that. I use his resources for leadership. I think I purchased all of his pamphlets over the years. Uh, the ones that I recommend, if you're just starting, um, your team kind of falls into the culture bucket. First steps in developing your team. So this is where I learned how to do like core covenants and how to come up with those for your team and how to get your team buy-in and all that. But the one that I actually use for leadership is one that I don't have because I've gifted them to all of the leaders on my team, but it's called Captains, seven Ways to Lead Your Team. So I give each of those. Um, or one of those to each of my team leaders, so the people on our leadership core. So we develop a core of leaders who are in charge of certain parts of our program. Um, if you wanna learn more about that, I have a video about leadership core. I don't wanna go all the way into it today, but, um, if you wanna learn how to actually develop like a core of leaders in your program, who will lead season after season. Check out that video. But the Seven Ways Leisure team just takes them through like very simple. Like, here are seven ways to lead and here's what it means to be a leader. It's a really good jumping off place. So that is number one. When it comes to leadership, I know Bruce Brown does a lot more when it comes to culture and things like that, but I love his, um, leadership resources specifically. Seven Ways to Lead Your Team. Okay. When it comes to culture. Now culture is a variety of things, right? Um, there's, there's a lot that goes into it, but if you're looking for like. A system, like a way to actually systematize your culture. Um, then I recommend JP vin's culture system. All right. Now, this isn't a book that your. Players will read. This is for you. Um, I read his book. I also purchased his program culture system, and there's a lot in there, but this is a really good way to, like I said, implement systems to support the culture that you want. This is where I came up with, um, our team impact plan. So like the one page document where I communicate player roles and, um, claim time associated with that. And then I share that document with parents. And so that came from here. The idea where it came from. Here, if you wanna check out how to do a player impact plan, I also have a video on that so you can look at that next. But this is a really good starting place if you're like, I know, maybe kind of what the. Culture is that I want in my program, but how do I actually like implement systems to make sure it's supported? So like I said, there's a lot here, but this was really good for me, especially after coming off of a tough season in 2022 where had two players quit and I was like, ah, gosh, no. Like, um, there was a lot that went into that. That's not the point of this, but there were. Opportunities for me to look at my culture and see like, how can I make sure I have things in place to actually support what I say that we stand for, um, in our program. All right. The last one is around mental game. And obviously I'm passionate about the mental game. It has changed the trajectory of my program. Um, it has given. Skills to my players that have served them in their sport, but also in life. Teaching mental skills is something that I think every coach should do, and I know why most coaches don't do it because I was that coach as well. You know, six years ago is when we started implementing mental training, but I did it the hard way. I went and became a mental performance coach because I saw how badly my. My players needed it, but I didn't do it before then because A, I didn't have the time and b, I didn't wanna go back to school to become a sports psychologist. So I did end up like doing the hard route and like going to become certified and like wading through all of the materials, using my team as getting paid, and then I co-founded a company to make it easier for everybody else. So I had packaged my system into a plug and play method. It's called Plug and Play Elite Method Game for teams. We've had hundreds of teams come through. We've had thousands and thousands of athletes come through, um, our program and using our system, using our methodologies. And so I packaged it for you. This is our facilitation guide. I literally use this with my team. So I do plug and play EMG with my team obviously. More doing it live because, um, I'm there doing it. But I use our facilitation guide. So after every single lesson, and by the way, this takes 20 to 30 minutes a week, so I schedule it in. We do like Mindset Mondays. Um, and so I teach a little mindset thing, literally the same thing that's in plug and play. I use my facilitation guide to do a short facilitation, um, of like a discussion with my players. Um, they can break off into teams, they can break off into small groups to do it. And that actually adds in like some team bonding, really easy way to give your athletes mental training skills, literally plug and play, um, so that you don't have to add more to your plate. And you don't have to also feel like, Hey, my, my athletes are not equipped because you can train them physically all you want, and they get into that pressure moment. And if they're like. Yeah, I don't want the ball to come to me or they're like making one mistake and having that turn into two and three and four, like, those are mental errors and they can be trained. And you as a coach, it's, it's our responsibility to give our athletes all the skills that they need. And a lot of times we're like, I just do not have time for that. I'm not an expert in that. That's why we have plug and play. So if you wanna learn more about plug and play EMG, that is the top tool that I recommend to teach mental training skills without needing a lot of time or becoming a sports psychologist. Go to coach free training.com. I lay it all out there. I give you some easy ways to start and also talk about. The program and give you a discount on there. So coach free training.com. Alright, those are my top three. I hope that's helpful. I'll see you in the next video. Then one that is coming is all about developing clear impact plans, because that is also key to avoiding playing time issues and calls from parents and things like that. So I'll see you the next video.