Sports Psychology Tips to Help Your Team Perform Under Pressure

🔥 Your team is falling apart in a big game. Panic is setting in. What do you say? What do you do? This is how you coach through pressure like a pro. Grab more strategies here → http://coachfreetraining.com
 
When momentum shifts and your girls get rattled, what happens next is all on you. In this episode, I share exactly how to train AND coach your athletes through high-pressure situations—so they show up strong when it counts most.
 
🎯 Learn:
✔️ Real-time coaching tactics (without yelling)
✔️ Practice strategies that simulate pressure
✔️ Snapback routines & reset words that work
✔️ The exact plan that helped us win the state title under pressure
 
🎙 I'm Coach Bre  mental performance coach for girl athletes, co-founder of The Elite Competitor, and four-time state championship-winning volleyball coach. I’ve made every coaching mistake in the book when it comes to pressure, and I’ve learned how to turn those into powerful, practical tools any coach can use to build mentally tough teams
 
🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to Coaching Under Pressure
00:52 In-the-Moment Strategies for Coaches
03:02 Out-of-the-Moment Preparation
04:25 Practical Training Techniques
05:50 Visualization and Mental Preparation
09:26 Conclusion and Next Steps

📢 COACHES – What’s one pressure situation your team struggles with most? Let’s help each other grow in the comments. 👇
 
📌 Want more coaching tools to help you stay calm and strengthen your team’s mental game?
🔹 Grab our FREE training for coaches → https://coachfreetraining.com/  
🔹 Learn more about Plug & Play Elite Mental Game → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg 
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach

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

Transcript

1:04

Coaches, let's talk about how to coach through pressure situations. I actually got this question from another coach around like, how do you keep your team calm and focused and doing their jobs when they are losing a lead or the other team starts to creep back and momentum is starting to swing. Or in like these bigger championship games, playoff games where there's already a lot of noise happening and I've been in more than I can count as a coach. There's been times where my team does not show up and perform because they got rattled and they blew the lead. And then there are times like in this past state championship match where. They were equipped with the tools and I was able to navigate that, but not without some bumps in the road. So I'm gonna talk about some sports psychology tips and tricks that you could be using with your team to help you in those situations. If I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I'm a mental performance coach for girl athletes, but I'm also a four time state champ coach. I've been coaching for 14 years. So like I said, I've been in the, in these situations. A lot, and it's not like it gets easier, but there are things that can help. So number one, I like to think of this as like there's in the moment, strategies versus outta the moment strategies. So I'm gonna first talk about like in the moment strategies which aren't as effective, I will say as first, like some out of moment strategies. But I'm gonna start there just because we're like, well, what do we do as coaches? In those moments when your team is panicking or maybe you're panicking as a coach, this maybe goes without saying, but you have to show up with the presence that you want your team to emulate. So you want to think of yourself like the flight attendant. If you've ever heard of this analogy, I hear a lot in the parenting world, but you know when the plane that starts to experience some turbulence and you look. To the flight attendant, you're kind of like, is this an emergency or is just this normal? And typically the flight attendants can like show on their face and their body language if this is an emergency or not. And if you're like, well, the flight attendants look like they're cool, so everything's good, you can stay calm. And the same thing happens when. Your team starts to experience some of this turbulence in a game. They're looking to you. They're like, is this an emergency? Is this a problem? Or like, are we gonna get through this? And so if you can be that like calm, cool, collected coach, I'm not saying that you don't need to like, you can't be passionate and things like this. But if you start to freak out, you know, you start to flip your lip, lose your cool, like your team is gonna follow that and they're gonna start panicking too. So in the moment, the best that you can like stay calm, composed, focus. I like to have a little plan for myself if I'm like, if we get in a rut, we let a run of three or four points happen on us. I like to, like, literally, I write things down ahead of time of what I can do in those moments. So I coach volleyball, but it's like I can make a sub, I can change. So receive, I can call a timeout. Like I honestly have to have a little cheat sheet because I get a little flustered at the moment too. So that helps me. So maybe that can help you as far as it goes with your players, making sure that what you're saying is focused in like. Positive, present tense. We're not focusing on the outcome. We're not focusing on like, don't do this or don't do that, or, what are you doing Instead, like, give this constructive, here's what we're gonna do next play. So that type of language can really help to kind of ground them, give them something to focus on, not over coach them, things like that in the moment. So like I said, though, you're in the moment, strategies are really going to be useless if you don't have some things kind of worked out ahead of time. So what I mean by that is. At a moment. Strategies means that you're preparing your team for the moment that they're going to be in. And as a coach myself, like I spent way too long not preparing my team for these pressure situations. And it was evident in how we showed up. I had talented teams that, you know, should go far in postseason and then we would end up losing in these like winner to state loser out matches because we just crumbled under the pressure, not because we couldn't physically do it, like we were clearly talented, but we just didn't know how to handle the moment. And I had to look at myself as a coach and realize like. There's gaps in my coaching that is not addressing this, and I needed to stop expecting my team to show up mentally tough when I hadn't taught them the skills to do that and expecting like someone else to teach them, you know, like parents, teachers, whatever, like someone else teach'em how to be mentally tough. When I had to point the figure out myself and realize like, well, I need to be giving some skills for this and. Also, if you're like me as a coach, I like didn't know where to start. I felt like I didn't have any time and so I took the hard path and I became certified as a mentor performance coach. I started teaching skills to my team, started get, getting a lot of success with it. But you don't have to do that. I actually like made it easy for you. So I'm gonna go over a couple of things right now that you can be doing to prepare your team, but if you wanted to like the full breakdown, I do that over at our free training. It's at coach free training.com. So head there and I break down like everything in more detail. I talk about like a really simple way that you can do this with your team through our plug and play system. So. Coach free training.com. But the first thing that really helps kind of prepare your team for these moments is. To do it in practice, like as much as possible, you're not gonna be able to totally emulate like what a state championship will look like in practice. But having been a part of four state championships in the past four seasons, there are common situations that your team is going to get into in those big games that you can train in practice. So things like setting the score to a deficit or flipping the score, kind of like mid game, um, putting some consequences on the game. Now I'm not. Huge fan of like exercises, punishment, but you can come up with other, I do it in moderation, but like you can come up with other things that kind of add some pressure. We do a competitive cauldron and you know, if you're considering that for your team, if you know what that is, it has to be introduced, especially with girls, like in a very intentional way because it ranks players and PE people get points and that really breeds a little competition in our gym. But as you know, everything is scored, everything is a competition. MO for the most part. And that really helps kind of add in what that feels like because in a game it's everything is scored and everything is a competition. So making sure that you're doing those elements in practice and that it's high energy and it's structured and you know, there's winners and losers. So that's how we can like train for those moments. But also you can pinpoint like specific situations like we're down by three and you have to win the next point. Things like that so you can emulate some of that pressure. The other thing that is really important is. For, for those moments is to identify them. Like we actually sit down, especially as we head into postseason and we're like, what situations are gonna throw us off? What situations are we gonna be in that you can't plan for everything. That's why it's important that you instill in your athletes the belief that they are adaptable and they can meet any moment, things like that. But there are some common ones, so there it's very common, especially in volleyball for us. To get down by a few points. And so we have to have a plan for that. So we come up with a plan of what we're gonna do, some options, and then we visualize it. So we do something before practice every day called 3, 2, 1 braid. It's like a, a simple daily mindset routine that incorporates visualization, incorporates some breath work so that they know how to ground themselves and they have like some self-regulation. Techniques that they can also use in that mo those moments, we also infuse some affirmation so that they have some good self-talk to, um, fall back on. So all of that is really good to make sure that they have a plan for those moments and that they visualize them ahead of time. So we usually, we actually visualize ourselves like being down by a few points and kind of like, as much as possible recreating that feeling of panic. So like, ooh. And then seeing ourselves like, Hey, we're gonna take a deep breath. We're going to maybe adjust our serve, receive, we're gonna pass this next fall of three. So like. It's not a guarantee that that's what's gonna happen, but we're doing our best to prepare for what could happen. And like I said, you can't plan for every single moment. You can't like come up with like all the 86 things that could go wrong in a game, but you can plan for some of the common ones and you can plan for, you know, the fact that things are gonna go. Sideways. And so we almost like not only anticipate that, but look for it in a way. We're like, okay, we're here. It's going sideways. Like, all right, we're adaptable. We can do, you know, so it's like we're addressing the elephant in the room before it happens. Um, so that is, is really good. I will say that having also like a failure recovery method, we call ours a snapback routine, is essential in this last state championship. So we were. It was a tight game. It was back and forth, you know, the other team was really good. You know, the fact that we even gone to this match was impressive for our team last year. And then to come up against this team that was like physically big, hadn't lost a game pretty much all season. And we had only lost like one set, maybe. Like they were physically dominant and we were kind of going back and forth. It was tight in the fourth set. We, um, were like down. A couple of sets at that point. So meeting the other team was about to win state. We were in those like really tight pressure situations. My team was able to meet. The moment they were able to come back from championship point, they were babbling back. We won the fourth set in like this epic way where our mental game was strong. The other team kind of crumbled mentally, and then we won the fifth. Set. And it was, it was phenomenal. And my players were interviewed obviously afterwards and you know, they were asked what were, what was going through your head when you were in that situation, when you were down championship point. And they said things like, I was just doing my snapback routine. I think one of'em said I was doing my breath, I was saying my reset word, doing my breath, saying my reset word, which is the snapback routine. It's a combination of a breath, a reset word, and a reset, um, signal. And so we were, you know, making sure that athletes had trained that the whole season and it really didn't. Help us. I mean, it helped, but it didn't, it wasn't obvious until that pressure situation, until that moment where it was like, oh, okay. I don't know what else to do. I'm super nervous, so I'm going to do my breath and say my reset word. And that is what kind of held us in that moment and allowed us to stay mentally tapped. So it's really important that athletes have some sort of failure recovery method, like a snapback routine. All my athletes have their own. I don't know all the reset words. I don't know all the reset signals, but we do have now a shared common language. So I can say, do your reset word, or I can say do your snapback routine. We did that a couple times, like in the timeouts, in those pressure situations, and they know what to do and they have the skills to regulate themselves. So that's, I. Really, really important. So training for high pressure situations, visualizing some of those things ahead of time, having a failure recovery system, all of those things can actually be done in practice. And there's three things that I do every single day in practice to train the mental side of the game that incorporates these things. And if you wanna check out exactly what those three things are, I go over that in this next video. So three simple things that you can add to your practice as well. So check out that next video. I'll see you there.