How to Coach a Quiet Team of Nice Girls

Your quiet team isn't broken. They just need the right systems. I'm sharing the 4 strategies that took my silent, "too nice" team to a state championship. Grab my free training → https://coachfreetraining.com

👋🏼 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. 

In this episode, I'm breaking down why forcing communication never works (and what actually does).

You'll learn the exact frameworks I use including:
👉 Earn the Right - how to teach communication standards from day one
👉 Open Circle Method - building trust that leads to natural communication
👉 Competitive Cauldron - creating healthy competition without toxicity
👉 Confidence Skills - teaching athletes to reset and play free

This isn't about making them louder. It's about making them confident enough to compete. 

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction: The Problem
01:31 Strategy 1: Earn the Right
03:55 Strategy 2: Building Trust
05:51 Strategy 3: Competitive Cauldron
09:04 Strategy 4: Teaching Confidence Skills
10:01 The Snapback Routine10:41 The Alter Ego Technique
12:02 Wrap Up & Resources

If your team drops balls in silence or plays scared, this episode is for you.

💬 Coaches - What's your biggest struggle with coaching a quiet team? Comment below. Let's talk about it 👇

📌 Free Tools & Next Steps
🔹 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! 

P.S. A few stats worth knowing:

• Athletes in competitive practice environments communicate 31% more during games (Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2022)
• Trust-building interventions reduce team conflict by 47% and increase communication by 28% in one season (Institute for the Study of Youth Sports, Michigan State University, 2021)
• Athletes with structured reset routines recover from errors 2.3x faster than those without (Frontiers in Psychology, 2023) 

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.

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

Transcript

1:04

My team won the state championship last season, but if you were to watch our first practice of the season, you would bet money that we wouldn't make it past. The first round balls were dropping, nobody was docking. They were so nice to each other that it was honestly painful to watch. And I knew exactly what the problem was and it wasn't necessarily a communication problem. And I know you've been in this situation too, maybe you are right now. Where you have a team of nice girls who almost find it hard to compete with each other because they don't want to be. Mean or aggressive or rude or whatever it is. I'm gonna show you exactly what I did this past season to fix it. Three strategies, actually. Four strategies that I tried and spoiler. We did win state. We ended up solving that communication problem and this team of nice girls actually learned to. Compete, but here's what most coaches get wrong about quiet teams of nice girls. They think the solution is just making them talk more. So they set consequences. They run lines. When athletes don't call the ball, they give speeches about communication. And it works probably for like five minutes, and then someone makes a mistake, the energy drops, and then you're right back to where you started. There's crickets, and here's why this typically doesn't work. You can't force communication necessarily, but you can create conditions where communication happens naturally and those conditions are building confidence. Teaching them how to compete and trust each other. So that's what we're gonna build, and I'm gonna give you the exact drills and the systems that I used to do it, starting with the first week in practice. So first week of practice, that's where we're starting. We do something called Earn the Right, and this helps them actually learn what competing actually looks like. All right, so here's how it works. It's a series of drills and activities that I have my athletes go through. They actually. From, from completing each of these activities earn little parts of their gear, so like their practice shirts, their jerseys, things like that. And it starts very simple. It starts with individual ball control, and then it leads up to team systems. And, um, I have a whole video on what or in the right is and how I structure the first week of practice. I'll link to that below or right after this, so you can check that out if you're really curious. But, um, some of the, the drills that we do, some of the activities that we do have criteria on them in order for them to meet the goal and earn the right is typically very challenging. And one of the things that we do, one of the activities is, um, a little passing drill. So I coach volleyball, and in order to be successful in this, and they have to get like a hundred free or sorry, uh, perfect free ball passes in a row. And in order for it to count as perfect, one of the criteria is they have to call the ball. So very simple, and that's why we start with the, the basics. But you'll find that when you start this, okay, and you can apply it to any sport, they don't do that, right? They'll pass the ball and it'll be a perfect pass, but then they didn't say anything and nope, that doesn't count. We go back down to zero. And so they learn right away in order to be successful in this specific drill. We have to call the ball, we have to talk. So that's just one way that you can instill that in the beginning of your practice. Um, and also you can, they can transfer that to all parts of, um, whatever you're doing in your practices. So any drill, talk about what success looks like for that drill, and then you can always come back to that. So if success looks like we are talking and be specific about what talking means, right? Does it mean calling, well, does it mean calling somebody's name? Does it mean talking about what's going on on the other side of the net or other? Other half of the court, like be specific on what communication and what talking means. Um, because if you're not, then they don't really know what that means, even if you think it's pretty obvious, but it's also something that you can come back to and bring it in, like if it's not happening. And we come back to the success criteria and even put it on the board and like, are, are we actually doing that? Okay. So that's what we do within the first week. And they might actually hate you a little bit because earn the right, um, if you do it correctly, it's supposed to be challenge, supposed to be hard, and you're supposed to hold them to that standard or they don't move on. Okay? But. That's the point of it. Okay. Now the other thing that we had to do within the first week was help them build trust with each other. And a lot of this, like quiet teams, naturally, like from the beginning, they, they might be quiet and it just sometimes takes some time. But if you're not intentionally building trust within your team, especially with girls, they, there's that saying that, you know, girls need to feel connected to win or however that goes. Like they, they've gotta feel like. The person next to them is someone that they, they trust and that they will have their back. Like that's really important in this, this team culture, especially if you're coaching girls. And so we have to create an environment where they do that and it's not just let's go have a team dinner, although that's fun and it helps and all of that. But what I like to do is build in an intentional day of the week where we have a team meeting. And it's not just a team meeting where we're talking about whatever, it's a very specific structure. I call it the open circle method, and I have a whole video on that too that I'll link for you. Um, but we go through the same structure every week where athletes are actually sharing. Things outside of their sport with their teammates. And um, you know, bene Brown talks a lot about vulnerability and how that builds trust and how you can't build trust if you're not vulnerable. Vulnerable. And it athletes don't have an opportunity to be vulnerable with each other. They don't have the opportunity to build trust. And, um, sometimes it's hard as a coach to create containers for that. But I actually have. Just a list of questions that I rotate through to help with this, and that's in that other video as well. Um, and some of the simple, simpler ones can literally be like roses and thorns from the week. What's a a row, something good that happened? What's a thorn that happened? And a bud, if you wanna, um, add that in something you're excited about. And just helping athletes share outside of, you know, just their sport and who they are in their sport. And that helps build that trust and that vulnerability. And build in that structure for athletes so that they are building trust and when they can build trust, they can feel more free, um, to talk and communicate and compete. Okay. Another thing that I did, and I've been doing this for years, is to make sure that your. Your drills, whatever you do in practice are scored and in order to create competitiveness within your team, and I know sometimes it can be tricky because competitiveness is not always seen as a good thing, especially if you're coaching girls. Sometimes it's just kind of the reality. But we do something called the competitive cauldron, and basically that means that. Everything is scored every, every single thing. Uh, well, I wouldn't say every single thing, but most drills get scored and they get put into what's called a cauldron. It's recorded on the board. Every athlete has a number, and they're getting points every week for, um, the points that they get in drills, in small group drills, individual drills. Um, six on six drills. The six on six drills are actually weighted a little bit more because we emphasize winning when it comes to full on game situations. And so every week they're accumulating scores in their cauldron and they actually have like a little score next to their name. I group them by position so they can kind of see within their position group how they're competing and how they're, um, kind of, you know, stacking up, um, against people in their position group. Now you have to. Really present this in a very intentional way because, um, we don't wanna pit people against each other and like have that be the culture we talk about competing, um, as something that actually makes our team better. Because you're either pushing somebody or you're pulling somebody, you're either pushing somebody to get better, you're right on their tail, right? Or you're pulling them, you know, you're maybe ahead of them a little bit in the cauldron that week, but you're pulling them in, um, along with you so that they're getting better as well. And we talk about how, um, in order to make our team better, you have to compete and you have to give a hundred percent effort. And, you know, you've gotta have, um, situations where that's being measured. And so that's why we put scores on things. We also talk about how you're not your number, you're not your sta, you're not your competitive cauldron score. And um, this is just a metric for you along with all the other metrics that you could have in a season just to see where you are. And if you're like, yep, I got last in the cauldron this week. Hey. That I actually don't use it to determine, determine playing time, really at all. Um, but it's feedback for you to say like, okay, next week I wanna do a little better in the cauldron. And we do talk a lot about how, um, you know, we, we want this to be our culture that we're competing, but also we want to be our biggest encouragers and biggest cheerleaders as well. And so we practice like, um, if somebody is ahead of you in the cauldron that you're, you're saying good job and you're giving them kudos, and if somebody's below you in the cauldron, you're saying like, Hey, you're doing awesome way to compete, like. We build in also structure at the end of practice to give kudos and shout outs to people in their position group so that we are practicing this term that we talked about this season of Mudita. Um, maybe you've heard of it. It's kind of circulating around, but that is finding joy in other people's joy. It's a, um, Sanskrit term, um, but finding joy in other people's happiness. And when good things happen to other people and they've worked hard for them, uh, those things, you can hold two feelings. You can, you know, want that, maybe be a little jealous, but also be happy for them. And so that's another thing that we've had to kind of layer in along with this. Okay. So compete, score, everything that's really helped with the competitiveness in our gym. As well. And they want, they wanna win a little bit more when things are on the line. Okay. Um, all right. The last strategy I leave you with is to actually teach confidence skills. And this is huge because a lot of times when athletes are quiet, it's because they're afraid to make mistakes. And if you think about it, if you're scared, you're gonna mess up, you're gonna play tentatively and you don't take risks. And you don't make the calls because what if you're wrong and tentative athletes don't really talk. And so it's we, what we have to do is we have to teach them how to reset after mistakes quickly. This is also comes back to a lot of your coaching, like how do you talk about mistakes? How do you talk about errors, right? Aggressive errors are are great. Do you probably say in your gym like it's okay to make mistakes, all of that, but do you actually give them a way to come back from mistakes? So it's one thing to say it's okay to make mistakes and I don't care if you make aggressive errors. But it's another first, an athlete to actually have the skill to come back from a mistake after they just bombed it out in the back of the court, right? Because afterwards they're probably not gonna be feeling great about themselves, and then they're spiraling even more because now they're making more errors. So you've gotta give'em a way to reset. And we teach something called the snapback routine. It's a combination of a breath, a reset word, a reset signal. It's very simple. All athletes in my program have one, and it's a two second way for them to reset. I teach it at the beginning of the season, and if you want to learn how to teach this to your team, I break it down in my free training for coaches. It's called coach free training.com. It's actually called how to, um, quickly Level Up Your Team's Mental Game, but it's at coach free training.com. So if you head there, that's one of the three mental training skills that I teach at the beginning of the season so that athletes have a way to reset and they don't have to. Be tentative. The snapback routine is one of the main skills that we teach to help them play a little bit more free because they have a way to get back. Another skill that was really cool that we taught this last season is the alter ego technique. So. If you really do have these girls that are super nice and their personality is maybe not aggressive or outgoing, and they kind of feel this like friction because they're, you know, nice, but they have to be more aggressive on the court and they feel like that's kind of a threat to their personality. The alter ego technique is they, they literally come up with an alter ego that they become on the court. This is like Sasha, Sasha Fierce, Beyonce, or. Clark Kent to Superman, black Mamba to Kobe. Like it's that concept and they come up with an alter ego for themselves. It's another workshop that we do in the mental training, um, Mondays that I do with my athletes. And it's really great because it creates a little bit of a distance between their personality and how they can show up on the court that might be, um, you know, different than what their personality is. It gives them permission, it gives them freedom, and it's kind of fun because then whatever their alter ego is, we put a little like. A sticker or a drawing on their, um, notebook that reminds them of that. And so just a, a, a great little strategy to have in your back pocket. So again, if you wanna learn about that as well and how we teach that, we teach it inside our mental training program called Plug and Play Elite Mental Game for Teams. This is our literal plug and play program for coaches to. Do mental training with their teams and as little as 20 minutes a week. It's very simple. You don't have to prep, you just press play. And to learn more about that, go to coach free training.com. I break it all down. Okay. I hope that this is helpful. If you have a quiet team, um, some resources for you that you can head to after this open circle, methods that you can build trust on. Um, I do those on Fridays every week, so I've got a video about that. I also have the video about my first week of practice and how we do earn the right. So that they can start teaching that competitiveness early and how to communicate and what the standards are. Now, before you go though, I'd love to hear below, have you had this quiet team of nice girls and what have you done? That helps that. All right. I'm Coach Bree. I'll see you in the next video.