Earn the Right: How I Start Every Volleyball Season

"Earn the Right" is the preseason tradition I run every single season to test the mental toughness of my team. Get the free mental game training → coachfreetraining.com

👉Grab Plug & Play Elite Mental Game for teams → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg

Every year, before my athletes touch a jersey, a backpack, or a jacket, they earn it.

"Earn the Right" is the preseason tradition I run every single season. It tests their mental toughness, their teamwork, and their ability to handle frustration - before it costs us a game.
 
👋🏼 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 video I'm breaking down all six challenges, how they build on each other, and why I believe practice should feel harder than the game.

Here's what you'll learn:
Why I intentionally make athletes fail in practice
The exact six-challenge sequence from individual drills to six-on-six
How this trains mental toughness without adding extra time
What "everything is earned, not given" actually looks like as a system

This works for any sport. Grab what fits your program and run it.

🕓 Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
00:16 What Is Earn the Right?
01:19 Mental Training & Testing
02:13 The Challenges Overview
02:25 Challenges 1–3: Individual & Small Group
04:32 Challenge 4: Free Ball Passing
05:11 Challenge 5: Serve Receive
06:05 Challenge 6: Six on Six & Wrap-Up

*****Connect with me*****
📩 Work with Coach Bre: coachfreetraining.com
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📲 Instagram: @coachhergame

*****Free Tools*****
👉Grab Plug & Play Elite Mental Game for teams → https://elitecompetitor.com/plugplayemg
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🔹 Player Impact Plan: https://elitecompetitor.kit.com/6639eaaf9f

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P.S. Here's what the research shows:  
⚡️ When athletes mentally rehearse a skill in vivid detail, the neural pathways fire the same way as during physical practice. (Cleveland Clinic)
⚡️ Athletes who reframed pre-competition anxiety as excitement showed measurably higher performance than those who tried to calm down. (Wood Brooks, A., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014)
⚡️Only 9% of high school coaches report receiving formal training in sport psychology or mental performance. (Journal of Athletic Training, 2021)

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.  

#coachinggirls #mentalperformance #girlsinsports #highschoolcoach #athletemindset #leadership #culture

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

Transcript

0:00

All right, coach, this is a highly requested video about what I do during the first week of my high school volleyball season. I've been a high school volleyball coach for the past 14 years, won four state championships as a coach, and I've been doing the same thing every season during the first week of our season. It's called Earn the Right. So let's get into it. Earn the Right, first of all, is a series of challenges, I have six, that allows my athletes to be uncomfortable. Physically, mentally, as a team, I put them in challenging situations that they have to work their way through, and as they complete challenges, they earn gear. So in our program, we give out, like practice shirts, jerseys, backpacks, jackets, and I really want athletes to earn those things. It's a value of our program that everything is earned, not given, and so this is a way to practice that. My college volleyball coach, shout out to Diane, she had us do Earn the Right every season in college, and I have modified it to fit our high school purposes. But the other reason why I love it is not only do they have to earn things, but they also get uncomfortable and challenged, which is what we want practice to be. We don't want our athletes facing the most mentally tough parts of their training when the game is on the line, so that's why I incorporate mental training into my program using really simple strategies. And Earn the Right is one of the ways that I can test the mental toughness of my team and test the strategies that I've given them. So if you want to learn the specific strategies that I give my team when it comes to mental strength and toughness, things like the snap back routine Self-talk, how to come back from mistakes faster, how to deal with pressure, all that. Go to my free training. It's at coachfreetraining.com, and I break it all down for you there. But earn the right is a way for me to test the mental toughness of my team. Are they actually using their reset words? Are they actually coming back from their mistakes? Because in earn the right, they make a lot of mistakes. So I intentionally put them in this situation that's challenging for them mentally, individually, but also as a team. So they get into these challenges where they have to work together as a team, and it's frustrating, and it's easy to get mad at your teammates because you're trying to accomplish this goal, and maybe somebody keeps messing up. Like, how do you show up as a teammate in that situation? So earn the right just gives a really great way to do that. So what do we actually do? This is volleyball. You can apply it to whatever sport that you coach. Just think of what your values are, what you want to emphasize, and also what skills are important at the beginning of a season. Earn the right starts with individual drills around ball control, and then it leads up to six on six, okay? They have to earn the right to practice as a team. They have to nail the fundamentals first. We've got to be really good at passing. We've got to be really good at serve receive and free ball passing before we can go fast. So we start small. So the first challenge that I have them do is forearm pass to themselves for three minutes in a row, okay? Sounds simple, but in my team, they all have to be able to complete it at the same time. So I start the timer. Everybody starts passing to themselves. If anyone drops the ball, we go back down to zero, okay? And we start over. So they keep doing it until they can all cross that finish line at three minutes with nobody dropping the ball. Then we move on to setting. So same idea, but setting overhead passing for two minutes in a row. Then we move on to shuttles. So we start to get to small group. That was all individual, and when we get through that, we go to small group. So I have, on my team of 12, I create three teams of four. So shuttles are they're hit a split on either side of the net, two people on one side, two people on the other, and then they start just by passing. So they pass over the net, and then they run to the back of the line. So they run under the net and to the back of the line, and then they pass it over the net. So it's kind of fatiguing, right? They have to, like, run and, you know, go to the end of the line and things like that. They have to get, um, 20 forearm passes in their group, then 20 sets, then 20 pass to themselves set over the net, and then they go down to 16 pass to themselves or set to themselves and down ball over the net to their team on the other side. That's where things start to get a little hairy, right? Because if they mess up at any point in this sequence, they go back down to passing. They gotta start at the beginning. So they do that. And then we get to two on two. So- When they get to the end of that, it's pass, set, hit over the net. So they're trying to control that ball, and each person needs to get three swings, okay? And I want it to be a nice controlled swing. It doesn't have to be full out, but I don't want them to just down ball it or just go easy. I want them to have good mechanics and good form. So once they get through that, then they're done with, with that piece of it. And they complete it as a shuttle group. They don't have to have, like, all three shuttle groups complete at the same time or anything like that. They're now just win- within their small group. This one can get frustrating because it includes a lot of ball control. You know, there's, there might be somebody who's a little bit weaker when it comes to ball control and, you know, they're the one that keeps kind of messing up, so they really have to work together, okay? That is challenge three. Challenge four is free ball passing. So we use our free ball system. We do, like, kind of a butterfly drill to practice this, but they have to get 100 perfect free ball passes. And I know you're like, "Oh, that sounds like a lot," but honestly, free ball passing, we've got to be good at it. The caveat here is I'm actually looking at their form versus their outcome, okay? So I'm looking at do they have wrist and hands together, straight and simple platform? Do they face the ball and get it to the target? Are all those right? Are they calling mine? And at any point they pass, and I'm watching just one side of the net- And they don't do it, I say no, and we start back over at zero. I don't do it 100 in a row, just 100, uh, free ball passes. And then after they do that, we go on to serve receive. Serve and passing, most important skills in volleyball. So they have to get 100 three, three, three passes. You know, that's, three is like, in volleyball, that's a perfect pass. Um, and it doesn't have to be in a row. They just have to get 100 three passes. And so everyone rotates through serve receive, through the target, and through serving. And if they pass a three, they get a point. If they pass a two, it's a wash, just doesn't count n- for noth- for anything, just, we just move on. Um, however, if they pass a one or a zero, then they're in the danger zone, because if they do that again, if we get two ones or zeros in a row, then we go back down to zero. Also, if the server misses her serve two times in a row, so whether it's the same person two times in a row, or like I serve and then the person next, behind me serves and they miss, also we go back down to zero. Now, they get benchmarks, so every 25 they get to lock that in. But that one typically takes the longest. And then the last one is a six on six drill. So we call it bucket of balls. Again, this came from Diane, but I modified it a little bit. They have six balls in a bucket. They only have this, those six to complete this drill. It's timed, so we're in a six on six. We're practicing our defensive systems, and it's outside hitter versus outside hitter. So we set the outside every single time. She has to swing and hit the ball over. Our defense has to dig it up, set the outside on the other side of the net, and that outside needs to hit over. So it's cooperative. We have to keep the ball alive for that full two minutes. After two minutes, we go to the middles, same thing. Then we go to the opposites, same thing. And then we go back row attack, same thing. Now if they drop the ball or mess up at any time in that, then we throw a new ball in, but they only have six balls, so only six chances to complete that full eight minutes. And that is Earn the Right okay? It typically takes, we do tr- tryouts for the first two days, and then, um, it typically takes the next, like, three practices to get through all of Earn the Right. But the really great thing is that they get a ton of reps as well. This is not wasted time. They're getting individual reps. They're getting ball control reps. They're getting free ball passing reps, serve receive reps, six on six defensive drills. Like, they get it all, and I can give a ton of feedback as well as a coach. So it's very intentional, um, while also putting them in challenging situations that they have to work through. At the end, they feel like they've just won State. They're like, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing." Um, and so it's also a really cool way to start off your season. So that, my friends, is Earn the Right. If you want more information on how you can build your team's mental game so that they can do challenges like this without breaking down and imploding on you, then check out our free training at coachretraining.com. That's where I teach all of those skills. I'll see you there