Mental Training

Mental Toughness. All coaches want their players to have this skill. Some kids seem to have it, and other kids don't. I think it is one of the least taught non-basketball fundamentals there is.

A lot of coaches have had sports psych people come in and do classroom sessions with their team, or take them on team building events designed to introduce them to the fundamentals of mental training skills. That stuff is always great and wonderfull, but the real mental training interventions need to be made on the court by the coach.

My work here at the NEDA program has been so beneficial to see how coaches implement mental training into their practices.

One of my favorite mental skills that we have talked about is the IPS, or ideal performance state. Most of the work I had done in the NCCP courses about it were very much based on handouts and things to do outside of practice to see how you prepare yourself for competition. The focus here has been to trim that idea down and just talk about "it".

Everybody has coached a practice where the players had "it". It might have been for a whole practice, it might have been for just one drill, but everyone had seen it when all 12 players have been competing, focused and energized.

So how do you get it? That's the biggest question. A great start is analyzing the last sentence of the previous paragraph. "When all 12 players have been competing, focused and energized.

Mike McKay calls them "ICE goals" - Intensity, Concentration, Enthusiasm

Intensity is the physical side of performance. Working hard with full effort until the last whistle.

Concentration is the mental side of performance. Having your mind on task and focused.

Enthusiasm is the emotional side of performance. Giving energy to others in the group.

In order to be at peak performance, these three areas need to be engaged. When your team has it, you will do well. When they don't have it, what can you do to get it back? The first step to take is to identify in practice when you have "it" and when you don't. Then you can begin to figure out what to do to get things back the way they should be or how to stay there.

Billie Jean King once said that she had won matches in which her physical and her emotional side were on but her mental side was lacking.

She also won matches when her emotional and her mental side were on but her physical side was not.

She said she never won a match when her emotional state wasn't right.

My apologies to Mike Mckay for "borrowing" all of this material from our conversations.