1) Team Organization – With the busy schedules of student-athletes, captains remind players of commitments and changes in schedules and reinforce team structure.
Continue Reading →In the past year, we’ve covered Super Bowl winning Seattle Seahawk http://www.seahawks.com coach Pete Carroll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki three times in the Championship Performance Coaches Journal https://championshipperform.com/coaching-journal
In this week’s Winning Ways blog, we look at how Carroll worked to get his team mentally ready to compete ‘in the zone’. Carroll has been a long time advocate of sports psychology since his days with the New England Patriots and New York Jets where he worked with Championship Performance Advisory Board ...
Continue Reading →Right after a heartbreaking loss to Alabama, Texas A &M quarterback Johnny Manziel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Manziel talked about his team staying focused on goals such as getting to the SEC Championship by taking things “one game at a time.” That old coaching cliché is great, but successful goal setting is far more systematic and planned out. Here are 5 steps to increase the likelihood of reaching team goals.
1) State the purpose. Complete this sentence. I want to __________.
Examples: I want the ...
Continue Reading →In a recent ESPN documentary http://espn.go.com, former Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt http://www.patsummitt.org was profiled. Having lost in the Final 4 several times, during the run up to her first championship, she was committed to do things differently and leave no stone unturned.
She gathered her team on the day off before the title game and had them all lie on the gym floor. Then she took them through a guided mental imagery exercise where she asked them ...
Continue Reading →Every team could use a few players like Chicago Bulls Joakim Noah, http://www.nba.com/bulls/index_main.html His high-energy style of play raises the enthusiasm level of his entire team. How can you help cultivate an enthusiastic atmosphere on your team?
Here are 5 ideas you can use as a coach to fire up your team’s enthusiasm quotient:
1) Listen for team members when they talk about their own ‘claim to fame.’ When your players talk about proud moments in their athletic history or off ...
Continue Reading →You want to keep spirits up when the pressure to win can to be overwhelming. Here are 4 strategies to keep the team loose and build morale.
1) Have a team movie night or funny television show break at lunch. If most of your team members eat lunch together, you can show old re-runs of comedy shows. Also, consider having a team movie night even during the off-season to build team unity.
2) Set up a “Humor Corner” in the locker room. ...
Continue Reading →With NCAA March Madness upon us, the heavy favorites will be on guard against having over-confidence. Self confidence can be defined as an athlete’s belief that he or she can perform difficult tasks under certain conditions. Overconfidence develops when they misjudge those conditions. They tend to pay less attention to detail, ignore critical information and lack focus both before and during the competition. These combined factors set the stage for losing to an over-matched opponent.
Over confidence appears in three ways. ...
Continue Reading →It’s something that happens in sports and can be hard to explain. One team of equally talented players starts to lose to another team on an annual basis. You hear the expression, “they are in their heads” to describe the winning team’s mental edge over the losing team. Losing streaks can last a few years to over a decade in some cases. To the team on the losing end of the stick, losing begets more losing. Past defeats create doubt ...
Continue Reading →Urban Meyer has quickly left his mark on the team culture of Ohio State football. Almost everyone observing an Ohio State practice this spring has remarked about the intensity of the workouts. Every play, every drill — even calisthenics — is a win-lose proposition. Meyer has rewarded sprint winners with ice-cold Gatorade while the losers drink from an old garden hose. Scrimmage winners get good food on nice tablecloths while the losers eat cold-meat sandwiches off by themselves.
Meyer’s approach to ...
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