Business as Usual...unfortunately

I attended a few football games this week and heard one coach talking to his QB. "That was a terrible throw! You need to settle down." You'd probably hear those exact two sentences a thousand times from coaches all over the country this past weekend. But do they really help? Do they help the QB? No, he probably already knows that he's throwing poorly. Does it help the team? No, because those words just make the QB more nervous and makes his throws worse. Do they help the coach? Probably yes. It makes him feel that he's actually doing something, some coaching, as if he's trying to solve the problem, but its just out of his control.

My argument is that its not totally out of his control. Those two sentences symbolize a certain mental mindset of coaching that has negative consequences on a team. Mental toughness is not always about being tough with your players. It's about coaching resiliency, a quiet mind, an ability to handle pressure, and those things rarely come out of agressive judgment and criticism.

Instead, what if the coach could have figured out what was causing the mistakes. It likely wasn't a lack of effort, lack of ability, or lack of desire. It was probably that he was nervous and his mind was racing about all the things that could go bad (like the coach yelling at him.) Thus, he didn't have the mental bandwidth to handle all the game inputs that he needed to compute. Instead of telling the QB to settle down, the coach could have helped him settle down, whether through talking him through his anxiety, breathing excerises, and reducing the pressure of the situation. The coach here just inceased those things.

Just another example of where mental toughness coaching can come into play.

Page navigation

My Blog » Business as Usual...unfortunately

Comments

Leave a Comment