|
"The
Attitude of Your Team - How You Can
Out-Attitude Your Opponent"
Written
by:
Bill Utsey
, Director of Athletics, Greenville
County Schools, Greenville SC
“If your team is going
to win, more times than not, they will
either out-talent, out-condition, or
out-attitude your opponent.”
This quote has been attributed to coaches
across our country. Many coaches will
attest to its high degree of truth regardless
of the sport you coach. Strength and
conditioning coaches would probably
wholeheartedly agree to its contention.
In essence, it says that the three most
important tools in a team’s or
athlete’s tool kit are: talent,
condition, and attitude.
What exactly are these tools?
Talent may
be defined by some as those anatomical
and physiological gifts with which an
athlete is born. However, your education
has told you that coaches can have a
significant impact upon the level of
talent if you define it as a collection
of speed, strength, power, experience,
and skill. An athlete’s condition
is indeed defined as one’s fitness
level, his or her speed, strength, power,
and muscular and cardiovascular endurance,
plus the other six fitness items. Coaches
do have a tremendous amount of influence
in the level of condition of any athlete
or team. But what about this item called
“Attitude?”
One can agree that an athlete or a team
can out-talent or out-condition an opponent,
but how can you “out-attitude”
an opponent?
This article submits to you that “attitude”
is a tool an athlete or team can harness
and, as such, should be looked at as
something you can work on, improve,
and a force that will give your team
or athlete the edge versus competitors.
Let’s first define attitude. Simply
put, attitude is the way one thinks.
Because attitude can be a tool for athletes,
coaches should never describe attitude
as bad or even good.
If attitude is a tool, it can be strong
or weak and, most definitely,
positive or negative.
The objective of this article is to
get you to believe coaches do have a
huge impact on “the way players
think.” When a coach begins to
look at attitude,
just like he looks at talent
and physical conditioning,
it indeed becomes “one of the
most important tools in your athlete’s
or team’s tool kit.” If
you can develop and grow attitude into
one of the critical tools in athletic
competition, you will be empowering
your players and team. When the first
two tools—talent
and physical condition—are
about the same as your competition,
then attitude can give your team or
athlete the edge.
Think about
these axioms:
- If it makes good sense to arm your
players with the tools to win with,
and if given a way that you can develop
attitude into a tool that would make
a difference, then doesn’t it
make sense that you should find out
all there is to know about developing
a positive mental attitude (PMA)?
And,
- If it makes good sense to lift
weights to get stronger and to do
speed workouts and plyometrics to
gain speed and power, doesn’t
it make sense to do all that is possible
to grow, improve, and develop a positive
mental attitude (PMA)?
Coaches have always described how their
player or team played during a contest
as the ways in which they or he or she
played with, “confidence,”
“determination,” “focus,”
or “inspiration.” Look at
these words again. They are descriptors
of how the athletes were actually thinking,
in other words their state of mind during
a contest. This is attitude at work
being used as a tool. How else would
you want players to think, especially
during the course of a game or match?
What are some things you can do that
would “condition” the way
your players think? Think seriously
about some descriptive words or phrases
that best express how you would want
your players to be thinking during a
competition. Write them down. These
will help you determine a theme or themes
you want to use with your athletes or
team. The objective, of course, is to
have them assimilate these themes into
the way they think during games (see
ideas at the end of this article).
A great coach once pondered, “If
I can come up with a way of controlling
the emotional momentum of a game, then
we will win a lot of games!” All
of those terms mentioned above can play
a key role in maintaining, capturing,
or re-capturing the emotional momentum
of a game, and they can make a difference
in any one contest for your athlete
or team. In simple terms emotional momentum
can be described as the flow of attitude
- going up and down from the positive
to the negative - during the course
of a contest. What a coach wants is
for his or her athlete to be armed with
the highest level of belief
or PMA to 1) respond
in synergistic concert with the positive
flow of a contest and 2) to be so conditioned
with PMA that your athlete’s response
counters any negative momentum flow
and helps to minimize the negative emotional
impact upon his or her level of belief
in his or her ability to succeed.
It is important that you and, more
importantly, your players know what
belief is
and its role in growing PMA.
Belief, by
definition, is a goal held
in expectation that you will attain
it. It can sometimes simply
be confidence - a belief that you will
succeed in whatever it is you set out
to do (accomplish a goal, score a goal,
make a great shot or play, or win a
game) or the expectation that something
good will happen. This article suggests
that a winning attitude is simply a
PMA - players who believe,
not think, that good will happen and
that their goals will be achieved.
Ponder this: How does an underdog team
or athlete with less talent, less speed,
and less size beat a heavily favored
team or athlete? Every coach reading
this has had to have experienced either
playing on or coaching an athlete or
team that has pulled off a great upset
win. Go back in your mind and re-examine
what really happened in any one of these
upsets. What this article submits to
you is that attitude - mostly harnessed
in the form of emotional momentum, the
result of PMA and belief
- was the key ingredient in any particular
upset. Additionally, this article submits
to you that attitude, in the form of
emotional momentum, plays a critical
role not only in upsets, but
in all of your competitions.
How your players are prepared mentally
to respond during games with an unbending
belief that they will succeed is exactly
the tool you want your athlete or team
armed with, and the tool that can take
him or her to a higher level of play.
Better yet is how they respond when
things go wrong or they experience a
loss (or a number of losses) during
a season.
Are we not talking about the very traits
that we want all of our athletes to
learn from playing sports; to have confidence
in all of life’s situations, and
to respond to the ups and downs of life
by believing that one can always overcome?
Teaching young people the power of PMA
in sports has everything to do with
the frame of mind one carries throughout
life. Successful people in all walks
of life have a confidence level that
is built on a belief that they will
achieve their goals and can overcome
any adversity that comes their way.
What can you do to condition your players’
minds to think, behave, and respond
with an unbending belief to succeed
and to overcome? Exactly what is it
that you can do to change the way your
players think? What are some things,
some exercises that you can give your
players that will work on, grow, develop,
and condition their attitude?
There are at least three areas where
a coach can do specific things that
will help develop, enhance, grow, and
maintain a Positive Mental Attitude
with your athletes. Because of space
limitations, I will list only a few
ideas under each area. You can brainstorm
lots of ideas yourself once you see
some of these ideas.
Create
a Culture and an Environment of Positive
Expectancy:
- Learn all there is to know about
motivation, the power of goal setting,
and the use of affirmations and visualization.
Do your own research!
- Use positive
reinforcement as often as possible.
Unlike negative reinforcement, you
cannot overdo positive reinforcement.
This is especially true whenever someone
makes a good play. Remember, the best
motivator a teenager can receive is
recognition in front of his or her
peers. Do this as often as possible.
- Take every
opportunity to give encouraging talks
that pertain to life lessons as often
as possible.
Create a Team Personality:
- Use a team theme or themes. Post
them in your locker room on signs,
banners, and posters or on a team
T-shirt. Reinforce them during the
season at practices with short talks
and before every game in your pre-game
talks.
- Demand discipline
in all phases of your team’s
activities:
- Demonstrate command-of-presence
when talking to your athletes.
Demand that they are all looking
right at you when you speak, and
that they are all in front of
you every time you speak!
- Exercise and demand discipline
of time at practice. “Time
is WINS!” Don’t ever
forget this at your practices,
AND don’t let your players
forget it.
- Exercise and demand of your
players and coaches the disciplines
of mental intensity and quantity
of repetitions at all practices.
Mental intensity is listening
and learning discipline. The discipline
of quantity is exacting the most
repetitions you can possibly get
in during the time allotted at
practice.
Do Exercises for Your Players To Use That Will Grow PMA:
- Have a team goal-setting session
at the beginning of your season. This
is a special meeting or meetings that
can take upwards of two to four hours
or more (“you have to know where
you are going before you can get there”).
In this session you must:
- Teach the meaning of success
(Success is a journey!), motivation,
belief, PMA, and emotional momentum.
- The team goal or goals must
come from your players, not you!
- The goal or goals must be realistic
and attainable.
- You must complete the session
or sessions by making the goal(s)
a process goal(s)…what is
it that the athlete must do today,
tomorrow, this week, next week,
next month, etc?(“plan
your work, work your plan”)
- Use affirmations.
Have each player paste one on his/her
locker.
- Use positive
quotes on each of your practice schedules
at the beginning of each game week,
or post them on each player’s
locker. Select a quote, statement,
or short parable that has a special
impact for that particular week…print
it out and post it, then talk to your
team about why it is important that
week.
- Teach your
athletes about visualization and how
to use it.
|
