What The Best Teams Do: Everyone Has A Purpose

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What The Best Teams Do: Everyone Has A Purpose

In college you'll rarely see a player sitting on the bench doing nothing during a game. When I played at Ithaca College, every player on the team was always cheering, clapping, or doing something in a supportive role when on the bench. Your positive attitude can anchor the “spirit of sport” in your team.

Last week our mental game lesson was about Charlie Morton, a 37-year old pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays who started the last game of the 2019 World Series. At the time his ERA is .57 and only made his first all-star game two years before that. If Morton would have won that night, he would have tied a record by posting eight consecutive winning postseason starts.

When asked about this wonderful run, he said,

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When You Lose Confidence In A Game

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When You Lose Confidence In A Game

Most players have started their season already. Games will be testing your and your team’s abilities. They are an accumulation of all the work you’ve put in all winter. While the offseason was a time when you’ve learned new things, like improving your pitch repertoire or making big changes to your fundamentals, the in-season is all about performance.

Even though you’ll be learning a lot during the season, if you want to play and if you want to win, you’ll have to give the coach a reason to let you pitch. Giving chances in order to let the pitcher learn or see if she can handle pressure might be few and far between.

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Spiraling Out of Control - What to Do

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Spiraling Out of Control - What to Do

Almost daily, whether I’m coaching or not, I notice things about my life that I learned while playing sports in my youth. Most stems from our “mental game” lessons as a player for Ithaca College. On Thursdays, our off day, we would lift weights then go to one of the classrooms in the “Hill,” the athletic facility, and complete a hour-long lesson on how to think about the game.

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How to Prevent the Downward Spiral

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How to Prevent the Downward Spiral

I hear it all the time, “Is there some kind of trick that I can use during a game to prevent me from going into a downward spiral?” It’s frustrating (and even more confusing) to start off well and then lose this “groove” later in the game.

While at first it seems sometimes coaches over-analyze what could have happened…”she got tired”, “she lost it mentally”, “she stopped performing her mechanics properly,” and so on, at second thought, I believe this is an under-analysis or a faulty analysis without proper work on the back end to diagnose issues and adjust practice accordingly. In order to identify the issue take a cue from college teams. They are always recording a huge amount of stats throughout the games. For them, there is no “guessing” when it comes to the issues they face during game time. They try to make it as objective, and therefore easy, as possible to make decisions.

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