LOCKED IN PREPARATION - Mental Conditioning for Football

The 2014 season marked my 10th season as defensive coordinator at Northwestern College. Throughout the ten years we have been blessed to have some great players and have had consistently strong defenses. Over this time, we have always gone into each game week with a list of ten goals. These goals were all measurable outcomes we could strive to achieve in each game. How we measured each goal may vary from year to year but these goals always included winning as our #1 goal. This goal was followed by goals for takeaways, rushing yards, passing yards, third down defense, three and outs, and other stats we could measure that we felt would lead to our success as a defense and a team.