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LOCKED IN PREPARATION - Mental Conditioning for Football

by: Matt McCarty
Assistant Head Coach/Defensive Coordinator – Northwestern College, Orange City, IA
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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.



We entered the 2013 season with a young defense. We graduated nine defensive starters off a playoff team in 2012, and our initial plan was to be consistent with what we have done as a defense in the past. We began the season going into each week with similar goals for each game. As we struggled through the start of the season, one of my assistants whose son was playing Division I baseball introduced me to a mental conditioning approach used by their baseball team. Anyone familiar with baseball knows it is a long game where failure is more common than success. The mental conditioning approach talked about developing a routine, being locked in to the process, being in control of each pitch, flushing failures and making each pitch count. We spend countless hours developing our players physically but have not spend much time developing how they approach practice and games mentally.

We staggered out of the gate to a 2-2 start and one thing I noticed was our young team focused so much on the product and outcomes of our goals for Saturdays that they were getting frustrated with not meeting our expectations. We needed to shift our focus. As we entered a bye week, the time was now to dive into mental conditioning.

With what we had learned from books, blogs, and tweets from Brian Cain, one of the premier mental conditioning coaches, we developed a new approach for the remainder of our season. Instead of focusing on Saturday’s outcome and the stats from Saturday, we would emphasize each rep each day in practice. We built the remainder of our season on three principles:

1) Locked In!

2) PROCESS over PRODUCT

3) Being OUR Best

LOCKED IN!

We script out our practices and script out reps in practice for our players within the two deep roster on defense. Instead of six to eight reps with our starters and then three or four reps for our twos, we made the move to three play segments for everyone. We asked our guys to focus one play at a time for three plays max. We knew this was doable, and we wanted them to feel and see the success of this. We would give them the down and distance, offensive personnel and defensive call each rep and ask them to “Lock In.” At our practices you would hear coaches yelling “Get locked in” over and over. Our coaching staff could see a dramatic difference in our performance and confidence as a defense from this.

Another aspect of getting locked in was developing a routine for each play. We taught our guys after each play to take a deep breath, flush the last play whether it was good or bad, and refocus by looking at the guys across from you and telling yourself you will win this play. Again, this seemed like something minimal to spend time on but our players and staff could tell the difference in performance after we instituted this plan.

PROCESS OVER PRODUCT

We moved away from our product outcomes for games on Saturday and focused more on getting better each day in practice. We wanted to emphasize the process and wanted our guys to understand that we were going to focus on us, what we do, and what we could do to improve each day. We knew if we continually did this and had a great week of practices, the outcome on Saturday would be what we desired.

Instead of focusing on a goal for takeaways in the game on Saturday, we implemented a goal for takeaways in practice. For each practice we needed to get six takeaways from our offense. This helped our defensive players develop a mentality of creating takeaways but also forced our offense to take care of the ball in practice. We counted takeaways from any segment against our offense (1 on 1s, inside run, 7 on 7, team, etc.). Through our first four games we had generated one takeaway. In our last seven games we created 18. We felt this was a great example for our guys to see how focusing on the process will create the desired product.

We also tracked how much film our guys were watching each week and kept them accountable to preparing their best. Each position group was asked to grade their teammate’s effort during inside run, 7 on 7 and team segments. This led to focused film study for our guys and accountability on effort in practices. It was another simple adjustment that led to more productive practices each day.

BEING OUR BEST


The third aspect of mental conditioning that we focused on was BEING OUR BEST when it matters most, which is each and every play. This helped develop a one play focus for our guys. We asked them to focus on controlling what we could: blocking out the last play, officials, crowd, opponent, etc. and being their best the next play.

A few concepts that aided in this were ACT BIG; BE BIG and TALK to Yourself vs. LISTEN to yourself. From studying mental conditioning, we learned that the mind does not recognize the difference from imagination and reality. We learned you shouldn’t wait to be confident when you feel like it but first act confident and then your emotions will follow. We helped our guys develop this by teaching them to talk to themselves vs. listening. That is, to tell themselves what they were going to do each play. To look at their opponent before each snap and tell themselves what they were going to do to them instead of listening to all the negative talk inside their head about what could go wrong. It was amazing to see the confidence and attitude a bunch of young guys began to play with.

The last part about being your best that we stressed to our players was by focusing on being our best each play each day. There was no need to “step up” our play for a big game or difficult opponent. We simply played how we played each day in practice, focused on controlling what we could control like our emotions and effort, and let the outcome take care of itself.

We saw our performance as a defense improve dramatically over the last several weeks of the season. As coaches, we could see it every day in practice. We improved statistically in every category and most importantly, we finished our regular season with six straight victories, including two wins over previously unbeaten teams and qualified for the NAIA playoffs for a second straight year. I credit much of our improvement to a focus on preparing our young team mentally as well as physically with the approach we learned through materials from Brian Cain. We are always looking for an edge and spending time on our player’s mental conditioning helped us be our best when it mattered most.






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