Athletic success is a state of mind! Too many times we parents (dads) and coaches take for granted the state of mind of our players. When struggling, we expect them to toughen up and come through in a physical way. Overcome the difficulty with a perceived strength, try harder, fight etc.. (be a man). This doesn't really work especially well with females and can be the cause of great frustration on the part of the player and coach as well. The truth of the matter is that if you want to be more effective and successful as a coach then you must begin understand and to work on your team's (players) "inner" game, their minds. More importantly, you also need to understand the mental differences between males and females and how they may react emotionally. This is even more so in the case of the athlete that is struggling with a batting or fielding slump. Most slumping ball players experience performance difficulties because of mental rather than physical or mechanical problems. And that is where a coach needs to begin to focus corrective efforts. Winning coaches do! It's probably more important than pure talent in the development of great team players. (Read on it's free! Just hit the menu bar at the beginning of the article.

Athletic success is a state of mind! The very best athletes in and out of softball are successful not just because of their physical talent and conditioning. While these are absolutely critical to becoming a champion, by themselves they are not enough to produce a consistent winner. What really separates the best from all the rest are their "heads" or mental toughness. In other words, the mentally tough athletes know how to play the "inner game." They are the ones who always seem to come through under pressure, remaining calm and composed. They seem to have the ability to concentrate and block out distractions. They rarely get psyched-out or intimidated. They have an uncanny bounce-back ability enabling them to rebound quickly from their errors, losses, and bad breaks. Further, the athletes with a "good head" always seem to act and think like winners regardless of the game situation or competition.

You can learn to be tough!

For a long time athletes and coaches in this country mistakenly believed that these mental components were distributed at birth. That is, you were either born with a "good" head or not. The fact of the matter is that you can learn to develop the mind of a champion. You can learn to better handle the pressure of big games. You can train yourself to focus in on what's important and block out distractions. You can develop the ability to bust out of hitting or fielding slumps and to insure that your bad days, which everyone has, don't take root and blossom into full-blown slumps.

The purpose of this article is to help both the softball coach and player develop a working understanding of the mental side of athletic performance. That is, what causes poor performance or hitting slumps, and how to overcome them. What I am interested in here is teaching you practical, easy-to-learn strategies that can be immediately put to use to significantly raise the level of your play.

If you are struggling with a slump or hitting problem, the material presented here will help you get you back on track, hitting and fielding better, guaranteed! However, this article is not just for players or teams struggling with performance problems. Developing mental toughness is about becoming a more complete ball player. Working on your "inner" game is absolutely necessary if you truly want to reach your potential as an athlete. From a coaching perspective, teaching your players the required mental skills is the only way they will be able to take all your other coaches about the "outer game" and consistently apply them under pressure when it counts the most.

With all that said, let's start with an understanding of what causes batting and fielding slumps and poor performance and then go on to look at two important underlying principles in mental training and peak performance. So where do slumps really come from? Are they contagious like the common cold? Well, if you want the answer, look no further than yourself, because 90 percent of performance slumps for softball players are self-generated and self-maintained! Let me explain.

Everyone has bad games once in awhile. Sometimes these bad games even get strung together and may last a week or two. Further, many ball players have really tough experiences where they let the team and themselves down in a clutch situations (i.e., striking out with bases loaded and the game on the line or making a game-deciding error). These situations are a normal part of softball and in them does not cause slumps. They are merely the seeds or potential for a slump. What actually cause the slump are the player's perceptions about these bad games or tough breaks. That is, it is what the player thinks and says to herself about these events that determines whether the slump "seeds" take hold and begin to grow. If the player dismisses the bad game or two as normal and keeps herself focused on the present, then those bad performances of hers will remain isolated incidents that will fade away with time. However, if she hangs onto these bad games by continually reminding herself of them, ("Here we go again" or "I knew this was going to happen once more") and thinks that they mean something (i.e., "something must be wrong" or "I always seem to mess up in those situations"), then she will be unknowingly setting herself up for recurring problems.

What gets set up in every slump is a self-perpetuating cycle that insures the bad performance will continue. The trigger may be a bad game or at-bat, which causes the athlete to get into negative self-talk. That is, they put themselves down and emotionally beat themselves up. This negativity naturally increases the athlete's doubts about herself and leads her to exaggerate and blow out of proportion her bad games and forget or belittle her good ones. This is something that I call "selective distortion." The end product of this short-term memory for success and long-term memory for failure is diminished self-confidence. Lowered confidence then adversely colors the player's expectations of future games.

Further, when you go into a game concerned about failure, your nervousness or anxiety will distract your concentration from the task at hand. If you're too tight and concentrating on the wrongs things, it will be virtually impossible to play well. Out of this anxiety and lowered confidence, the athlete gets into trying too hard and trying to force things to happen ("I got to get a hit", I just got to get a hit"). The end products of this over-trying are tight muscles and another poor performance, and the cycle repeats itself.

A classic example of this was the collegiate pitcher who came to me locked in the midst of a slump. It seemed that last year she had been the star reliever on the team, had amassed 12 saves, and was a good reason the team had been so successful and qualified for the conference championship game. Despite the fact that she had been sick with the flu for the entire week, she came into this final game in relief but was promptly tagged for six hits and several runs. When the smoke had cleared, her team had lost and she felt overly responsible. It was all her fault that they had lost.

This failed save attempt was the trigger for her pitching slump and crisis of con fidence. She spent a good part of the summer, fall, and winter berating and blaming herself for "failing" and letting her teammates down. When the new season started, she kept revving last year's "failed" season, (she had conveniently forgotten about or discounted her 12 saves), expecting that she would continue to pitch poorly. With her concentration distracted by past worries and the "what ifs" - what if it happens again, what if I can't get it back, etc. - she began to muscle her throws too much. This in turn caused her to loose her stuff as well as her accuracy and she was well on her way down the path of a full-blown slump.

So the next logical question, of course, is what can be done to help a player like this recover from the bad game and get her performance to return to normal? Perhaps the initial step is to be able to understand two important underlying principles in mental training and slump busting.

The first is that there is an intricate connection between your mind and your body. That is, what you think and say to yourself before, during, and after each at-bat or play in the field goes directly into your body and effects how you then perform. In fact, an understanding of this principle makes it clear why most slumps are maintained by the player outside of her awareness.

For example, if you are in the on-deck circle and are filling your head full of "garbage" - i.e., "this pitcher is awesome, I'll never be able to hit her," what if the coach benches me if I strike out" - or you've just booted an easy ball at second and you're telling yourself, "I can't believe how bad I am ... what a choke, I can't field to save my life," then your body will begin to respond with increased heart and pulse rate, tighter muscles, shallower and more rapid breathing, and movement of blood away from your extremities (bands and feet) into the deeper muscle groups.

The effects of these physiological changes on your performance is as follows:

1) Tighter muscles mean slower reflexes, slower bat and foot speed, a tendency towards injury, and impaired performance both at the plate and on the field. You have to be physically loose in order to perform your best;

2) Shallower and more rapid breathing will inhibit your ability to think clearly and quickly because your brain is being deprived of oxygen. Further, when your breathing is disrupted in this way, your muscles will have a tendency to tighten up even more and you will kill your endurance regardless of what kind of physical condition you are in;

3) Finally, when your blood moves from the extremities to the deeper muscle groups (an instinctive biological response of the "fight or flight" syndrome so that you won't bleed to death should you be cut), your hands and feet become cold. The problem with this is that you completely lose that all-important feel up at the plate and in the field.

Let me explain this mind-body connection by saying that the real difference between a player's very best games or great at-bats and her worst ones has to do with her "mental strategies" or what she is thinking, saying to herself, or picturing in her mind's eye before, during, or after performance. The difference is rarely physical. Why is it that you can go out in one game and hit the stuffing out of the ball and the next day, against the exact same pitching, hit like you didn't know which end of the bat was up? Physically, you haven't changed one bit! You haven't suddenly lost your skills or ability. What has changed is all mental.

Another easy way to understand this mind-body connection is by the concept of GIGO. GIGO comes from computer terminology and is an acronym for Garbage In, Garbage Out. When you program "garbage" or the wrong commands into a computer, the computer gives you "garbage" in return and won't function the way you would like it to. If you program "garbage" (i.e., negative thoughts, self-talk~ and failure imagery), into your computer - your brain - what you will get back out in terms of your performance is garbage (i.e., tight muscles, less speed, more errors, and poor at-bats).

THE CYCLIC NATURE OF LOSING STREAKS/PERFORMANCE SLUMPS BEGINS WITH FAILURE OR A SPECIFIC POOR PERFORMANCE
TRYING HARDER
DISRUPTED CONCENTRATION
NEGATIVE BELIEFS/EXPECTATIONS ABOUT FUTURE PERFORMANCE
DIMINISHED SELF CONFIDENCE
NEGATIVE SELF-TALK
SELF DOUBTS & SELECTIVE DISTORTION

(Editor's Note: This is the first installment of a multi-part sports psychology series on the secrets of slump busting and poor performance. Future installments will be in Travel Coach. Next Issue we'll talk more specifically about the first step in busting out of a slump

Adapted and edited from an article By Dr. Alan Goldberg, Sports Psychologist and Director, Competitive Advance for Fastpitch World

The Horrible Example
Is this you or one of your players?

It's late in the game and it's all up to you. There are two outs and runners in scoring position with the winning run on first. This is the moment that you've been waiting for all season long. This is your big chance to finally prove to the coach and your teammates that you can come through in the clutch, that you can really hit the way that you use to before that stupid slump set in.

As you walk to the plate the crowd erupts. Members of your team and supporting fans scream out words of encouragement while the opposing fans and players attempt to drown them out with their own banter. "No batter, no batter... come on Jenny, blow it by her... easy out ... easy out!! " You try to appear confident and in control but the act is not working very well. Two months ago you would have killed to be in this situation. Unfortunately, your hitting slump has changed all that now and has totally squashed your self-confidence.

As you take your practice swings you try to be encouraging. You tell yourself that it doesn't matter how fast Jenny is or what she's been doing with her rise ball all game. It doesn't matter that she struck you out in the first inning or that you haven't been able to get the ball out of the infield in seven games. Today you're going to put all that behind you. Today you're going to just "DO IT"

But your determination is hurting you. You grip that bat too tightly as you dig in and stare at the pitcher. No matter where you look though, you just can't seem to find that inner cockiness that used to be a big part of your game. You can't stop your mind from racing over every negative possibility: You strike out again ... you ground out weakly to the pitcher ... you let the team down once more... NOW you scream to yourself to pull it together, to be positive but it's not working. You can feel the tension building across your upper back and shoulder. There's a growing feeling of dread in your belly as Jenny begins her windup.

As she releases the ball, all you can hear is your own "got to get a hit " echoing over and over again in your brain. But the ball seems to travel almost too fast to even see and your bat finds noting but air. STRIKE one the crown roars and so do your self doubts. "God, not again!!! Don't be a choke... If we lose, it'll be all my fault. Can't you even hit the stupid ball?

You look back at the mound as you try to settle back into the box, and now Jenny looks huge and intimidating. Are you imagining it or is she smiling smugly? She's not even taking you seriously! You feel that anger flare up inside of you as you grip the bat twice as hard as before. Now you're really going to take her best and send it out of there. Enough of this slump garbage!! This it me! You're ready for her rise ball as she begins her delivery. The pitch comes in hard and at the last minute catches you by surprise as it drops under your swing. STRIKE TWO! She got you with a stupid drop ball. Darn!!!

Now the little voice in your head is going crazy making you more and more uptight and dejected. The crowd is on their feet screaming. You want desperately to make something happen, but inside you just know you'll blow it once more. You can't stop those feelings of failure from creeping in and overwhelming you yet again. You're already out of the game mentally before Jenny even throws her last pitch. Now you just want it to be over with so you can go home. When the ball finally comes, you swing stiffly, barely getting a piece of it and fly out harmlessly to the shortstop to end the game. You walk away in disgust with the thought, "I knew this was going to happen, I just can't shake this slump. "