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Coaching Psychology for Champions in High School Athletics
By: Dr. Jin Wang

Introduction

Coaching high school team sports is a great challenge because of athletes' immature cognitive thinking processes, parental influences, peer pressures, etc. Many coaches spend their full energies in trying to bring their teams to success; unfortunately, many teams fail due to various reasons (Wang and Ramsey,1998). So many high school coaches feel frustrated with their inability of bringing a team together to achieve success regardless of coaches' great technical skills and work ethics. Needless to say, coaching a team sport at high school is an art that not only requires coaches' technical ability, but also psychological skills which are needed in order to bring teams together and prepare athletes to achieve success.

A team's performance (team productivity) is equal to potential productivity minus losses due to faulty group processes (Weinberg and Gould, 2003). What is faulty group processes? Faulty group processes reflect how a group of athletes are unable to work together to maximize a team's full potential. To overcome faulty group processes, coaching psychology plays a significant role. With this concept in mind, the purpose of this paper has two folds: (1) elucidate the coaches' challenges, and (2) introduce psychological strategies for champions. Hopefully, these applied strategies can help high school coaches have a comprehensive understanding of how to set up a well-rounded team system to ensure a unity for success. In addition, coaches can understand necessary coaching psychology to prepare their athletes to achieve peak performance.

COACHES' CHALLENGES AT HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETICS

(1) Personality conflicts
One of the challenges of coaching a team sport at high schools is how to handle the personality conflicts between athletes, between coaches and athletes, and between head and assistant coaches. According to Kalat (1999), personality is "all the consistent ways in which the behavior of one person differentiates from that of others, especially in social situations." Yet, personality is a stable factor which is not easily altered. A sports team includes many athletes who must work together and mold the differences of personalities in order to achieve a common goal. In reality, many athletes cannot tolerate the personality differences with their teammates and have many conflicts. If coaches cannot mold these personality differences, and enhance the threshold level of tolerance for other people, a sport team can never be successful.

(2) Differences of Perception between Coaches and Athletes
According to Wang and Callahan (1999), the perception differences of athletes' ability between coaches and athletes are very common. A non starter might think that he/she is one of the best players on the team, but the coach might think otherwise. Such a difference of perception on an athlete's ability oftentimes becomes a cause of conflict between coaches and athletes. That is one of the major reasons of why many conflicts occur between nonstarters and coaches. Obviously, how nonstarters show respect to their coaches becomes a determining factor of team cohesion because playing time is always a central issue of team sports. This factor is also perceived as a fairness issue; if coaches cannot handle this issue satisfactorily, coaches could be easily blamed with favoritism attitudes toward certain players.

(3) Lack of An Effective Team System
In order to truly motivate each individual athlete including starters and nonstarters, experience and inexperienced players, or skilled and less skilled players, coaches must develop an effective check & balanced team system. With such a system in place, each athlete on the team knows how to behave, how to reach their goal, how to reach coaches' expectations, and how to follow team rules, etc. Thus, coaches are not necessarily required to make many subjective decisions of managing a team. For example, if a player is late for practice, the team system will take care of how to handle such a violation; if a player does not practice hard enough, the team system also lays out the consequences of such behaviors. Once a team system is well established, every athlete can follow the system accordingly. In reality, many coaches do not spend the time to set up an effective system; as a result, team disciplines are compromised and eventually lead a team to a dismayed situation. A poorly skilled team with strong discipline can achieve success; conversely, a well skilled team with a lack of discipline can cause a chaotic situation. An effective team system is a must and there is not any other choice to replace that for championship.

(4) Coaches' Lack of Understanding of Coaching Psychology
Another common problem for high school team sports is that coaches lack psychological knowledge. Coaches' verbal and nonverbal behaviors have profound impacts on athletes consciously or sub-consciously. Instead of helping athletes, coach's unconscious improper behaviors or authoritarian style of communication can immensely affect their relationships with athletes, and could also trigger athletes' anxiety level before competition. For example, when an athlete makes a mistake, a coach could easily yell at the athlete in competition due to a competitive situation. Such a manner could greatly hurt the athlete's feeling even though the coach had a good intention. Without knowing psychological principles, coaches easily engage in improper behaviors that significantly affect athletes' psychological well being. The following are common problems of implementing a psychological program for a sport team at high schools: (1) coaches' unawareness of the importance of psychological factors contributing to competition performance, (2) coaches' lack of knowledge on how to train athletes to be psychologically ready for competition, (3) coaches' unawareness of their own misbehaviors before or during competition. Thus, many times, a team loses, the major reason was not because of the athletes, instead because of coaches' unconscious mistakes and unfortunately, coaches might not realize the causes of failure are due to their own faulty behaviors.

WINNING COACHING PSYCHOLOGIES FOR CHAMPIONS

(1) Establishment of An Effective Team System
To establish an effective team system is the most important team structure for any sport teams. Many factors should be considered when establishing a team system such as (1) how to motivate each athlete: for example, a. the way of determining playtime, b. rewarding behaviors and punishing behaviors, c. degree of punishment based on the misbehaviors, d. what kinds of criteria for receiving awards; (2) athletes' behavioral guidelines: for example, a. no complaining to others during competition, b. no bad mouthing behind teammates, c. no cursing to anyone on the team, etc. (3) team unity expectations: for example, a. cohesive team activity, b. help system between good and poorly skilled players, or between good or poor academic players, etc. (4) establish an evaluation system for coaches, for example, team manager, and coaching staff. The evaluation procedures need to be specific and measurable so that not only athletes need to follow the team rules, but also leadership personals need to be evaluated by all athletes as well. To establish such a check & balanced system is vital to team success. All athletes and coaches should work together to develop such a system with a comprehensive structure.

(2) Coaching Psychological Strategies
One of the key factors that contribute to a team's success is implementing coaching psychology, since coaches' superior authority has a significant impact on athletes' psychological well being before or during competition. The following introduction is a brief overview of a successful coaching psychology program at high school which can be used to help athletes achieve peak performance in competition. The steps of the program are as follows: (1) Coaches need to know each athlete's psychological characteristics such as: (a). anxiety level at particular situations, (b). what should or shouldn't athletes do before competition, (c). what are athletes' expectations on coaches before competition (For example, a particular athlete might want to have instructions or not), (d). analyze why a particular athlete did well or failed in the previous competition, (e). what psychological strategies should be developed to overcome the psychological barriers? (2) Based on the above information, coaches should develop the pre-psychological competition routines for each athlete (what does the athlete suppose to do before competition? Engage in mental imagery, talk to coaches or teammates, meditation?). (3) Understand coaches' proper behaviors before or during competition. For example, many coaches are very nervous before competition, and their anxious facial expressions and behaviors could negatively affect athletes' psychological well being. Furthermore, coaches need to know what they can say or do, and what they cannot say or do before competition. The following are the guidelines for coaches to follow:

What coaches should do before and during competition

Use positive feedback and emphasize athletes' strengths
Emphasize what athletes should do instead of what they should not do
Emphasize how to play instead of the importance of the competition
Focus on the game process, strategies and skills
Emphasize the weaknesses of the opponents

What coaches should not do before or during competition

Don't OVER emphasize the importance of the competition
Don't put too much pressure on certain athletes
Don't remind athletes' of past mistakes; instead, tell athletes what they SHOULD do
Avoid criticizing athletes before competition
Don't emphasize how many goals or points athletes have to make
Don’t emphasize the consequences of a loss or mistakes
Don't demonstrate coaches' self-nervousness
Don't make a motivational speech if athletes are already highly motivated
Don't criticize certain athletes in front of other people (Wang and Goldfine, 2008)

(3) Help Athletes to Be Psychologically Ready for the Competition
Once coaches understand their own proper behaviors before or during competition, coaches need to know how they can help their athletes to be psychologically ready for the upcoming competition. The following psychological strategies are effective, and coaches should learn them in order to help athletes:

(A) Build Strong Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is a perception of the athlete. Thus, how coaches can help athletes form positive perception is a determining factor of self-confidence. To build self-confidence, the following psychological strategies are recommended: (a) The athlete needs to find as many self-strengths as possible. For example, a particular athlete's self strength might include strong physical stamina, great flexibility, good coordination and agility, good learner, mental toughness, etc. The more strength the athlete can think about, the better confidence he/she will have. (b) After knowing his/her own strength, the athlete needs to compare self-strength to opponent's weaknesses. To use such a strategy, the athlete can greatly enhance his/her confidence and eliminate feelings of fear of the opponent. (c) Coaches should give more positive reinforcement to the athlete so that the athlete can gradually form a perception of "I am good at what I am doing." (d) Encourage the athlete to engage in mental imagery to visualize his/her best video-clips or photos of skill movements. With such imagery training, the athlete can use visual cues to confirm his/her own abilities of performing skills to enhance self-confidence. Coaches should help each athlete to make video-tapes with the best motions and transport these images to CDs so that the athlete can repeatedly see this and reinforce these images in their minds. (e) Coaches should help athletes set challenging and achievable goals so that athletes can strive to achieve these goals with reasonable efforts. Once athletes can repeatedly achieve the set goals, their self-confidences will be significantly enhanced.

(B) Eliminate Negative Thoughts and Replace Them With Positive Ones
Another psychological strategy athletes should learn is to know how to eliminate negative thoughts by replacing them with positive ones. Every athlete, regardless of skill levels, has negative thoughts from time to time before or during competition, but the difference between championship-athletes and failing-athletes is that championship-athletes know how to eliminate negative thoughts once these thoughts appear, and know how to replace them with positive thoughts instead. The negative thoughts can trigger uncoordinated motions in competition, because human muscles have only two functions that are: developing tension and relaxing. At any moment of skill execution, an athlete must precisely send electronic information from the brain to the muscles; the brain acts as the executive and the muscles act as effectors to carry out actions from the brains commands. If an athlete has negative thoughts at the moment, his/her brain could not send proper or précised electrical impulses to muscles. As a result, the athlete will lose the coordination or lose control of performing a skill movement.

Thus, to eliminate unwanted or irrelevant negative thoughts before or during competition is a crucial step for athletes to learn. The specific procedures are as follows: (a) The athlete needs to know when, where, and under what circumstance negative thoughts will appear. (b) The second step is to develop positive thoughts to match negative thoughts one by one. Thus, once a negative thought appears, the athlete immediately realizes that this is the negative thought that needs to be replaced by a positive one. (c) The athlete must practice this skill over and over during practice and competition. With long-term practice, the athlete will eventually become accustomed to this practice, allowing the athlete to automatically replace negative thoughts with positive ones. This is one of the most critical psychological techniques for any athlete to learn in order to prepare themselves to achieve peak performance in competition.

(C) Learn the Psychological Skills to Deal with Adversity Situation
Any athlete in competition from time to time will encounter adverse situations. Without effective psychological preparations of dealing with adversity, an athlete could lose his/her mental control leading to chaotic situations regardless of athlete's gender, age, or sport type. For example, when a referee made a bad call at a critical moment for awarding opponent team to having a penalty shot in soccer game, such a devastating call could make some athletes mentally out of control. As a result, physical confrontation is unavoidable. Therefore, an elite athlete not only requires excellent technical skills, but also needs to have the ability to deal with any unforeseen adverse situations. Athletes can use mental imagery to artificially create adverse situations and mentally develop strategies on how to properly handle such a situation. Also, a scrimmage game to a violent team could occur in order to practice athletes' tolerance of dealing with adversity, because a violent team can cause more trouble than playing a regular team. Since athletes have no choice of choosing which team to play with in competition, such practices could give athletes with the opportunities of dealing with many tough situations. Another psychological strategy is to engage in attention training to teach athletes how to switch their anger or frustration to the proper attention after an adversity incident occurs. Athletes can watch video-tapes with various adversity situations and mentally develop strategies of how to deal with each of the watched adversity situation. All the aforementioned psychological strategies are effective and should be practiced regularly until athletes master these skills.

Conclusion
To bring a sports team to championship at high school level requires coaches' overall abilities including technical and management skills, psychological and physiological skills, dedication and commitment to the team, etc. Unfortunately, psychological skills are commonly a forgotten area that needs to be paid more attention to by coaches and athletes. If not, a team's unity and discipline will be compromised; athletic experience will be hampered; and team performance will suffer. Hopefully the above strategies may help coaches, athletes and practitioners have a comprehensive understanding of some key psychological principles for champions at high school athletics.

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references

Kalat, J. W. (1999). Introduction to psychology. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Wadsworth.

Wang, J. & Ramsey, J. (1998). The relationship of school type, coaching experience, gender and age to new coaches’ challenges and barriers at college and university levels. Journal of Applied Research in Coaching and Athletics. Vol. 13, 1998, p. 1 – 22.

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