IN FOOTBALL, MENTAL FORTUNES CAN TURN AROUND INSTANTLY From a mental standpoint, football is a game that can turn around on you in a heartbeat. You can go into a game with all of the confidence in the world and have the most powerful offense the game may have ever seen during the regular season. Because the first offensive snap of the game results in a safety, everything the team had mentally prepared for fell apart. We saw this during the NFL’s Super Bowl a month ago. Who could have foretold Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos failing on such an epic level. Was Seattles defense that great? It didnt seem so during the regular season when the Rams came up within a second string quarterback missing three attempts from inside two yards of upsetting them. They had the leagues best defense, but on paper, they were nowhere close to Denvers offense. So what was the difference? I saw it as a complete collapse in the mental attitude of the Broncos. The offense lost it on the first play of the game and never regained it. One small and rather insignificant error attributable to Big Game Jitters (two points for the safety), snowballed every time they had the ball offensively, which then, after a couple of series, affected the ability of the defense to keep their heads in the game and made them unable to do their job. When it comes down to the mental aspects of sports, there is an old adage about Keeping your head in the game. Denvers players could not keep their heads in the game and everyone saw the result. One thing I stressed to the Showgirlz last year and I will introduce to the new players on the team next week is the ability to let a mistake go. It is important to recognize when you make a mistake. But in football, you have to quickly recover from a mistake, learn from it, but do not dwell on it. In poker, there is a term called going on tilt. It occurs when you lose a hand that you should statistically have won or a player makes a terrible play with their cards and causes a player to lose a large number of chips. The losing player not only loses their chips, they also lose control, emotionally, physically and mentally. This can cause a player to become angry, not looking at how they should play the game, instead they go off half-cocked. Their anger overtakes their reason and their play suffers. The same happens on the football field. A defender misses the easy tackle and the running back bust a huge gain, or the receiver is wide open in the end-zone and drops a pass that falls in their hands. The next several plays they concentrate on their mistake, not on the play that is happening at the moment, so they miss another tackle, run the wrong route or fumble the ball. This continues for several plays, the other team recognizes the signs and takes advantage of the players lapse of attention and burns them again, this then causes another On Tilt moment, which increases the frustration and the mistakes compound. It doesnt just affect the player that made the mistake, the feeling is contagious and the whole team becomes infected. So how do we keep this steam-rolling, game-destroying, mind-blowing event from continuing play after play, snow-balling into an uncontrollable meltdown? In my studies, I found a way to keep from going on tilt, a method that allows us to acknowledge that we made a mistake, but instead of breaking us, we learn from it. The method of control is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming construct called anchoring. Next week I will talk a little more about what Neuro-Linguistic Programming is and I will discuss the process of anchoring in detail. So comeback next Thursday for my weekly entry on Sports Psychology Coaching and how it impacts on the Las Vegas Showgirlz, one of the nation’s premier Women’s Tackle Football Teams.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 05:58:08 +0000
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