The "Mental Prep" Playbook

For all the coaches out there who will be using their playbooks to teach the players how to run and execute various plays in games, make sure that you dedicate some time in your team practices to helping your players be mentally prepared to play their best game. Besides having the players physically run through the different plays from the playbook, it would be very beneficial to show your players how to "mentally run" through these plays in order to keep themselves composed, focused and perform with more confidence.

Once the team has physically run through a designated play several times, you could then introduce the following mental prep exercise for all the players in that designated play. First, have the players get into their positions for this play. Then, tell the players to close their eyes and take a deep breath. After the deep breath, ask the players to visualize each step that they are going to take to successfully execute their role in the play. And as they visualize their performance, tell the players to positively talk themselves through the series of steps. Then, after they have finished the visualization, ask them to identify the positive feelings from visualizing their successful performance.

If you are handing out playbooks to the players, encourage them to invest some time after practice to write down their visualizations for each play and attach them to each play in the playbook.