Know the Players Around You

How understanding athlete personality types and operating systems under pressure helps coaches build stronger team cohesion.

By Scott K. Wilder · Team Culture

I was recently coaching a soccer team in New England, and their roster had a lot of new players.

Transfers. Freshmen. Players who hadn't grown up together, who hadn't played together yet, didn't yet know each other's personalities, and didn't necessarily speak the team's language.

Instead of running the same mental performance session, I changed things up — and introduced GRIP.

GRIP — Game Ready Identity Profile — is the athlete personality typing system I built at Game Ready Mindset. It's inspired by the Enneagram's nine patterns and is designed to help athletes and coaches understand how different players are wired to compete, respond to feedback, and handle pressure.

My interest in the Enneagram started years ago at Intuit.

I was part of a newly formed team facing a genuinely audacious goal — launching a new service in 60 days. So, I hired David Daniels, who I had worked with before, to coach us through the Enneagram. David was a clinical professor of psychiatry at Stanford Medical School who spent decades studying and teaching the Enneagram.

What struck me wasn't the idea of putting people into nine categories.

It was what happened when we understood how and why people responded differently under pressure.

One teammate needed to talk a decision through out loud before trusting it. Another needed quiet and time alone before a match. Neither was wrong. They simply had different operating systems for handling pressure.

Once we understood that people tick differently, we stopped mistaking someone's style for a lack of commitment.

That experience stayed with me.

Years later, when I began working with athletes, I wondered:

What if coaches could have that same insight into their players?

That's where GRIP came from.

But I didn't want to create another personality assessment that produced nine types and a report that sits in a drawer.

I wanted to combine the GRIP profile with my Competitor Framework — a data-driven system that looks at how an athlete is actually showing up over time.

That's when the idea really became useful.

GRIP tells you why. The Competitor Framework tells you what.

The Competitor Framework looks at the athlete's Resilience, Process, and Mindset (RPM).

GRIP helps provide context for those numbers.

A coach looking at a low Resilience score alone is looking at a symptom. Pair that score with the player's GRIP profile, and you can start asking a better question:

Why is this player struggling with resilience?

Is it how they typically respond to pressure?

Is fear of failure driving the response?

Are they protecting their image?

Or is something else going on that has nothing to do with their underlying wiring?

That is a very different coaching conversation.

And it changes how you coach the same number.

Imagine two players both score low in Resilience.

On paper, they look the same.

But they may not be.

One player may be highly sensitive to the possibility of failure and need reassurance before they can hear the correction. Another may respond better to a coach who is direct and says, "Here's what you need to fix."

Same data. Different delivery.

That's not favoritism.

That's coaching the person and not just the team.

Think about what happens on a soccer field.

Three players get benched.

One becomes quiet and withdraws.

Another becomes visibly frustrated and starts asking questions.

A third keeps telling the coach, "Put me back in — I can win this for us."

A coach who only sees the behavior might decide one player doesn't care and another has an attitude.

But what if the behaviors are coming from completely different places?

What if the first player is processing disappointment internally while the second needs to understand exactly what went wrong?

The behavior is the what.

GRIP helps you explore the why.

That distinction matters because coaches don't just coach behavior. They coach people.

And people don't all respond to the same message in the same way.

This is where self-awareness becomes important.

The goal of GRIP isn't to tell an athlete, "This is who you are."

It's to help them recognize a pattern:

"This is how I tend to respond when the pressure gets high."

There's a big difference.

When an athlete understands their own internal wiring — not simply "I get quiet under pressure," but "I understand why I tend to get quiet" — they have something they can work with.

That's self-awareness.

And self-awareness is the front door to so much of what coaches are trying to build:

Composure.

Accountability.

Better communication.

The ability to reset after a mistake instead of spiraling.

The ability to recognize when your response is helping you compete — and when it isn't.

It also changes how teammates see each other.

This may be one of the most important benefits.

Two players can experience the same fear but express it completely differently.

One might get quiet.

Another might get defensive.

Another might become overly controlling.

Without understanding what's underneath those behaviors, teammates can easily turn differences into judgments:

She doesn't care.

He's selfish.

She's too sensitive.

He's got an attitude.

But when players begin to understand that people have different ways of responding to pressure, something changes.

They become more curious and less judgmental.

They stop automatically interpreting a teammate's reaction as a character flaw.

They begin to see it as a different way of dealing with the same pressure.

That's not just individual development.

That's team development.

Back to that New England team.

With a locker room full of players who didn't yet know each other, GRIP gave us a shared language.

Not a label.

Not a box.

A starting point.

It gave coaches another piece of information about the people they were coaching — before the first mistake, before the first difficult conversation, before a benching or bad week forced everyone to figure it out in real time.

Because that's the part I keep coming back to:

You don't want to discover how a player handles pressure for the first time when the stakes are already high. You want to learn during preseason and during practices how a player responds to stress. You want to help prepare them for those challenging moments — and even the good moments — during a game.

You want to have some understanding of that player before the pressure arrives.

A type isn't a box.

It's a starting point — one more piece of information that helps a coach do what the best coaches have always done by instinct:

Meet the person, not just the position.

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