Mental Training Isn’t a Fire Extinguisher

Mental training shouldn't be an emergency response. Learn why proactive mental preparation builds resilience before performance slumps hit.

By Scott K. Wilder · Mental Toughness and Readiness

It usually starts with a text.

A hitter has gone 0-for-12 over three games. A striker hasn’t scored in five games and has quietly stopped asking for the ball. Then, often after days of hesitating, the message comes: “Coach, can we talk? I think it’s mental.”

I’m always glad when an athlete reaches out. But after working with high school and college athletes, I’ve noticed a pattern. We spend months preparing their bodies for competition. Yet too often, coaches and athletes wait until something goes wrong before they start training the mind.

Too many young athletes treat mental training like a fire extinguisher. Hang it on the wall. Forget about it. Grab it when something’s on fire.

That’s not how it works. And young athletes are missing the chance to build skills before they need them most.

Two patterns I keep seeing

I see two traps over and over with young athletes. Even the ones who believe in mental performance.

Trap 1: Waiting until the house is on fire.

When athletes struggle, they usually turn to their coach first. In one small study of 60 NCAA Division I athletes, researchers asked who they’d go to during a midseason slump, a return from injury, or simply wanting to perform better. In every case, athletes picked their coach ahead of a sport psychology professional (Maniar et al., 2001).

There’s nothing wrong with that. Coaches matter. But many coaches don’t have the background or the time to help a player who is struggling mentally. And coaches fall into the same trap. Some hope for a short intervention right before a big competition, a kind of quick fix (Bastos et al., 2014).

Sport psychologists have been warning about this for years. Holliday and colleagues wrote back in 2008 that practitioners are too often asked to “fix” struggling athletes (Holliday et al., 2008). Patch the leak. Move on.

The athletes who need it most may wait the longest. Their thinking is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In one study of 166 college athletes, those with high perfectionistic concerns were less likely to seek support when they needed it (Watson, Hill & Madigan). I’ve coached a lot of perfectionists. That one landed.

Trap 2: Mental training only in season.

Think about what young athletes do in the off-season. They lift. They take private lessons. They watch their diet. They play showcase tournaments. Physical training never stops.

For too many athletes, mental training simply stops. Many players I work with during the season tell me they’ll check back in when next season starts.

Even elite athletes do this. Researchers Boris Blumenstein and Iris Orbach found that most elite athletes don’t build mental skills into daily training. They mainly use them in competition (Blumenstein & Orbach). If this happens at the elite level, it’s worth asking what happens in high school sports.

The two traps feed each other. Because problems show up in season, in season becomes the only time anyone thinks about the mental game.

It’s a long game, and it doesn’t move in a straight line

Research increasingly supports a longer-term approach. Imagine only working out during the season. Nobody would expect that to build a strong athlete. The mental side works the same way.

Two studies stand out to me. In one, junior athletes did either one week or eight weeks of self-talk training. Both groups improved. The eight-week group improved more (Sports, 2019). In another, a 2025 review of mental toughness research described building it as a long-term, non-linear process (Lan et al., 2025).

That word, non-linear, is the one I wish every young athlete understood.

It means you’ll have a great week, then a terrible one. A breathing reset will work perfectly in practice, disappear in the first big game, then show up three weeks later when you need it most. That isn’t failure. That’s what learning looks like.

We already accept this with physical skills. Nobody expects a swing or a first touch to improve in a straight line. But athletes expect their confidence to.

Here’s the part athletes often miss. Mental readiness doesn’t mean feeling confident every day. It means having the skills to compete when confidence is missing.

A hitter can feel nervous before an at-bat and still follow a routine.

A goalkeeper can give up a goal and still organize the back line.

A pitcher can struggle with control and still focus on the next pitch.

That’s progress, even when the scoreboard doesn’t show it. The goal isn’t to get rid of hard days. It’s to respond better when they come.

So what does the long game look like? Holliday’s group borrowed an idea from strength coaches called periodization, which means planning training in phases. Learn new mental tools in the off-season. Practice them in preseason. Use them in competition. Periodization is the bridge between building skills in the off-season and using them when it counts.

The off-season is when you build the foundation. The season is when you test it, strengthen it, and keep building.

How we teach young athletes to play the long game

Telling a 17-year-old “this is a non-linear process” doesn’t work. I’ve tried. Here’s what does.

Use the language they already speak. Every athlete understands the weight room. Nobody squats once the week before playoffs and expects to be strong. Mental reps work the same way.

Warn them about the dip before it happens. I tell players up front: some weeks you’ll feel like it’s not working. That’s normal. When the dip comes, they recognize it instead of quitting.

Start before the season starts. Off-season and preseason are for reflection and goal setting. We’re now handing teams physical GRM notebooks so players can write their season goals on day one. Pen. Paper. Their own words.

Keep it small and daily. Two minutes of breathing or a quick self-check is easier to stick with than an occasional long session. Consistency builds the habit.

Make coaches the front door. Athletes go to their coaches first. The research says so, and so does my experience. When a coach talks about the mental game every week, players stop seeing it as something for “broken” athletes.

Call it training, not fixing. Mental performance isn’t therapy for weak players. It’s part of being a complete athlete, like nutrition or sleep.

Measure progress, not just results

Here’s the problem with how most athletes judge their mental game. They use the scoreboard.

Went 3-for-4? Mentally strong. Went 0-for-4? Mentally weak.

But results are noisy. A line drive gets caught. A shot hits the post. If you judge the mental game by outcomes, a non-linear process looks like chaos. And athletes quit right in the middle of the dip.

We track physical development all season. Why should mental development be any different? At Game Ready Mindset, we’re making mental readiness part of the athlete’s development process, just like strength training, nutrition, and technical skills.

Players regularly reflect on their readiness. Coaches add their observations. We look at patterns over time and use them to guide conversations and mental training exercises. In the GRM platform, that looks like this:

Journal: a quick weekly self-check where players rate their own mental game.

Report Card: a bigger survey two or three times a season.

Coach’s Notes: coaches add their view every few weeks.

The Conversation: where player and coach see things differently, that gap becomes the agenda for a 1:1 talk.

Sometimes the player and coach disagree. That’s not a problem. It’s often where the most useful conversation begins.

I want to be clear about what these numbers are. They show how athletes see their mental readiness over time. On their own, they don’t prove a player is performing better. That’s why we pair them with coach observations and what athletes actually do in practice and games. The numbers aren’t the final answer. They’re the start of a better conversation.

We track it by player, by position group, and by team, because the halfbacks may be in a different place than the strikers. Players also get weekly exercises matched to the area where they’re lowest.

The big shift is looking at the trend line, not a single week. One bad week is a data point. Six weeks of observations can show a pattern worth exploring. A player can go 0-for-4 and still have a strong week if they reset after every at-bat.

That’s the conversation I want athletes having with themselves. Not “Did I win?” but “Am I getting better?”

Don’t wait for the text

Coaches and athletic directors: the best time to build mental readiness isn’t when an athlete is struggling. It’s before the struggle begins.

We don’t wait until athletes become physically weak before sending them to the weight room. Why do we wait until confidence collapses before developing the mental game?

Three principles guide everything we do at GRM:

Train before you need it. Mental skills are built ahead of time, not only when there’s a problem.

Progress isn’t linear. A hard week doesn’t erase the skills an athlete has built.

Measure the process, not just the outcome. Athlete reflections, coach observations, and behavior tell the real story.

For many spring sports, the off-season is already here. The games have stopped, but the chance to develop hasn’t.

Mental training shouldn’t be the fire extinguisher athletes reach for when things go wrong. It should be part of what prepares them for whatever comes next. It isn’t an intervention. It’s part of preparation.

I’d love to hear how your program handles this. Do your athletes only think about the mental game when something breaks? Share your experience in the comments. And if you’re a coach or athletic director who wants to build a year-round mental readiness plan for your team, send me a message or visit gamereadymindset.com.

Game Ready! Life Ready!

About the author

Scott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset (TM), a program and platform for teams and athletic programs — working with players, position groups, and teams in baseball, soccer, softball, and volleyball. He holds a Master’s from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University), a Master’s in Business Administration from New York University, and a Master’s in International Studies and Conflict Resolution from The Johns Hopkins University, with coaching credentials from Georgetown University, Brian Cain’s MPM Program, the National Federation of High Schools, and FC Barcelona Football Club. He is the author of Millennial Leaders and Find What Energizes You, and the forthcoming book Compete in Any Weather. gamereadymindset.com

Further reading and research

Maniar et al. (2001), Student-athlete preferences in seeking help, The Sport Psychologist

Kasiulis (2010), Attitude of coaches and student athletes to sport psychology

Bastos et al. (2014), Sport psychology in Portuguese disability sport

Holliday et al. (2008), Periodization of mental skills training, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology

Watson, Hill & Madigan, Perfectionism and attitudes toward sport psychology support

Blumenstein & Orbach, Periodization of psychological preparation

Self-talk training: one week vs. eight weeks, Sports (2019)

Kim et al. (2021), PST meta-analysis for archery players

Psychological interventions and collegiate athletic performance, Frontiers in Psychology (2025)

Lan et al. (2025), Mental toughness training meta-analysis

He (2026), PST and adolescent athletes: a systematic review

NSCA Coach, Combining physical and mental training