Written by Confidence…
It’s something we hear about all the time both inside and outside competitive sports. It’s such a subjective topic that means something different to every person who talks about it, so I want to take a deeper dive into Confidence because it plays such a huge role in an athlete’s success both on and off the field. I want to discuss what confidence is, look at how to cultivate it in our teams, and figure out why it is so important to success in the first place.
I’ll preface this as early as possible… This article will be a far cry from an all-encompassing discussion about confidence in sports. It will cover Confidence in general and some topics important to athletes’ confidence, but this is such a complex topic it would be impossible to condense it all into one short article. So here’s to the start of the ‘Confidence Rabbit Hole’.
Confidence is simply defined as “the feeling or belief that you can rely on someone or something.” But when taking that definition and applying it to sports it gets way more complex.
We want our athletes to have high levels of confidence in multiple things. We want them to obviously be confident in themselves and their abilities. But we also want them to be confident in their coaches, believing they have sufficiently prepared them to compete. And we want them to be confident that the teammates around them will also be able to execute on their responsibilities. Confidence in sports isn’t as simple as a good pre-game hype up speech. A confident team culture is something that is built and cultivated over time through effective training, team bonding, and trust being built from top to bottom of a team or organization.
When looking at Self-Confidence there are a lot of things at play, but none being more important than preparation and practice. What this means is that in order to build Self-Confidence in athletes, a lot of it boils down to effective preparation through practice and training. Athletes gain confidence most efficiently when training in situations that replicate game situations. This allows them to experience that ‘high stress, competitive’ feeling in the ‘lower stakes’ environment of practice. This way, when they get into a heated game-situation, they have already had that experience and are confident in the skills they worked on during training.
Athletes can gain a lot of confidence in their ‘sport specific skills’ through their practice and preparation, but there are a ton of other factors that also impact their overall Self-Confidence. For example:
Maybe half of my team failed a test the morning of our big game.- This is going to have a massive negative impact on the mentality of my team as a whole. They all have something else on their minds that will impact their performance in competition. When outside factors like this are impacting Self-Confidence, it is more important than ever to rely on the other aspects of confidence discussed at the beginning.
When an athlete has full Confidence and Trust in their Coaches, they’re able to go out and compete with the belief that their coach is right there with them through good times and bad… But that feeling of trust didn’t happen overnight. Instead it was built over time through strong, trusting relationships between player and coach. If an athlete has full trust in their coaching staff it’s much tougher for them to second guess or hesitate when a coach asks them to do something. When they trust their coach, they’re willing to do anything that will help their team succeed. And that is where all coaches strive to get their players. As a coach, it takes a lot of leg work to build this trust and confidence in players. But once that foundation is there, you will be able to notice a shift in the behaviors and mentalities of every single one of the athletes who has bought into what the team is trying to do. This trusting player-coach relationship falls heavily on the shoulders of the coaches. You have to be willing to let players trust in you, and you in them. Without this, you can’t expect athletes to buy into what you are asking of them.
Trust Amongst Teammates is the final piece of confidence we want to take a look at today. Team sports are such an interesting dynamic because they can bring together young people from all different backgrounds and put them on a course with a common goal. There aren’t many other things out there like this. And if you aren’t able to get everyone on the same page, that common goal of success becomes much more difficult to reach. That is why creating trust and confidence between each teammate is so important.
Similar to trusting their coaches, when an athlete has full confidence in the person right next to them, they no longer have to worry about what that person is going to do. Instead, they already know that their teammate is going to give full effort and execute their job to the best of their abilities. This eliminates so much anxiety and worry that athletes are typically dealing with throughout the course of a game. When teammates have a strong trust and belief in one another, they will automatically be willing to fight harder, give more effort, and put themselves out there for each other.
This is the type of team dynamic we see in all the great inspirational sports movies like ‘Friday Night Lights’, ‘Remember the Titans’, and even ‘Major League’. These movies are examples of the team dynamic that all coaches dream of, but they don’t just have to exist in movies. These dynamics can be built in real life, just like the real stories that many of these movies are based off of.
Now, this isn’t everything there is to know about confidence, but it is a small introduction into what types of confidence are at play in competitive sports and why they are all so important.
When you combine all three forms of Confidence, you have the recipe for a close-knit, highly competitive team that will go out and give their all no matter what the situation. And this all sounds great on paper, but how can I, as a coach or player, put this into action in my specific sport?
Let’s figure that out!
1. Self Confidence
Instead of trying to figure out how to ‘build’ confidence in our athletes or in ourselves, I like to look at it as ‘revealing’ the confidence that is already there, somewhere.
No matter who you are or how long you’ve been playing sports, there has undoubtedly been a time that you felt better than normal while playing. You were highly confident in everything you did and nothing could stop you. So let’s figure out how to get back to that feeling and replicate it for every single competition. Helping athletes feel more confident in competition all starts with practice.
While this information is for both coaches and athletes… I’m going to take a little bit to speak directly to coaches:
The goal of practice is to prepare your athletes to play, right?
So, let’s make sure our practices are effective and give our athletes the best chance of success when it is game time. This can be done by:
Replicating Game Situations:
Playing loud music or crowd noise as a distraction, creating highly competitive drills to encourage competition, or simulating ‘end of game’ situations to prepare for those high stress moments.
Making Practice Harder than Games:
Scrimmage with unbalanced teams, don’t allow teammates to communicate verbally, or mixing up teams randomly to throw off their rhythm. This creates an environment that is even more difficult than anything a game can bring. So come game time, nothing can happen that would be tougher than what they’ve already practiced for.
Applicable Drills:
Working on skills, plays, and game plans that will actually be used in game. Instead of doing the same things every single week, you can utilize drills and activities that are specific to your upcoming opponent. This allows the athletes to get that quality practice on things that they will need in the upcoming competition.
All of these options will differ depending on your sport, competition level, and overall situation. But no one knows your team better than you, so think outside the box and create practice plans that utilize these things and start to create a highly competitive and confident culture among your team.
2. Confidence in Coaches
If we want our athletes to trust us and truly believe that we are doing the best things for them, we have to be able to prove that to them. Both ourselves and our athletes have to believe in everything we do if we want to reach that full potential that we know is in there. We can build that trust and confidence with our athletes in a few different ways:
Explaining WHY We Are Doing Something:
If we can give a concrete answer on WHY we are doing a certain drill or learning a certain skill, an athlete is much more likely to give their full effort and actually buy into it. If we can prove that this drill directly correlates to something in game, it’s easier to understand its importance. This also prevents us from doing things just to do them, and instead creating a practice structure that is focused toward performance in game.
Being Vulnerable:
Put yourself in your athletes’ shoes for a minute… Why should they trust some complete stranger who is telling them to do something? Is it just because you have the title of ‘COACH’? That isn’t good enough!
If we want our athletes to trust us, they first need to know us and understand who we are. By opening up and telling your athletes your story, you are building that trust and relating to them on a much deeper level than just player-coach. Now I’m not saying you need to share your entire life story on the first day of practice, but sharing bits and pieces of your own story throughout a season is a great way to build that trust amongst your team.
Try sharing WHY you got into coaching in the first place. Or, tell them a story about your playing days. Or even tell them about what else you enjoy outside of coaching (what hobbies do you have, what teams do you cheer for, what is your family like, etc.).
Building this trust with your athletes takes time and a lot of effort from both parties, but by being a genuine person and showing that you actually care about your athletes, win or lose, it makes it a lot easier for them to trust you!
3. Trust Amongst Teammates:
Self-Confidence and Confidence in Coaches are very important, but in team sports, if the athletes don’t trust each other… Well, you are pretty much up a creek without a paddle. The good thing is that building trust among the players on your team often involves activities that are outside the norm and usually pretty fun for those involved. I’m talking about good ole fashioned ‘team building activities’.
As old and cliché as some team building activities are, they really do work. They help to bring these individuals together into a cohesive unit that fully trusts one another and will do whatever they can to help each other succeed. I’ve learned that oftentimes, the most obscure and off-the-wall activities seem to yield the best results when it comes to building that trust amongst teammates.
That’s a ton of information directly targeted at coaches, but if you’re an athlete reading this don’t ignore that entire section. You can take all that same information and apply it to your life, training, etc. All the same principles apply, the only difference being that YOU have to be the one to make the changes and put in the work to ‘grow’ your own confidence.
You can’t rely on your coaches to do it, you can’t rely on your teammates to do it… If you want to be a more confident player and person, YOU have to be the catalyst and you have to be the one to make the changes necessary to become a more confident version of yourself.
Trust that you have the skillset and that you’ve put in the work needed… Then, and only then, will that confidence that’s buried deep inside you start to peek out a little bit. Once you see that glimpse of confidence, it’s all over. From there you can keep growing, improving, and building on that foundation until you become the most confident version of yourself the world has ever seen!
Confidence is something that we hear about all the time, but it’s much more complex than we often realize. Cultivating it within a team takes a lot of work and buy-in from everyone involved, but in the end it’s well worth it because there aren’t many things better than a team full of fully confident athletes!
This is bound to be the first of many articles around this topic because ‘Confidence’ truly is one of the deepest rabbit holes out there when it comes to Performance and Team Building. This article only scratched the surface of what there is to explore when we talk about Confidence in sports. So keep an eye out for more deep dives into the nuances of Confidence in the world of competitive sports!