Mental Training (part 3/5 Inside the Mental Game of a State Champion)


Having a built-in expert in sport psychology is rare and is something that not many teams, let alone high school teams, have. But just having access isn’t enough. Coaches traditionally like full control of what goes on with their teams, and have trouble trusting an outside source to teach and implement new skills that they may know little to nothing about. Fortunately for the Franklin HS boys soccer team, Oregon Coach of the Year Ty Kovatch trusted me enough to allow me the time and freedom to implement the mental training plan I have always dreamed of putting into place.
Coach Ty and Brian

As the assistant coach, I did my best to support the vision the coach had for the team. I was a basic assistant coach: supporting practices, running some drills, training small groups, and more. Within each of these, I tried to bring an element of mental training in the area of focus, positive mindset, communication and more. For the pure mental coaching piece, we did regular classroom sessions and various activities throughout the year.

Positive Culture is essential to Mental Training

A strong mental game starts with a strong, positive culture and positive coaching as I wrote about in Part 2. To have a strong culture though is to actively embody it.  We hve to live the traits we espouse. And part of that was having the right mentality. Here are some of the mental training elements that were essential to our run to the state championship.

1) Process over Results

Just about every team’s goal at the start of a season is to win a state championship, but only one gets to achieve that goal. So it’s important to set process and performance goals and not just set the outcome goal. I asked each player during the preseason what their goals for the team were. As I mentioned in Part 1, we knew we had enough talent to go deep into the playoffs, so not surprisingly the most common answers were: State Championship, PIL Championship, beat Cleveland (our rival who has historically pretty much owned the series), and to go 14-0. 

This is a good starting point, but again, most teams have these goals at the beginning. In sport psychology, the outcomes they listed are considered out of your control. What’s in your control is how hard you work, your attitude, your preparation and other things. So, to not to let the goals just sit in outcome mode, my next questions were “How? How are we going to do this? What is the focus day-in-and-day-out that will get us those results? What are the things we need to be and do ‘No Matter What’?”

The photo below shows the process the team decided to follow and the results they hoped to achieve.
sport psychology process goals outcome goals

2) Apex Soccer Journal

Consistency throughout a season is crucial especially the mental game.  Throughout the season players used The Apex Soccer Journal to set personal goals each month and each week. We had them check in on their goals regularly to stay focused and self-motivated. The book served as the perfect tool, and the players were expected to have it with them at all times like any other piece of equipment!

Apex Soccer Journal sport psychology

After each game, the journal guided the players through a self-evaluation and also an evaluation of the opponent they had just faced.   This helps by making sure they learn from as many details as possible throughout the season. Not only that, but we ended up facing three teams in the playoffs that we had seen in the regular season.  Because of this, the players had an extra bit of preparation as they could read over their own notes about that opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. In the regular season we were 1-0-2 vs those teams. In the playoffs we were 3-0.

3) Team Building

We did team building in two ways.  The first thing we introduced was 6am Saturday practices. No teenager wants to get up at 6am on Saturday. It makes them miserable. But nothing brings people closer quite like being miserable together. Several players I spoke with admitted as much: ‘we hated that you made us do that, but we all saw the results’.



The second thing we introduced was road trip challenges. On our bus trips, instead of just allowing the kids free reign, we implemented structure and reserved the first 30 minutes as time without phones or music.  The goal was to get the kids talking and interacting, to ensure cliques didn’t form over the course of the season, and to talk face to face without screens and without distractions. During that time we created collaborative and competitive challenges to complete.  These activities helped the players not only get closer as the season went on, but to stay focused on those long road trips. As a result, we only lost one game on the road all season.

4) Visualization

During the season all the players had access to the Sports Mindset Audio program.  They could listen to these at anytime on their phone. As a team I led various types of visualization exercises throughout the season. Before games we might do skill building visualizations like seeing themselves making a tackle or scoring a goal.  After games we often did recovery visualization to allow dedicated time to process mistakes and dwell on positive things they did in the game. Before training we sometimes did a few short mindset visualizations: to transition from a school mindset to a soccer mindset.  All of this practice culminated in a 10 minute visualization in the locker room at Hillsboro Stadium before the championship game that got everyone calm, confident, and on the same page. There’s no doubt that that final mindset shift helped tie everything together.

So there you have it – a general view inside the mental game of a state championship team. The consistency and attention given to the sport psychology training did not make these soccer players great, but it did allow them to have a certain freedom of mind in the most pressure-filled situations.  The next two parts of the series will focus on adversity and “living up to the cliches.”

Positive Culture and Positive Coaching (part 2/5 Inside the Mental Game of a State Champion)

Positive Culture and Positive Coaching

As I addressed in Part 1, the 2019 Franklin High School men’s soccer team had tons of talent and depth coming into the season, but you can never really tell how the chemistry is going to be. To fuse the talent with the heart, it takes the right environment, the right balance between structure and freedom, and a place where everyone feels valued.  In other words, it would take having a positive culture.

According to m-w.com, culture can be defined as:
the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization

Build a Positive Culture and Evolve it over time

Culture doesn’t happen overnight. And it never really ends either. It’s always a work in progress.  Finding and shaping shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices is constantly changing and evolving.  I don’t want to give away all of our secrets, of course, but I do want to share some of the general ingredients to creating a winning culture. 

So what made this team’s culture so powerful?  In a word – Positivity.

First of all, Franklin High School is not an athletic powerhouse. The school opened in 1914 and had produced but two state championships in over a century (boys basketball, 1959, and boys cross country 2019). The boys soccer team had only once made it past the first round of the playoffs.  So there was no “championship culture” to speak of. However, the culture had been built slowly by a couple dedicated coaches over the past 12 years or so. 

Enter current head coach, Ty Kovatch, this year’s Oregon Coach of the Year, who joined in 2014. Here is my take on some of the key elements on how he has taken the program to the next level, and has built the culture of a state champion.

A Positive Culture Attracts Positive People

Over his five years, Ty has built a culture that is overwhelmingly positive. It’s a program that people want to be a part of.  When you intentionally set a culture, one of the big benefits is that you attract the right kind of people to the program, people who embody those same attitudes and values. Part of Franklin’s lack of previous success was that good players wouldn’t come out for the team because it wasn’t worth their time. This is definitely not the case anymore.

This is true not only of the players, but of the coaches who have come on board. Each coach has come in because it’s an environment they want to be in. For example, when I joined the staff last year, I wanted to implement my sport psychology knowledge and be not just an assistant coach, but the team’s mental performance coach.  That’s been added to the culture of the program – a strong mental game, with time and focus dedicated to mental training.  But more on this later, in Part 3.

And this year it showed up beyond just the players and coaches.  As I mentioned in Part 1, many friends, acquaintances, and neighbors have commented to me about how fun it was to watch our team play.  That fans came to watch us play (including our semifinal match, which drew over 2500 fans! *see photo below) was a byproduct of our culture.

Culture of Inclusion
One of the attractive qualities of the FHS program is it’s culture of inclusion. There are 4 teams (Varsity, JV, JV2 Grey and JV2 Maroon) – that’s nearly 80 players in the program. There aren’t many schools who have more than 3 teams.  We had just under 100 boys try out each of the last two seasons. Instead of cutting half of them, Ty created another team.

And it’s not just a place to play, it’s a place where you can contribute and find success. On top of the varsity team winning a state title, our other teams had success too: 

  • JV went 11-1-2 and had a stretch of 7 1/2 games without giving up a goal.  
  • The JV2 Grey and JV2 Maroon teams had success as well, often playing and holding their own against more talented opponents.
  • JV2 Grey and JV2 Maroon played a season finale game in the stadium, under the lights, with JV players as referees
  • At times during the season, players were able to move up or down to give more playing time.

A culture of inclusion also includes how to handle conflict, academic, attitude, or behavior issues. When players make mistakes off the field, we do our best to include and not exclude.  We give players second chances but are firm with expectations moving forward. 

Culture of Ownership

Ownership basically means that every player on the roster feels valued and has a role on the team, and that their opinions matter.

All of the coaches are available to the players for questions and for feedback. Many players end up taking advantage of this throughout the year. We don’t always use the player’s ideas, but they always feel listened to. And that is extremely important for effort and buy-in of what we are trying to do. One example of player feedback that was implemented this season was that they didn’t like the pre-practice warm up. After a discussion between the team captains and the coach, the players took over the warm up. Giving players ownership makes the whole experience more intrisincly motivating.

Giving players ownership helps the balance between freedom and structure.   Soccer is a game of solutions: Too much structure, and players won’t be able to come up with their own solutions. Too much freedom, and they won’t play together as a team. Teams whose culture is too structured, more of a dictatorship, aren’t typically as adept at solving problems when the pressure is on. This team was very easy to motivate game in and game out, because they mostly did it on their own.

Ty makes sure that every guy on the roster feels like he has a role in the team, and like they always have opportunities to prove themselves. And they delivered! Over the course of the year, 25 players got playing time on the varsity level. 15 players scored at least one goal. 13 players notched at least one assist. Here are some of the big moments in the playoffs:

  • Game winner in overtime of the second round came from a player playing out of position
  • Won the quarterfinal without our two leading scorers (injury) and our leading assist man (red card in previous game). Non-starters provide both the goal and assist in the game’s only goal.
  • 3 JV players saw action in the quarterfinal
  • Backup goalkeeper scores game winner in overtime of the semi final
  • State Championship opening goal came from a player who hadn’t scored all season
  • State Championship game winner with 6:42 left in the game, the assist and the goal came from players who didn’t start most of the season. 

The best part?  No one cared who got the glory, because they all had ownership in how they played, in the outcome of the games.

Franklin players celebrate the game winning goal in the 2019 OSAA 6A Championship game.
Photos by Leon Neuschwander, for The Oregonian/OregonLive

Positive Coaching

This one seems obvious. Ty is a positive guy. He’s a high energy guy. And the boys feed off of his energy. And so do the coaches. We strive to be encouraging and enthusiastic in our communication. I can count on one hand the number of times that the players were punished by extra fitness, which is extremely rare in my experience with soccer. But I want to make it clear that positive coaching is not just “rah-rah,” “you-can-do-it!” positivity. That’s only a small part of it.

Positive coaching is more about setting expectations, having clear goals to work toward, and problems to solve. It’s about a culture that brings people together. It’s about not only creating, but living the positive culture you are trying to set.

Positive coaching is about using all the tools available for players to succeed. For Franklin, we give all our players access to video of our games through Hudl so they can study film.  We do mental training all season. We put them in uncomfortable situations in practice to prepare them for uncomfortable situations in games. One example is the 6:15am Saturday practice. Which seems negative. They all hate it. But, they hate it together. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s uncomfortable together. And bringing a team together? That’s positive coaching.

A side note on Positive Coaching: In this day and age, negative coaching and negative cultures still exist. I really don’t get it. There are amazing organizations out there from AMPlify Sport Psychology and other mental performance coaches, there’s Positive Coaching Alliance, and Changing the Game Project, and Proactive Coaching. All of them teach how to build a positive culture that athletes are strongly motivated to be a part of. They teach not only why positive coaching is important, but give the tools to do it. But so many coaches still use the shortcuts of yelling at players, being demanding and negative, blaming referees and everyone else for their failures.  

One of the things I am most proud of is not that we won a State Championship, but it’s that we won it the right way. That’s positive coaching. And. It. Works!  I don’t know why more coaches don’t do it. Not only is it effective, but it’s FUN!

So that’s the culture that has been built at Franklin. It’s not all of it, but it’s the basics, and all you really need to know. The rest is up to the coach or the leader to determine what’s right for their program.

What’s Next?

On a final note, I’ll go ahead and say it: we have most of the pieces back for another year. Returning will the Oregon Coach of the Year, the Oregon Player of the Year, 2 All State players, 3 All PIL players, and tons of experience. This will be the first time playing a season as defending champions, and the expectations are sure to be sky high. It will be the first time that every opponent we play will be excited to play us.

So our culture from last year will need to be updated to match. We can’t just sit back and say “we’re good, let’s just do what we did last year.” I am looking forward to the challenge of growing and evolving our positive culture.

In Part 3 of the series, I will go more into the sport psychology of our team.

Inside the Mental Game of a State Champion (a 5 part series)

This year I had the pleasure to coach the Oregon 6A State boys soccer champions.  I served as an assistant coach and mental performance coach for both the varsity and JV teams.  As I write this, it’s exactly a month later, and I am still feeling the glow of the title. Friends and acquaintances I run into in the neighborhood stop me to say congratulations.  Most of them tell me just how fun the team was to watch, how much heart they played with.

Thinking back and reflecting on everything that went into it has been a really valuable experience.  Not just the outcome, but the journey we took to get there. It’s an experience that I want to share: How did we have so much success? How did a 14 seed make a run through the playoffs that included winning 3 overtime games?  How did we manage after losing our captain and leading scorer 2/3 of the way through the season and our next leading scorer for the semi and final matches?

I could come up with dozens of reasons, but here are the top 5:

1 – Talent

2 – Positive Culture/Positive Coaching

3 – Mental Training

4 – Facing Adversity

5 – Embodying the cliches

I will write 5 sections based on these. So, let’s start with #1: Talent

Let’s face it, without talent, coaching can only take you so far. Sport psychology and the mental game is great, but confidence can only take you so far… you have to have the skills, the sports IQ, and the athleticism to compete at the highest level. 

And we had an embarrassment of talent.  We knew this coming into the season. We were strong from player 1 through player 22, including arguably the best goalkeeper in the state, and 7 returning starters from a team that went 9-5 the year before.  Plus two extremely talented newcomers. Many of our players train at high level clubs like Eastside Timbers, River Plate, and Portland City United.

Not only that, but we had 6 JV players who trained with us fairly consistently, 4 of whom saw minutes on varsity in the playoffs.  That JV team went on to go 11-1-2 including 7 ½ straight games without giving up a goal. We knew we had the talent and depth to win the whole thing.

Some teams have a ton of talent, but lack the chemistry, drive and heart it takes to go all the way. Some teams have all the chemistry, drive and heart, but lack the talent to match.  This team had both. It takes more than talent to win. It’s what you do with that talent that makes the difference. It takes the right coaching, the right environment, and the right mindset.

Next time, I will talk about the Positive Culture within our program, and the Positive Coaching style that helped fuse the talent with the heart.

BOOK REVIEW The National Team

A great primer for the 2019 Women’s World Cup!

The 1999 USA women’s soccer team did what no one would have thought possible just a few years earlier, and that included the players:  capture the attention of the nation, and bring the spotlight to soccer in the United States. Names like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Brianna Scurry, and of course the image of Brandi Chastain celebrating the winning PK against China are all iconic.

And today’s stars like Alex Morgan, Tobin Heath and Megan Rapinoe are all fixtures for the US team heading to France this summer, hoping to capture American hearts all over again this summer.

How did the National Team grow so much in 30 years?

None of this would have been possible 30 years ago. In fact, before 1985, there was no women’s national team. And before 1991, there was no Women’s World Cup. The rise of the game and it’s quality of play, and it’s stars did not happen by accident. And it did not happen easily.

In her brand new book, The National Team, Caitlin Murray traces the history of the women who created, and continue to advance the game. Drawing on her experiences as a journalist covering the game, Murray interviews almost 100 key figures to tell the complete history of the US Women’s National Team.   

This is a very well-written book, of course, gives the history on-the-field from the team’s formation in 1985 to a post-Olympic friendly in 2017. Murray describes key points in games and behind-the-scenes preparation in the USA’s 3 World Cup and 4 Olympics championships.

What these women did off the field will blow you away

But The National Team is more about the off-the-field struggles, challenges, and victories than the on-the-field results. This is a book about the women who followed their passion, stood up for their rights, and took risks trying to make a living from the game they loved.  

For me, this part was the most surprising and frustrating, but also the most inspiring.  If you love soccer and the US Women’s National team, the underdog, and people who fight the good fight, this book is a must-read. If you don’t, this book might win you over.

Sound good? Buy the book to read all the details.