Some players get rattled easily. This can happen when a referee calls a bad call, the crowd gets negative or an opponent hands out a cheap shot. It can also happen when a team loses a game they feel they should have won or really wanted to win. Athletes that don’t have the skills to handle these situations have a tough time competing in high pressure circumstances. They also may have a tough time moving to the next level because at the next stage of development dealing with pressure is critical in order to be successful.
Learn to Exercise Restraint
Learn to not react or take it personal when an event like the ones listed above happen. Be in the moment and work on letting things pass right by. Sometimes it helps to view it as an outside event that is happening to someone else. By reacting you are giving the power away to the other team and wasting it when it could be used towards solving the problem at hand. Things happen quickly and at higher levels of play one small lapse can lead to the opponent taking advantage and winning. Control is a very important and so it should be practiced in advance.
Rise to the Challenge
Sometimes when you are a good player opponents are going to foul and push you around just to get a rise out of you. If you react at everything they do it is easy to see that it will result in your implosion. View their physicality as a positive almost like they are giving you a compliment by being tough on you. Don’t rely on the refs or anybody else to make the calls that put you in the best situation to succeed. Learn to work in the worst conditions like a hot gym, the wrong shoes, a ball with not enough air in it or a rim that isn’t perfect. This way when tough things come at you as a player you are used to it. Simply digging in on defence to get stops and converting those stops into points on the score board is an excellent way to rise to the challenge. This is the very best way to silence the crowd, your opponents and your inner critic.
Refocus
This is the part where it is critical to get in the mental condition that is ideal for you to compete in. If you get too intense the pressure is too much and it can cause you to not be able to measure up. Not intense enough and you could be a step behind on everything. Especially when channeling energy it is a good idea to work on getting in your optimal state in practice so that when you are in a game it becomes easy to just block everything out and play. The game then becomes about putting the ball in the basket instead of about the people trying to interfere with that by any other distraction they are setting up in front of you. I heard a football player use the example of pretending the player across from him said something terrible about his mom even though he didn’t. This was what he used to get himself into a situation of just bringing his highest level of intensity. Figure out what yours is and use it.
Use the Feeling Later
Sometimes losing can be devastating and people make comments like “it’s just a game!” in order to help you feel better. One of the things I felt most successful was taking that feeling and bottling it up. I knew everything about how it felt and where to access it. This way when I was having a bad training day or didn’t feel like doing something to get better I would reach in and grab that feeling to give myself an extra boost. This particularly helps in the offseason or when there is a lot of time in between games. It helps to make offseason productive in terms of improving and digging deep to reach your goals.
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