Coaching Mental Performance: Team Identity and Value Systems

Despite a club’s best intentions to make sure all coaches are maintaining consistent verbiage across age groups and skill levels, and keeping the expectations of the training environment relatively consistent, it often devolves into coaches putting their own spin on how they train their squad. What results is a team identity that is uniquely their own and becomes an integral component of their overall performance.

Team Values

Often when I speak to team’s about their identity, I refer to Nitsch and Hackfort’s (2016) idea that performance excellence means intentional and valuable contributions relative to the sociocultural and/or personal value system the team has created, or has yet to create. Their theoretical framework of performance psychology argues that “performance” is a relational concept. Furthermore, “Team Values” provide a standard, and an aspiration level, in relation to the athlete’s skills and their personal value system. When we adhere to the established core values of the team, we achieve performance excellence through maximizing intention of the behaviors we want to see out of our athletes and minimizing unfavorable side effects and undesired long-term consequences. With a framework to describe how we need to behave on/off the court, our season becomes about developing, maintaining, and reestablishing (if need be) desired and actual motivation, competence, and resilience of the team so that they can adapt to the rising-demand of competition.

Define Value Systems

Now, if you have been following along with the Coaching Mental Performance Series, you recognize that there is a theme of bottom-up processing (see the article around the neurosequential model). When we consider that the athletes are trying their best to regulate themselves, coregulate with their peers, and manage the stress of their environments, coaches want to make sure they provide environments that allow athletes the freedom to express themselves as naturally as possible; so as to have a safe environment to figure out how they respond to the demand of competition. Therefore, when guiding value orientation sessions, I encourage the players to define their value systems. This places the players as the sole creators of the set of standards they will base their performance from and increase the likelihood of them naturally developing the resilience needed to adapt to the demands of competition.

Often coaches extensively and specifically define offensive and defensive…