Volleyball Psychology: Being mentally ready happens even before you step on the court

With the season in full swing and Junior Nationals upon us it is vital to cover all your bases to give your team the best chance at winning. This is where competition ramps up and each point is vital. The mental aspects and demands upon a player and team quickly accumulate in high pressure moments.

This month’s edition of Sport Psychology focuses on how to coach a team that has made it to the Performance Stage. This is the stage in which the team has come together around a set of goals and norms, allowing them to play as one unit rather than a group of individuals.

It’s getting close to that time of the season when teams have put in the hours building their strength and conditioning, perfecting skills sets, and running offensive and defensive schemes. The goal is to translate all that practice into tournament-winning volleyball that is not compromised by nerves or mental errors. Coaches should incorporate these simple yet effective mental skills and training principles.

This month’s edition of Sport Psychology rounds out the final stage in the Tuckman (1965) model of team development, the Performance Stage. This is the stage in which the team has come together around a set of goals and norms, allowing them to play as one unit rather than a group of individuals.

This month’s edition of Sport Psychology addresses two potential team issues that coaches can face when teams are just coming together and establishing baseline norms. Here are two case studies that can help guide coaches in how to address these situations.

Moving through the stages of team development (Tuckman, 1965), a team will eventually learn to constructively set aside their conflicts and establish important norms of behavior that are unique to the team culture.

Whether you’re an athlete, coach, athletic trainer, or just an avid sports fan, you likely know someone with an injury to her or his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or you may have been in the unfortunate situation to experience the injury firsthand. ACL injuries are a common sports-related injury with an annual incidence of 120,000, occurring primarily during the high school and college years.¹ Even more shocking is that this rate is increasing, especially in females. This article will focus on ACL injuries in the female athlete (although many recommendations can be applied to both sexes), with discussion on the science behind the injury, the debate on management options, and prevention strategies.

This month’s edition of Sport Psychology addresses two challenging situations that coaches can face with their players who may not have team success as their top priority. Here are two case studies that can help guide coaches in how to address these situations.

As a coach, knowing how to take the right steps to help your team resolve and grow through difficult situations can be the biggest challenge you face. The following examples will demonstrate how to face some hypothetical scenarios where team cohesion was in jeopardy and suggest some steps to help unite your athletes.

This month’s edition of Sport Psychology is for the coaches and individual athletes who struggle to address conflict within their team and themselves. This is the second article in a four part series.

The biggest challenges team’s face are usually the unaddressed interpersonal conflicts and internal discrepancies that seem too intimidating to talk about. Challenges such as athletes gossiping behind teammates’ backs to create social cliques or athletes and coaches ridiculing one another to other members of the team or staff build more conflict that directs attention away from the team’s success. If left alone, this can lead to the deterioration of the team. Many times coaches and athletes choose not to bring the interpersonal problems up in front of the team because they either think that the problem will dissolve naturally or that talking about them will bring about more problems. Usually the conflict works its way through the team in exactly the opposite way.