Match Fit Academy (NJ) Rolls Out Mental Performance Program

By Bryan Price, Ph.D.

According to U.S. Soccer, there are four major pillars of player development. The first three pillars – technical, tactical, and fitness – are common area of emphasis in soccer practices at almost every level.

Few clubs, however, provide their players and coaches resources to develop the 4^th pillar – the psychological component. I’ve written extensively on this gap in U.S. soccer in the past, including tips for players, coaches, and parents on how to work on their mental game.

One club, however, has led the way in providing its players, parents, and coaches with mental performance tools to build confidence, reduce anxiety, and improve mental toughness.

Dominick Bucci is the Director of Coaching for Match Fit Academy, one of New Jersey’s top clubs and a member of the ECNL. In January, Bucci announced a partnership with my company, Top Mental Game, to provide mental performance training for his club.

To Bucci, bringing this type of training into the club is about more than soccer. “The complete well-being of the athlete has always been of great importance for us,” he said in a January announcement to the club. “When the opportunity to work with Bryan and his Top Mental Game team became available, for us it was a no brainer.

Working in partnership with Bucci and the club over the past five months, we administered a club-wide survey to assess challenges and current needs, designed and executed a program to address those needs, and provided ongoing resources to help players, parents, and coaches.

Together we have created a model for mental performance training that we believe other clubs will want to implement.

Survey Results

The first step in creating a tailored mental performance program was to understand the needs of the club. To do that, we administered an anonymous club-wide survey for players, parents, and coaches on various aspects of the mental game.

In total, 277 respondents answered the survey:

144 players (from 11 age groups ranging from 2004 to 2014)
121 parents (from 11 age groups ranging from 2004 to 2014)
12 coaches from the club

Below are some of the results from the survey.

How important is the mental game?

When asked “what percentage (0 to 100%) of success in soccer do you think is determined by the mental game,” the response from the three groups may surprise you.

The average answer of each group is below (with the total number of respondents in parentheses):

Players (144): 72%
Parents (121): 70%
Coaches (12): 56%

Only eight of the 144 players who responded to the survey provided a percentage lower than 50%, including two young players who gave answers of 0 percent.

While there was consensus among all three groups that the mental game was important to success in soccer, we wanted to assess how the psychological component compared to other areas of player development.

What’s holding players back?

The three groups were asked what they felt was the main component holding them (or their players, in the case of parents and coaches) back from playing their best soccer.

Options included the four pillars of player development as defined by U.S. Soccer. Additionally, given the variability in physical development found in youth soccer, I added a fifth option of “physical size / speed.” The answers were striking.

All three groups (players, parents, and coaches) overwhelmingly chose the mental game as the main aspect holding them back from playing their best soccer.

Players (144): 53%
Parents (121): 47%
Coaches (12): 50%

For coaches and club owners who are not providing their athletes with any resources in the mental game, this should be a wake-up call. As I’ve articulated in previous articles, many coaches want to formally teach the mental game, but they don’t necessarily know where to start.

Many parents mistakenly think that additional training and more “skills and drills” is the answer to unlocking their child’s potential on the pitch, but the return on the investment in mental performance training is higher, longer-lasting, and can be applied to other areas of a player’s life off the pitch.

Where does pressure come from?

The survey also asked respondents about where players felt the most pressure – whether the pressure they felt was self-imposed, or coming from parents, coaches, or teammates.

Sixty percent of players said the greatest source of pressure came from themselves. This was an interesting finding, but what was even more interesting was how much pressure these players put on themselves.

For those players who said they were the greatest source of pressure, the average self-reported total amount of pressure was 59 percent.

While parents answered similarly as players on these questions, coaches said that 75 percent of pressure came from parents, with only 25 percent coming from the players themselves.

Interestingly, no coaches felt like they were the largest source of pressure from players, even though almost one in five players (18 percent) listed their coach as the highest source of pressure, the second highest source of pressure for players in the club.

How resilient are players?

Other questions in the survey attempted to ascertain whether players possess and can employ successful coping mechanisms to handle this pressure.

The survey results below give us insight into player resiliency (or lack thereof) and their ability to bounce back after a mistake. While a third of players who responded feel they know how to recover from a mistake, more than 41 percent say they often cannot bounce back, and 26 percent are unsure.

Assessing self-talk

When players and parents were surveyed on their (or their athlete’s) self-talk, 47 percent of players and 41 percent of parents said the self-talk was positive. Players, however, were more than 3 times as likely to say their self-talk was negative compared to what their parents saw, which suggests this might be a blind spot for some parents.

For those respondents who were unsure about their self-talk, I offer this warning. It’s been my experience that if athletes are unsure of whether their self-talk is helping them or hurting them, it almost always means it’s hurting them. We are often not self-aware of how truly negative our self-talk is, which is step one in addressing the problem.

Pre-competition mental routines

Players, coaches, and parents were asked whether players had an established mental routine to help them optimally prepare their minds for competition and to compete at a high level.

The majority of players do not have an established routine, and that reality is also seen by parents and especially by coaches. Two-thirds of coaches who responded said their players don’t have any mental routine.

I believe creating a consistent pre-competition mental performance routine is analogous to physically stretching and preparing for a game. We would never think of jumping out of the car and running directly onto the pitch as the referee blows his whistle to start the game without physically warming up.

Yet that is exactly what most players do with their mental game.

Emotional regulation for players

The survey also asked a question about emotional regulation in players.

The good news, depending on how you interpret the results, is that almost half of the players surveyed feel they can properly manage their in-game emotions.

The concerning news, of course, is that the other half either can’t properly regulate their emotions or are unsure about how to do this well.

We have all seen players, at every level, who make a mistake or blow an opportunity early in a game, and then can’t recover for the rest of the game. In what I call “the spiral,” they let that one moment negatively affect how they play for the rest of the game, and in some cases, for several games afterwards.

MFA’s Mental Performance Program

After administering the survey, I provided the players, parents, and coaches in the club with a webinar on the results and the ensuing mental performance program that would address the gaps we found.

Working with Bucci and the club’s leadership, we designed an 8-session program that’s being delivered over Zoom with players in age groups.

We were able to work with the club on the timing of the mental performance programing so it wouldn’t interfere with practices or games. The program has included the following topics:

Understanding how our minds and bodies respond to stress and pressure
Becoming self-aware of negative self-talk and what to do about it
Goal-setting and how to create your own plan to emphasize process over outcome
Visualization and imagery exercises as performance enhancement tools
How to create your own pre-competition mental performance routine
How to create your own reset ritual to bounce back after mistakes
Body language as a weapon
How to recognize fixed mindsets and move towards a growth mindset

Players in the program were also given recorded visualizations that they can download to their phone. These included visualization exercises to build confidence, fight burnout, reduce anxiety, and create a proven and personalized pre-game routine.

Parents, as well as players, were given access to my comprehensive online mental performance program called The Blueprint. They were also given access to the session recordings.

These actions helped arm parents with the same useful information their players were receiving, which helps them reinforce key concepts.

When the pilot program ends in early June, we will administer another survey to assess the program and make improvements moving forward.

Although Match Fit Academy is leading the way in this field, there is no doubt that other clubs will follow suit and provide the mental performance resources youth soccer players need and deserve.

Bryan Price is a mental performance coach who owns Top Mental Game in New Jersey. He is a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, Stanford Ph.D., and professor at West Point who works with elite athletes and teams on their mental game