With any sport, athletes not only need to be physically fit and capable of incredible physical feats, but they also need to have the mental fortitude to dedicate hours to their craft, endure the losses, and stay humble in success. SPIRE Academy is proud to have a mental skills program helping to train its student-athletes. 

For the past two years, Zac Bruback, a sports psychology consultant at SPIRE, has been working with students to develop their toolbag of mental techniques to prepare them for their competitions and their lives outside of sports. Now as SPIRE’s mental skills program grows in development, Bruback is transitioning to becoming a full-time mental skills coach. 

According to Bruback, the two main aspects of this program focus on in-class and competition-based mental skills training. Within the program, each student athlete goes through mental skills training once a week. This is where Bruback and other sport psychology consultants meet with the students to cover a variety of topics.

Some weeks they may discuss a range of techniques including:

• Visualization
• Goal setting
• Emotional control
• and growth mindset development

Ultimately, all of these techniques are meant to help SPIRE achieve the overarching goal of each student athlete learning how to develop resiliency when facing adversity in sport and in life. 

During their ongoing discussions, they sometimes take inspiration from what’s happening in the world and relate it to the student’s current situation. The idea being that students can more easily understand the high-level talking points through real-world examples.

Mental skills training doesn’t stop at the classroom. Bruback explains how the program also utilizes competition-based training to help student athletes put the techniques they’ve learned into practice. While on the court, field, track, or pool, they implement the skills they’ve discussed in the classroom and emphasize building awareness around the mind-body connection. A good example of this is breathing techniques. Student athletes will first learn about the techniques in the classroom, which helps them understand how they can impact performance and mental clarity. Once understood, they move to their respective, active training areas to put the techniques to use.

The mental skills team tries to focus on tools that provide student athletes with the methods to remain in their peak performance zone. They aspire to have all of the students dialed into a zone of caring about performing at their best, but not caring to such a high degree that they become overly stressed or burnt out. Oftentimes it can be a classic case of “mind over matter,” and this is when the team will explore how visualization helps students reach their goals.

Bruback says, “The biggest thing is building a shared communication and common understanding of where people are coming from – being receptive to understanding that first, so that we are able to progress forward.”

The mental skills program is becoming more established as time goes on, and a plan has already been implemented that allows consultants to meet individually with each of the student athletes to develop their baseline and set goals for the future.