PSYCHOLOGICAL CO-ACTIVE PART 1

 

My favourite day of the year, Grand Final Day, is upon us which usually coincides with my birthday week.

The 2 teams who make it to grand finals can no longer gain any more technical, tactical or physical benefit from training to make them any more prepared for what they are right now for the big dance, and there's only 1 co-active left that can now make or break the grand final result...

Psychological.

The psychological is easily the hardest co-active to master from a coaches and players point of view.

Most coaches don't have any experience on how to train their players for greater psychological capacity, not even know what it is.

Like everyday people, players won't naturally challenge themselves psychologically until "challenged" by others/coaches so it's pretty easy to see how this can be put in the too hard basket.

Here's a little story from my local club during grand final week last season (which we won).

We could quite possibly be the poorest club in metro Melbourne footy, without exaggeration.

In 2019 we were kicked off our home ground as it was deemed unfit to play on during that season by auditors so last year we played at a different ground, 4 suburbs away from our home base where we continued to train every Tuesday and Thursday.

We have 2 and half lights meaning we can't use the whole ground and can only train in parts of the ground effectively.

We're battlers, we know it.

Our ground's a shithole, but it's our shithole is one of our motto's.

We had been flogged in the first week of finals but then we bounced back in the second week to gain a spot in the Granny.

One of our players is the CEO of a VFL team and organised us to use their ground to train on during grand final week.

A VFL/AFL quality ground with full lights - it was Christmas time for our footy club.

Psychologically this provided a boost for us that no other team could have at that time of the season.

We had maybe 35 - 40 blokes train on that Thursday, more then we probably had at any other night that year.

Our skills were the same, our fitness was the same but psychologically I felt it gave us some major momentum, bloody hard to get from nowhere in August.

We already felt that we had the best team, we had displayed it during the year but now that we were on even keel in that we can train just like every other club on a full ground with full lighting and full player numbers, even if just for 1 week, I felt like it now put us in a close to unbeatable position, the psychological boost we gained giving us the edge over of the opposition.

Coming from our shithole, we were training on a ground far better than any other in our league, with lighting far better than any other in our league, and it gave us a feeling that we are now even even, albeit temporarily in front of our grand final opposition that gave us a sense of invincibility that would carry into Saturday and we lead the game from the first score to the last score.

This week will be focused on this with tips on what to look for, how to train it and make it a strength of your club with it then becoming a part of your culture.