Building Relationships with Our Athletes, Motivating Them, and Growing Their Confidence

We are happy to feature this guest post contributed by Coach Ansley Bates, Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach for women’s basketball and men’s tennis at Flagler College. You can find Coach Ansley Bates on Instagram at @thecoolbeansbates. Please see her full bio below.

We welcome submissions from other coaches who would like to be guest contributors. All guest contributors must hold certification from NSCA, CSCCa, or NASM. Five or more years of professional experience is preferred. Please send all submissions to dj@coachdjtaylor.com and include a reference sheet, a bio, and a photo. We will let you know as quickly as possible if your submission will be published.

Strength and conditioning coaches have many roles outside of strength and conditioning. At any given moment, we can be a nutritionist, sports psychologist, instructor, demonstrator, mentor, or friend. It’s up to us to be competent in these areas in order to help develop our athletes to the best of our abilities.

I have a natural inclination to psychology and this is a role I grew in most this year outside of strength and conditioning. To paint you a picture of just how much I grew, at the beginning of the fall semester I participated in a research study.

I filled out a questionnaire in the fall of 2019 about how often I use sports psychology as a strength and conditioning coach in various areas. I quickly forgot about the questionnaire, but in April of 2020 I received a follow up email to schedule an interview to further discuss my answers. I was talking about all the ways I used sports psychology principles in the weight room, on the road with basketball and on the court during games. About halfway through the interview, I was stopped because I apparently had answered most of the questions on the questionnaire in August about how much I use sports psych with “not much.”  I laughed, but I also realized how essential psychology was to sport. So special thank you to Adam Feit for showing me how deeply the principles of sports psychology are imbedded in our everyday habits as coaches. There is still so much for me to learn, so this is more of a reflection of what I’ve learned and used this past year.

I’ve separated concepts into three main categories that I feel best describe our areas of influence as coaches in the weight room. The first concept is building relationships, the second is motivation, and the third is confidence.

As coaches, our priority should be building relationships with our athletes. The better the relationships we have with our athletes, the more bought-in they will be to what we have to offer. We will be able to get more out of them mentally and physically because they trust that we care about their success as humans and as athletes. We have to get to know our athletes in order to be able to communicate, motivate and empower them in ways that are effective for them.

Now I am going to briefly skim over what could be a rabbit hole of a conversation but is something that gives a good picture of how deep individualizing motivation can go. Last week I was on a call with Dave Laughlin, a mental performance coach for Courtex Performance. He talked about the 16 Motives of the Reiss Motivation Profile. The theory establishes 16 drivers of an individual’s personality. Everyone has them but prioritizes each differently. The point of this assessment is to determine what motives influence a person’s choices and behaviors. For us, it shows us how we can motivate our athletes in ways that are most effective for them. For example, one of the motives is “Order.” An athlete who ranks high on the positive end of the scale for order will thrive in an organized environment where they have a regular routine and consistent training regimen. They would need coaching through situations where adaptation is required and help developing skills necessary for navigating change. You could also have an athlete that is on the complete opposite end of the scale. They thrive in an ever-changing environment and get bored if something remains consistent for too long. Now this theory, in practice, is more realistic for coaches with a single team, but the theory is good to keep in mind as we learn to individualize our coaching to specific types of athletes.

Because I don’t have the resources to do something like the Reiss Motivation Profile, I use a developmental questionnaire. I stole the idea from Charlie Rhea at Houston Baptist University and added my own spice, but the objective is to get to know your athletes on a deeper level than what you get to in everyday conversation in the weight room. The athlete receives the questionnaire at the beginning of the semester, fills it out, and schedules a time to meet with you to go over it. Then you meet again at the end of the semester to review and talk about what has changed since the beginning of the semester.

The meetings take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and the athlete can be as open as they want to be. In the questionnaire, there are general get-to-know-you questions and then questions about their goals for the weight room, their sport, and the classroom. The goals they write down aren’t normally SMART goals, so typically I will ask questions to help them create a SMART goal out of the one they put down.

These meetings have been huge for me. I’ve been at a new school every year, so meeting with each athlete before they come in the weight room allows me to introduce myself and get to know them on a more personal level before I obnoxiously get in their face at 6 am on the first day of lift. Taking the time to meet with each athlete shows them that we are invested in their growth in all aspects of their lives and helps both of parties identify what motivates the athlete to give their all.

These meetings are great to start the semester, but it takes a sustained investment on our part to make them effective long term. Continue to ask them about their goals and how they are applying the strategies they thought would help them achieve the goals. Open-ended questions are important in helping them clarify thoughts and ideas they’ve had but haven’t necessarily vocalized. If they tell you something notable, write it down on your sheet or practice plan. After the lift or practice, write it down in their file or set a reminder to ask about it again. I know I have the memory of a goldfish, so setting reminders helps me. When I learned this trick, I felt like it was cheating because my ego told me if I can’t remember it then I don’t really care. Ego finally aside, I realized setting reminders helps me show I care despite my short-term memory weakness and it really does go a long way with the athletes.

Once you get buy-in with the athletes and begin to understand who they are, you can start to motivate them in ways that are specific to them. However, there are ways to motivate athletes off the rip before you get to know them. From the moment they enter the weight room, we can hype them up with music, high fives, chest bumps and the like. Then, our warm-ups can add to the energy. High tempo drills or fun games can improve their mental, emotional, and physical states to set the tone for a successful lift. Coach JC at Georgia Southern University does a great job implementing reactive partner drills and soccer tennis with his Men’s Tennis team to keep them engaged and lighten their moods before competitions.

Our next opportunity to increase their motivation is our pre-lift speech. We can prime the athletes by talking about what the athlete should expect from the session, why the workout is important (small and big picture), and how you expect them to show up mentally and physically. Throughout the workout, cueing from coaches and teammates can help an athlete focus on what is important in that moment and give them direction for their efforts. Any monitoring tools like tendos, jumpmats, and biofeedback can also add a sense of competitiveness among teammates to improve their effort in each session.

Our final opportunity to sprinkle in a little motivation is our post-lift recap. We can talk about what we saw from the team compared to the expectations set at the beginning of the lift and ask the team to shout out individual players who exemplified the team standards. Lastly, we want to get in a few touches.

Communication and touches are an important component of motivation. When I was the women’s basketball strength and conditioning coach at Georgia Southern, this was one of our biggest goals as a program because the coaches knew that a team who communicated effectively and often and gave high fives or reassuring pats had more success. A study done at UC Berkley looked at every team in the NBA and totaled up their volume of touches and compared it to their success as a team. They found that teams with higher volumes of touch were more successful than those with low touch volumes. They explained that this was because touches grow trust and develop communication which leads to a stronger team bond. When push comes to shove, these teams will go the distance because of the little investment of a high five.

The final topic I want to highlight is confidence. As a coach, our job is to enable our athletes to play their best. Unfortunately, we can’t get in the game and make things happen ourselves, so we have to equip them with the skills to be able to navigate chaotic environments and make choices to achieve the best outcome. We do this through increasing their confidence by way of providing feedback, increasing their awareness of self-talk, and using imagery. Feedback is best given via positive coaching. Positive coaching doesn’t mean just slapping a good job on everything that happens in the weight room. It is focused and constructive feedback that forces us to be solution oriented, in the good and the bad.

For example, if I’m at basketball practice and I fumble the ball because I went to take a dribble before I secured the ball in my hands, chances are I know I messed up. Most reactions would be to say “Ansley, stop turning the ball over.” Well yeah, of course, I know no one wanted me to do that, but it happened. Positive coaching responds with “make sure you watch the ball all the way into your hands before you react to the defender.” This statement gives me instruction for what to do the next time I am in a similar situation and can help everyone avoid making the mistake again.

Or for example, in the weight room. I’m coaching someone on a split squat and their weight is in their front foot toe. Chances are their knee is way over their toe, they’re off balance, they’re leaned forward, etcetera. If I tell them don’t come on their toe, don’t let your knees come over your toes, don’t do this and that… I’ve just overloaded them with cues and none of them tell the athlete exactly how to do the movement correctly. There are a million ways to do something wrong and a few ways to do it right. With a cue like “sit your weight back in your booty,” 9/10 times you will solve the other issues.

Now I’m not a fool, I have worked with cross country athletes so I know there’s always the case for absurd cues…but for most cases, a cue or two will do the trick. Positive coaching also means being constructive in your encouragement. “Good job” is general and doesn’t give the athlete an action to take. Specify what they did well and they will be more likely to do it again because they actually know what it is that you liked about their series of movements. This can be for something we’ve already instructed them on, like catching the ball before you make a move, or something they did on their own without instruction, like bracing their core on a heavy lift.

This is a skill that takes intentional effort on our part to develop but is more effective than a “you messed up” or a “good job.” It is also a valuable skill to teach our athletes when communicating with each other. Now a side note, when I gave this lesson to the Georgia Southern women’s basketball team, they thought I was creating a way to avoid difficult conversations or conflicts, but it isn’t. It makes these situations productive by providing a solution with the problem rather than just fighting about the problem.

Self-talk, our most effective types of self-talk are instructional and positive. In this case, positive does mean getting a little “good job” happy. Instructional self-talk is using our positive coaching feedback skills on ourselves. Like I said before, most times we are aware of when we mess up. Even if we have someone coaching us on the outside, we need to have someone on the inside coaching us up too.

Instructional self-talk is a skill that helps us whether we have someone else coaching us or not. Positive self-talk is focused on talking about our strengths and what have done well in the past. It helps us see how we are equipped to handle challenging scenarios and the value we as individuals add to our team.

Carol Dewek wrote a book called Mindsets that goes in depth on the concept of growth versus fixed mindsets. The growth mindset looks at challenges as opportunities to learn and grow despite whether they succeed or fail, recognizing that every opportunity is a step in the process on the way to success. In the weight room, we can develop this mindset by tailoring our encouragement to something process-oriented rather than outcome-oriented. For example, if an athlete has been putting in extra work to improve their hip mobility and strength, they will look and feel better in their squat. Eventually, their squat max will go up. When they hit a new max for squat, recognize the time and effort that went into making that max happen. This highlights their time spent improving a skill that lead to a better performance rather than some innate ability to squat heavy. It reinforces hard work and dedication, which is what we love to see in every athlete.

Repetition is key in making sure the athletes understand a message. This past year I wanted to emphasize a growth mindset over anything else I’ve talked about today. Whenever someone would get frustrated because they couldn’t quite get something, I would repeat, “everything is a skill and all skills can be improved.”  They probably got tired of hearing it every time they were about to quit, but I hope that 5-10 years down the road, when they’re frustrated about a task the have to learn for their job, they’ll think to themselves “everything is a skill and all skills can be improved,” put their head down and get it done. I could talk all day about this one, but I’ll leave it at that. However, I do highly recommend the Mindsets book because it changed my perspective on life.

Imagery is another tool to increase confidence. Like they say, “seeing is believing.” Imagery can be anything from having an athlete visualize themselves staying positive through a tough conditioning session to completing a personal best in the bench press on max day. The most important part of imagery is visualizing success. Sometimes our brains can slip out of our control and show us failing but practicing helps develop control over our thoughts. The more vivid we can make these images, using all five senses, the better. When we imagine pressure situations, it’s important to add emotions and physical sensations that arise during these moments.

You can also use imagery to correct a mistake. I’ll go back to my fumbling the ball example. After that, I’m probably replaying the fumble in my head and beating myself up about it, but what this does is reinforce fumbling the ball over and over. It would be much more productive for me to change the narrative in my head and see myself catching the ball and making my move past the defender successfully.

Imagery can be used to learn or practice a new skill, correct a mistake, prepare for competition, learn plays/schemes, or prepare mental focus. It takes consistent practice to develop this skill, but it will become easier to do it on the fly as you spend more time with it. Even as coaches, we can use imagery to visualize how we coach a skill or how we work the floor during a lift. It can help us prepare for situations that may arise, so that if they do, we’ve been there already and know what to do.

Each one of these concepts are skills that must be developed over time. It takes continuous practice to be able to fine-tune our motivation techniques, increase our use of positive coaching feedback, reinforce instructional and positive self-talk, and improve our control of visualization. The work is worth it. All of these, at the end of the day, enable us to better show the athletes how much we care. These skills are developed now to improve performance in training and in sport but are valuable for the rest of their lives.

References:
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

Kraus MW, Huang C, Keltner D. Tactile communication, cooperation, and performance: an ethological study of the NBA. Emotion. 2010 Oct;10(5):745-9. doi: 10.1037/a0019382. PMID: 21038960.

Laughlin, Dave. (2020). Mental Performance [PowerPoint presentation]. National Basketball Strength and Conditioning Association Conference, online.

Rhea, Charlie, personal communication, June, 2018.

Williams, J. M. (2015). Applied sport psychology: personal growth to peak performance. Seventh edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Ansley Bates is currently an Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach for women’s basketball and men’s tennis at Flagler College. Prior to moving to St. Augustine, Bates served as an Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach for Olympic Sports at Georgia Southern University from 2019-2020 and worked with women’s basketball, men’s and women’s tennis, cross country and diving.

Prior to Georgia Southern she worked as a Strength & Conditioning Graduate Assistant at Mississippi State University from 2018-2019. Bates trained women’s tennis and assisted with women’s basketball, softball, volleyball, women & golf, track & field and cross country. She served as an intern in the Strength & Conditioning Department at the University of Alabama in 2017-2018 where she assisted with cheer, softball and golf. While in Tuscaloosa, she also worked as an Assistant Track & Field Coach at Holy Spirit Catholic High School in the spring of 2018.

Bates earned her bachelor’s degree in Health Science with a minor in Nutrition from Samford University in 2017 where she was a Heptathlete for the Track and Field team. She earned her master’s degree in Food Science, Nutrition and Health Promotion from Mississippi State University in 2019.

She is certified with the Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coach’s Association (SCCC), the National Strength and Conditioning Association (CSCS), and USA Weightlifting (USAW Level1 sports performance coach).

You can find Coach Ansley Bates on Instagram at @thecoolbeansbates.