The Boston Celtics have been experiencing some tough times since their veteran leader and defensive general Kevin Garnett was sidelined with a knee problem late in December. Assistant Coach Kevin Eastman recently wrote an article on his blog (loosely) addressing the issue. He observed that that teams who are trying to turn things around often look to improve their skills through drills, however this will only have a limited positive effect unless the team also raises their mental ability to meet their technical ability. They need to ‘get their heads right’, he says. I began thinking about a situation that I personally experienced a couple of years ago that required what I think is a ‘mental reset’.

UEA Women: 1-4 at Christmas

In my second year coaching the women’s team at UEA we were approaching the Christmas break in bad shape. We were 1-4 and sitting joint bottom of the league. We would have to perform a miraculous turnaround to lift ourselves out of the bottom two in a league where even a single loss can derail a season due to the small number of games played. We started the season on a high, having retained many of the players from our promotion-winning team the year before. However our expectations were quickly brought down to earth with a one-point away loss to Nottingham in our opening game. This had been our first taste of league defeat in BUCS and was a sign of things to come. We won our next game at home vs Cambridge but followed this with road losses against Wolverhampton, Nottingham Trent and a home loss to Nottingham.

The manner of the losses saw the players get down on themselves and I was losing belief in my team. We trained well most of the time and were largely cruising in the local league but could not seem to pull together in BUCS, despite our potential. Our defense was holding strong most of the time, but our offense was stagnating. Over the Christmas break I experimented by adding a new all-purpose offense to ensure we kept moving the ball and tried to get some higher percentage looks. Using the new offense (a simple dribble hand-off action on the wing and looking to penetrate) we started to gain some confidence through local league victories. Our next BUCS games arrived, at home to Wolverhampton and Nottingham Trent, two of the strongest teams in our division. The players were exhibiting a new-found confidence on the court and soundly outplayed both teams with a shortened bench. Two more victories over the bottom side saw us climb to an unassailable position in 4th and only a shock defeat of the top team by Nottingham Trent saw us denied 3rd place; a seemingly impossible position given our predicament at Christmas.

While it would be easy to claim that the new offensive system had been the catalyst for our resurgence, it was actually that the team had used the Christmas break to perform a ‘mental reset’. They refused to dwell on past results and used the adversity (relegation, depleted squad) to inspire them to two great victories, the games I consider to be our best performances (along with our title-winning end-of-season effort vs Coventry the year before). They were able to cleanse their minds of negativity and somehow were able to re-focus on the task in hand.

I want to examine the ways to initiate a ‘mental reset’ and turn around a slumping team in a future post, but for now the main thing to remember about the ‘mental reset’ is that everyone has to buy-in to it. It can only be achieved if all players and coaching staff buy into the need for a total change of mentality, and the new mentality must be consistent throughout the team for it to succeed.

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
– Thomas Jefferson