My journey with the mental game, unfortunately, didn’t start until about 10 years into my coaching career. I'd had success with my high school and travel ball teams. I read the leadership books, shared inspirational quotes, and gave motivational speeches. Things were going pretty well until that game.

We were playing for the regional championship and were up 2-1 in the bottom of the 7th inning with one out and nobody on. In my head, I was already thinking about the upcoming quarterfinals and imagining holding up the regional trophy for a team picture. Then the wheels fell off.

Two of my best players lost focus at just the wrong time and they committed back-to-back mental errors. That allowed two runners on base, and just 9 pitches later, the game was over 3-2. It was the worst, most upsetting game of my career. 

But as fate would have it, that summer I signed up for a sport psychology class at Western Michigan University.

In the first 15 minutes of that first lecture, it hit me like a ton of bricks. This is what I'd been missing all these years and what I never had as a player – the mental training as an athlete. 

My team wasn’t mentally prepared to handle the pressure, or adversity, which was very apparent that day. My professor had mentioned the book the Winners Manual by Jim Tressel, and from that book, the Notebook was born.

I create a notebook every year for my team to work on the mental part of the game. We read books, share stories and experiences and have daily discussions as a group. I know with absolute certainty, focusing on developing my players’ mental game has elevated our program to a different level.

All of those championships you read about earlier? I credit them to implementing mental training into practice every day. And now I'm making it my mission to take more teams to the next level with the mental game.

Growing up in Southern California, softball was huge. I discovered at a young age that I loved this sport and I was pretty darn good at it. But I was a textbook perfectionist- nothing was ever good enough and every strikeout, botched play or brain fart seemed traumatic to me. My coaches tried to help, but even their persuasive pep talks couldn’t get me out of my own head. By the time my junior year in college came around, it got to the point where I was being a bad leader and bringing my team down. My coach told me she didn’t know how else to help me, so I was benched.

That was my aha moment. I knew I had to buckle down and do something about my attitude so I bought it and read Mind Gym. I soaked up the lessons in that book and it turned my career completely around. Not only did I play better, but I also enjoyed the game again. It was like the weight of a decade was lifted off of my shoulders when I realized I had control over my thoughts and emotions!

From then on, I was hooked on the mental game and shared it with every team and player I worked with. Three years into my first head coaching job, things were going pretty well, and the program was on the rise, but I decided to step down to allow my husband to pursue his dream career. I decided I’d shift my career a bit to follow another passion: the mental game.

I had been preaching mental skills for years: positivity, anxiety management, focusing on the process, etc. I was 100% confident that these things helped with performance, but I had just figured out how to implement it every day. 

So my new mission, while taking a break from the field, was to make it easier for other coaches to do the same. I wanted to create an actionable mental training program coaches could implement - even without a Master's degree or a ton of time.

I'm so happy to be sharing this with other coaches who are seeing results too! Because that's my true mission: to help make other coaches' jobs a little easier so they can focus on what they do best... making a difference!