By Layne Weitzel, TTU Sports Information
COOKEVILLE, Tenn. – Two Tech men's basketball players, Kajon Mack and Shaq Calhoun, stayed late in the Derryberry Hall auditorium Tuesday night.
The pair had just attended a talk by sport psychology guru Dr. Spencer Wood, who visited Tech to speak to nearly 300 student-athletes and athletics staff about mental toughness.
"We just hope that this is a positive way that we can help our student-athletes kick off their year and give them a couple additional tools to help them be successful, not just approaching their play as an athlete, but in the classroom and in life," said Director of Athletics Mark Wilson. "We try to do this every year just to give them some edge over their competition in all that they do."
Out of the handful of attendees who stayed afterward to meet Wood one-on-one, Mack and Calhoun were the last two in the building, talking to Wood for nearly 10 minutes.
The trio had much to discuss. Mack received a redshirt in 2013-14 due to an ankle injury before transferring from Tulane to join Tech last season. Calhoun initially committed to Tech in high school but instead played at junior college Iowa Western for two years and South Alabama for one. He chose to spend his final year of eligibility in Cookeville.
Although Calhoun will suit up for the Golden Eagles for the first time in the 2017-18 season, both he and Mack are in line to take on leadership roles for Tech as the two oldest players on the team.
With men's basketball being one of the most high-profile sports in collegiate athletics, Wood urged the pair to block out any outside attention the program and players might receive.
"You have a million people to please but only a few to answer to," Wood told them.
As the founder of Icebox Athlete, which offers mental skills and toughness training for athletes across every level of sport, Wood's talk Tuesday night focused not on mental toughness off the field or court, like he told Mack and Calhoun, but training the mind specifically during a competition. Having worked with programs from each Power 5 conference, as well as smaller leagues like the Ohio Valley Conference, Wood knows what kind of collegiate athletes excel in a high-stakes environment.
"At the Division I level, when you start playing for silverware, obviously the talent begins to even out," he said. "What separates one team from the next in the playoffs, in the NCAAs – it is always the team that can bring their A-game when it counts the most, and particularly when they need to bounce back."
Here is a brief summary of Dr. Spencer Wood's presentation, "Mental Skills and Toughness Training for the 21st Century Athlete":
Wood explained that great athletes consistently display excellence in four areas: composure, concentration, confidence and commitment. These four C's appear in very special circumstances in sports, particularly when an athlete needs to bounce back from a mistake. He gave the example of how Tiger Woods, at one point in his career, led all male and female golfers in the statistic of highest percentage of birdies (one shot under par) immediately following bogeys (one shot over par).
"This dude's at his best right after being at his worst. That's special," said Wood. "I didn't pull this out of page 178 from a sports psych manual. This is real life!"
Wood used another set of letters to define the steps of bounce-back. The three F's of flushing, fixing and forgetting the mistake can be executed in two or three seconds when practiced.
"The first 10 seconds after a mistake are critical," Wood said. "You have to have a routine in there which distracts your mind from the ability to shift the consequences and outcomes."
To flush a mistake, control your emotion with deep breathing and good body language with your eyes, chin and chest. Fixing mistakes involves inside-out imagery, picturing a play as if you are actually in the moment. The likelihood of success on the next play hinges on the quality of that inside-out image, so it's important to picture the image with as much detail as possible.
Following that imagery should be one or two tough, powerful and believable sentences, which will distract and occupy your mind after a major mistake. "I never miss in the clutch" is tough and powerful, but not believable and also not positive. The brain cannot always distinguish between "do" and "don't do," so it's key to keep the sentences positive.
Toward the end of his presentation, Wood stressed that it's not mistakes that hurt great athletes but the athletes' response to those mistakes. He encouraged the Tech student-athletes to be "thermostat athletes", who self-regulate, rather than "thermometer athletes," who reflect the environment.
"Great athletes are not great because they are perfect," said Wood. "The truly great ones are great because they have an almost perfect reaction to their mistakes. If you're a team and you respond that way, you're almost unscoutable.
"If the other team can force you into a rare error, you're about to play your best."
Photo by Layne Weitzel
