Player confidence at all levels of play, from youth recreational to the professional athlete, is fragile.  Handle with care!  The challenge with building confidence is that it is such a fragile construct.  An athlete might be confident one minute and then a play or two later have their confidence shattered.  It is not uncommon for an athlete's confidence to fluctuate throughout the course of a season.  Every player goes through a slump and needs to rebuild their self belief.

Competitive sports is more about failure than success.  On average, soccer and hockey players miss 90% of their shot attempts.  Baseball and softball's best hitters are out 65 to 70% of the time.  Basketball player miss half of their shot attempts.  Quarterbacks do not complete 40% of their pass attempts.  All of this natural failure tends to erode an athlete's confidence.   How a player deals with the built-in failure of the game eventually determines how successful they will be.

The key is not eliminating all doubts and fear, but having the player muster up enough confidence to perform despite the doubts and distractions. 

Coach's confidence becomes player confidence

Youth athlete's especially look to their coach for confidence.  Ideally, athletes should be able to create confidence on their own by focusing on their personal strengths, past successes, and hard work.  In reality, a significant number base their confidence largely on how much confidence they perceive their coach has in them.  This is especially true for female athletes since they are relationship network based more than their male counterparts.

A young softball player had a batting average over 0.400 in the previous spring season, but when it came to trying out to make the fall season's team, the new coach was not sure he wanted her on the team.  It was only through the pleading of the previous year's coach that the player got an extended tryout.  Eventually, the new coach begrudgingly took her onto the team for the fall season.  In the first game, this young player hit two triples and a single.  During the two practices the next week the coach criticized her fielding and worked to "fix" her swing.  During the next weekend's game, the player hit the ball hard but got out in all three at-bats.  In the following week's practices, the criticism and swing fixing continued.  In the batting line-up for the next weekend's game, the player was dropped to the bottom of the order and was moved into a substitute outfielder role.  The player responded by striking out in two of her three at-bats that game.  The rest of the fall season was downhill from there.

Between the fall season and next spring season, the player switched organizations and coaches.  The new coach recognized the player's potential and took steps to rebuild her confidence.  During the next spring, the player's batting average was back over 0.400 and she became a key fielding contributor to the team's tournament play success.

What was the difference between the fall and spring season:  the perception of the coach's confidence in the player's ability.

Steps to building player confidence

As a coach, you play a prominent role in both the development and maintenance of your athlete's confidence.  As a coach, you can proactively build confidence until it becomes solid and stable and then monitor and repair it during the inevitable storms.  Here are a few steps to building, maintaining, and repairing player confidence.

1. Focus on the potential:  Building confidence begins with seeing their potential by envisioning them as polished players even though they may be pretty rough.  Do not get caught up with what they can do today but focus on what they can do tomorrow.  Keep the interference of their today capabilities away from what they can be.
2. Plant the seeds of success:  After you get a positive picture of what an athlete can become, it is time to start planting seeds by helping them see the same picture.   For most players, it is not what they are that holds them back.  It is what they think they are not.  Planting seeds of success is a clear way of showing your athletes that you believe in them.  It might take awhile, but the confidence you show in them is the catalyst that gets them believing in themselves.
3. Enable their belief:  Coaches build confidence by selling athletes on their own unique abilities and talents.  They set high expectations and get them to believe that they are capable of achieving those expectations by highlighting proof points along the way.  This helps athletes get out of their own way and build confidence that overcomes their self-imposed doubts and fears.
4. Provide a simple specific actionable plan:   Once you have set the expectations, take them through the daily and weekly steps necessary to obtain these expectations.  Highlight the specific, yet simple, activities and achievements necessary for success by breaking down your vision of their potential into short and medium term actionable steps.  Have the player's close their eyes and walk through these steps until they culminate into obtaining the vision.
5. Emphasize hard work deserves success:  Athletes earn victory only through hard work.  When you feel like you have outworked your opponents, you feel like you deserve success because you earned it more than they have.  Hard work is not a sacrifice, it is something that is good for them and an investment in their potential.  Every time they go the extra mile, they are earning an advantage over their competition.
6. Create early and often successes:  Building confidence requires proof points of success.  Confidence is most fragile in the early stages, so structure practices and schedules to build in early successes.  Work toward success early and then let them succeed.  Conversely, do not put them in a situation where they will fail miserably.  Schedule scrimmages with easier teams at the beginning of the season and leave the power-house organizations for later when their confidence is high.
7. Reinforce the positive:  Look for opportunities to praise early successes publicly.  By accentuating the strengths, a solid foundation of confidence is built that can be leveraged in the future.  Keep the constructive feedback private and infrequent.  Spend more time inflating the people around you than deflating them.  When players struggle with success, tell them you believe in them.  Tell them to trust themselves, that they are better than they currently believe they are.

As a coach, what you say and do does more to create a player's confidence than any specific action by the player.  If you can see the players' and team's potential, articulate a vision with actionable steps, create early success that can be reinforced, then your team will play with confidence and achieve many successes.

Are you willing to put in the up front work to articulate the vision of potential so that the team can attain success?

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