Melanie Crow describes her teammates as calm. Carly Kan describes them as steady.
The two words come from the same idea: Missouri volleyball players know they are good, but they don’t get ahead of themselves.
Ranked No. 25 in the American Volleyball Coaches Association poll, the Tigers are 21-5 overall and 12-2 in the Southeastern Conference. They sit near the top of the SEC standings, right below No. 6 Florida.
Still, they don’t get ahead of themselves.
Missouri volleyball and Mizzou Athletics put a heavy emphasis on mental training. Kan said it gives the Tigers an edge over their opponents by focusing on one game at a time.
“Mental performance is really helpful,” she said. “We’re not perfect, and we’re not always going to be thinking right, so having that mental toughness is going to put us further and give us that edge we need.”
Scotta Morton, the Mizzou Athletics mental performance director, works with the volleyball team in this aspect. She also works with the women’s basketball and softball teams.
Morton teaches skills for performance enhancement. She talks about confidence and concentration during 30-minute mental performance sessions, which she holds once a week.
“A lot of it is about finding the team identity, having that healthy perspective with sport, having team cohesion and building a good relationship with coaches,” Morton said. “Every athlete who meets with a mental performance coach knows they’re here to grow and get better, and just like they go to the strength room to build muscle, we’re building brain muscle. You can’t physically see it, but when you start using it you’ll start seeing rewards.”
One theme Morton pushes is a “right here, right now” mindset. Athletes can have big dreams, like conference and regional championships, she said, but if they do not focus on the task at hand, they could let those dreams slip out of their hands.
Crow said the players want an SEC championship this year, but they’re focusing on the present. She said that comes from Morton’s coaching.
“We are very good at staying in the moment and not looking way ahead to bigger games or ideas that could come in the future,” Crow said. “That all comes from the mental performance piece.”
Crow, a transfer from Mississippi, enjoys the mental performance training. She agrees with Kan that it gives the team an edge in competition and helps make everyone more well-rounded.
Crow said Ole Miss had a sports psychologist, but the training she received there was not anything like what Missouri has.
“There, we basically talked about how to get past arguing with each other, or how to get past negative attitudes, and it was kind of always dealing with something negative or a problem,” she said. “Whereas here, we focus on the positives around us, and we talk very specific things we can do differently to help us.”
Crow said even the five losses Missouri has had this year have been turned positive, which is something she did not experience at Ole Miss.
“Even when we lose a set or a match, none of us are angry or discouraged,” she said. “We’re just like: ‘OK, that happened. What can we do differently?’ And it’s so calm because we all believe we can go out there and achieve whatever we set our minds to, and that’s reassuring.”
Morton also attends practices and almost every match. She said she wants to meet the athletes where they are mentally at, and going to practice helps her gain that perspective.
Each session is different because each day is different for the athletes. Morton has some things she knows are necessary to talk about in every session. For example, if she sees the athletes are distracted in practice, she can talk about concentration.
But most sessions are open for discussion. She said she wants to help facilitate conversation between the athletes because if the athletes are not connecting mentally, competition will be that much harder.
She asks questions like: “Who are you? Who do you want to be? What does the path between who you are and who you want to be look like? What is this team’s identity?”
“Sometimes we’re building each other up and helping each other, sometimes we talk about what we can do better, and she’ll kind of talk about what she sees too,” Kan said. “It’s kind of a team discussion, and we’re all pretty vulnerable because we are letting each other know what’s going on in our head and see how we can improve on what’s next.”
“Controlling the controllables” is another mindset Morton wants the team to adopt. Statistics or the outcome of a game are things athletes cannot physically control, she said, but they can control their attitude.
“We’re not the ones voting on rankings and we have no control over what Florida and Texas A&M does and if they’re ready to play or not,” Morton said. “But we can control what’s on our side of the net, and we can control the effort and attitude in practice every day.”
This mindset can help when teams experience a loss. It is easy to get wrapped up in what everyone did wrong, but the biggest part of losing is what athletes do after, Morton said.
When Missouri lost in the beginning of their season, Morton helped the team take a step back and figure out what exactly they needed to do next. It resulted in an 13-match winning streak.
“The more the loss stings, the more you hold on to it and the less likely you are to be here right now,” Morton said. “It’s not like, ‘Take it and put it in the background like it never happened,’ but rather, ‘Let’s take it; let’s learn from it to help us move on.’”
The team can “control the controllables” in the middle of a winning streak, too. When Missouri played Kentucky the first time this season on Oct. 23, Kan said everyone was quick to think the Tigers would sweep the Wildcats.
Before they knew it, Missouri was down 2-1, and the match went to five sets before the Tigers could clinch a win.
“We were like, ‘Let’s sweep them; we got this,’ and then we lose the next two sets,” Kan said. “Refocusing back to the present helped us, and it has been task-focused ever since.”
Morton lays out a foundation for her athletes, but she says it is really up to them how much they get out of it. The most important thing for her is that they realize the mental performance piece is way bigger than sport.
“See, the mental performance thing isn’t just for athletes,” Morton said. “It’s for me, it’s for you. You’re going to use these same skills in the workforce, in the real world. The challenges and adversity you’re going to continue to face as you get older don’t go away.”
_Edited by Tyler Kraft | tkraft@themaneater.com_