Performing under pressure makes prospects stand out to college coaches

Coaches want to know how you responded when facing the bear

If you are an athlete, you’ve dreamed over and again about hitting the winning goal at the last second, striking out the toughest hitter in the bottom of the last inning, making a game saving play in the waning moments of a match, or running your personal best time in the biggest meet of your life. Competitors do that because it’s part of our makeup. It’s engrained in us and we want to know if we can rise to the occasion while others buckle under the pressure.

Realizing those dreams in real time and in real situations is another matter, though. Only a few have the internal facility to come through when everything is on the line. It’s called heart by some, courage by others, and it’s what every college coach searches for in prospects they recruit.

As a prospect, how do you prove that you have the capacity to fight through the nerves which others are incapable of beating back? How can you demonstrate to a college coach that when called upon, you will be the go-to athlete at crunch time? There are ways to provide this proof, but you have to do the work that’s required. If you do, coaches will notice and it can catapult you to the top of recruiting white boards.

First, following a contest which you have clearly demonstrated that you have performed exceptionally well under pressure, documenting your thoughts is a must. Thinking back to the situation and writing it down, that is, describing the details of the scenario, offers your perspective of the events and puts the coach in the position to visualize what happened. Then, recounting your thoughts, how you focused on the moment, the impact it had on you physically and mentally, and what you knew was going to be required of you at that instant, all add your inside view for a coach. Finally, recapturing what you specifically did and how you managed to isolate your thoughts and actions in such a way to perform to your full potential allows a coach to see your heart and your courage.

This is not an easy undertaking and it is not something which you typically see in messages to college coaches. But if you can muster up an accurate, clear account of the events surrounding an extraordinary moment, coaches will appreciate knowing that you have it inside of you to extend yourself in a crisis, that you did not fold, that you handled the pressure.

Every athlete wanting to play at the college level, or at least realistically capable of playing at that level, has run headlong into these types of pressurized moments. Those are the moments which push our competitive drive and make us want to be in that position again. Even failure in these times offer lessons worthy of our re-examination and permit us to analyze our frailties and weaknesses for coaches to see. In those seconds, which can seem like minutes and hours at the time, can connect you to college coaches in a deeply personal way. See, they are competitors, too. They have been thrown into similar circumstances and they appreciate athletes who recognize that when they have faced the bear, win or lose, they did not fear the bear.  They did not back down.

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