Coach and Captain Guide to Increasing Athlete Resilience

Aashna Sundesha
Dec 25, 2022
6 min read

Updated: Jan 16, 2023

A 4-step guide for leaders in the collegiate sports space to help create an environment that supports the development of athlete resilience.

Johns Hopkins University Volleyball Team

Surely, I don’t have to convince you that resilience is something all athletes should have to be able to succeed. Unfortunately, not all athletes are born resilient. Fortunately, however, it is something that can be developed. While a fair amount of resilience is dependent on the athlete themselves, I wanted to shine a light on how coaches, staff, and captains – their environment – can play a role in developing a fellow student athlete’s resilience. But, before I jump into the how, it is important to clarify what exactly resilience is.

What Is Resilience?

We’ve all heard the sports pundits and gurus throw the word around. Good performance is lauded with “she’s got great resilience” and poor comebacks are critiqued with “bad bounce-back ability”. But what does it mean?

The ability to capitalise on your characteristics to maintain performance under pressure is vital for sustained good performance [1]. This ability is resilience. It is often referred to in high-pressure situations and can further be divided into two types – robust and rebound [1].

1. Robust resilience is the pre-emptive quality in an athlete maintaining their well-being and performance when under pressure [1]. A robustly resilient athlete can handle greater loads of pressure [2] before considering the situation to be stressful at all.

2. Rebound resilience is the athlete’s bounce-back quality seen when a temporary disruption to their well-being and performance under pressure, is met with a quick return to normal functioning [1]. A rebound resilient athlete has more resources available to them to face and recover from a disruption [2] leading to faster recovery.

Hence, the qualities of being able to maintain, improve, or bounce back to a personally normal level of well-being and performance are characteristic of a resilient athlete. The two types of resilience call for their development and training to be both [1] proactive – to build robust resilience – and reactive – to build rebound resilience. So how, you ask, should you go about doing this?

Components Of Sustained Success

According to researchers in the field, sustained success through resilience is trainable and has three components that are constantly interacting with each other – personal qualities, challenge mindset, and a facilitative environment [1]. While athletes are constantly told to assess and work on their resilience based on their personal qualities and challenge mindset, the third condiment of sustained success often goes unacknowledged. This is the vital role a facilitative environment plays in creating and increasing athletic resilience. That’s where you come in!

Loughborough University Men's Lacrosse Team

Facilitative Environment

As someone in a leadership position you presumably have greater control of your training environment than your athletes. The environment in which an athlete is placed – its facilities, stressors, values, and culture – impact their ability to grow personally and in their sport [3]. However, these factors are either out of the athlete’s control or the athlete is afraid of confrontation or feels isolated and avoids bringing up environmental issues to leadership. So, coaches, captains, and staff alike should work towards creating a facilitative environment - with high challenge and high support (explained in step 1 below) - to ensure the production of resilient and successful athletes.

As a coach would you prefer a culture of mediocrity where your athletes are simply going through the motions unstimulated or are you constantly working towards a supportive challenge environment where your students support each other, take ownership of their goals, and learn from their mistakes?

That might as well have been a rhetorical question but of course, the answer is easier said than done. The next section reviews a few steps you can take as a coach or captain to build a facilitative environment to increase resilience in your athletes.

How to Build a Facilitative Environment

1. Identify Your Current Environment

For you to generate a shift in the environment, you need to identify the type of environment you are currently in. This can be done by assessing the levels of challenge and support (Fig 1) in your team. Fletcher and Sarkar’s 2016 matrix divides training environments into 4 categories (Fig. 1):

1. Stagnant environment: Low Support & Low Challenge

“Just going through the motions and surviving”

2. Comfortable environment: High Support & Low Challenge

“A happy performer will be a great performer”

3. Unrelenting environment: Low Support & High Challenge

“Sink or Swim”

4. Facilitative environment: High Support & High Challenge

“We’re in this together”

Fig. 1 - challenge-support matrix for developing resilience [1]

Ask yourself [1]: Can my athletes openly talk about the challenges they are facing and their resilience? Is failure being viewed as a threatening stressor or an opportunity to learn? Are my athletes genuinely excited to do resilience-building exercises or is it just something they think they have to “tick off”?

Once you have identified where you are, you can start working towards a facilitative environment with high challenge – having high expectations of your players to ensure accountability and responsibility [9] – and high support – allowing athletes their self-development through mutual learning and trust.

2. Survey your Athletes for Environmental Issues

To bring about a positive change in your environment, it is essential to consider how your athletes perceive their environment and its needs. Not only is this insightful for you as a leader, but also makes the athlete feel valued and heard.

When National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 athletes from 8 different sports were interviewed about their perceptions of mental toughness, many mentioned how a “positive atmosphere” [4] helped them build mental toughness, hence resilience (Fig. 2).

Similarly, Olympic Games and World Championships athletes in the UK have mentioned how environmental issues can be a source of organizational stress in preparation for significant competitions [5] (Fig 2).

Fig. 2 - Environmental Facilitators & Stressors [4] [5]

Hence, regularly interviewing your athletes one-on-one or through anonymised surveys might bring to light environmental factors impeding their performance that would be impossible to gauge otherwise. By scheduling bi-monthly or monthly meetings/interviews with your athletes for feedback, you will be able to identify positive and negative components of your training environment to be able to make meaningful steps towards creating a facilitative one to improve resilience.

3. Increase Challenge

One way to increase resilience by creating a more facilitative environment is through Pressure Inurement Training (PIT) [1]. PIT systematically manipulates the training environment to increase pressure [1] to allow the athlete to become more comfortable in discomfort making them better prepared for unforeseen high-pressure tournament situations. However, remember that PIT only makes sense if the added stress isn’t too much for your athlete to handle [7] and they already have notable skill acquisition and automaticity. You can implement training environment manipulation via PIT in 2 ways:

a) Manipulate demands

Type: introduce competition in practice
Property: introduce new drills, constraints on regular game rules, and planned distractions
Dimension: increase frequency and intensity of practice

b) Manipulate significance

Relevance: notice beliefs and attitudes about resilience training, invite important others to watch practice
Importance: stress attention given to goals
Consequences: introduce punishment for underperformance

4. Increase support

Of course, high demand without support can be demotivating and stressful. So, PIT also mentions creating channels of high support through [1]:

a) Increased learning:

Communication: Structure your team in such a way that enables athletes to form strong relationships with teammates and support staff to open channels of communication for learning from each other [8]
Culture: consistently reinforce a team ethos of empathy and support [6]

b) Increased practice:

As a means to create more opportunity for feedback about performance
- Motivational Feedback: provided if the challenge is exceeding their capacity
- Developmental Feedback: provided if the challenge is meeting or undervaluing their capacity

In this way, you can start creating a culture of supportive challenge that pushes your athletes from merely surviving to one step closer to consistently thriving. Understandably, you can’t take a group of resilient individuals and expect a resilient team, nonetheless, this is a start!

If these are steps you think would help in your training leave a like below or let me know similar ideas you have had or already implement with your team. Thank you for reading!

Aashna Sundesha