Set The Tone - Helping Your Athletes Switch From Classroom To Sports Mode

I know there are coaches that feel that the locker room is the athlete's domain and they don' t want to mess with it...but I believe the locker room is an important place for our teams and that we should put some time and energy into making it our own.

Think about it.  Your team, whether they're in high school or college, have been in class all day and we need to switch them from academic mode to athletic mode.  One way to do that is to focus on the first place they go before practice...the locker room.  Some of you may coach at a high level and have buckets of money at your disposal, while others of you may be club coaches with no real locker room to speak of...regardless, that switch can be flipped.

When I coached at the club and high school levels, the locker room was a shared space so I couldn't make it volleyball only.  So I made the gym "ours" and you can too.  Put up team pictures on the walls of all of your teams...from the 7th grade B team on up to varsity, or your 12 & unders on up to your 18′s team.  Not only does it give your players ownership in the program and a sense of pride, it also gives the little one's girls to look up to.  Put up "did you know?" facts about your players and coaches so that players and parents get to know the other folks who are always around.  Have a place where you keep everyone informed about your players who've gone on to play at the collegiate level so that your current players know who they are when they come back to visit.

Our locker room doesn't really lend itself to too much decoration, but we do have a bulletin board that's visible to them as soon as they open the door and we've made that volleyball central.  Everyday I put up a new motivational quote in the middle of the board, we keep updated team and conference stats on there, as well as team goals, itineraries, and any newspaper write-ups we've received.  They know that's the place to go for any of our team info.  I don't think it matters exactly what's up there, as long as it triggers the switch from personal to team time.

Do you have any tips for getting your athletes to make that mental switch?  I'd love to hear about them!

Dawn Redd is the Head Volleyball Coach at Beloit College. You can join Coach Dawn's community of coaching nerds over at her blog, http://www.coachdawnwrites.com, where she talks about motivating athletes and building successful teams.

Twitter: @CoachDawnWrites