As a coach of a select team I had to take a hard look at a motivation challenge last year. After a tough weekend where we were outhustled I sent this to them.
A note to our valued team:
Gang,
Obviously we are facing some effort and motivation challenges this weekend. This is inevitable during the course of a long select basketball season and I have had several teams deal with this specifically on Memorial Day Weekend.
On the other hand, we didn’t see our opponents struggle with early morning game or other challenges.
So let’s disengage a bit as individuals and be curious for 10 minutes about the science of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in basketball and off the court and how it relates to sustained effort, happiness, and success for you.
I care about each of you as individuals as well as our team culture, and I think we can use this to our mutual benefit.
Coach Chris
Basketball Mental Toughness: What Actually Works
By Christopher Corbett, Founder of BasketballTrainer.com and AustinYouthBasketball.com, Co-Founder of BasketballHQ.com and CoachTube.com
I’ve trained basketball players for over two decades. I played point guard at the NAIA level and still compete in masters basketball in Europe. I’ve helped more than 40 players find homes at high-academic college programs.
Here’s what I’ve learned about mental toughness: most of what gets written about it is overcomplicated nonsense. Sports psychology jargon, visualization scripts, biofeedback devices—none of that matters if a kid can’t handle getting yelled at by a coach or bounce back after a bad quarter.
Mental toughness isn’t mysterious. It’s trainable. And it starts with how players respond to adversity in practice, not in some meditation app.
What Mental Toughness Actually Looks Like
The mentally tough players I’ve trained share a few traits:
They don’t make excuses. Bad calls happen. Teammates miss rotations. The gym is too hot or the rims are tight. Mentally tough players adjust and compete anyway. The excuse-makers never make it.
They respond to coaching. When I correct a player, I’m watching their reaction as much as their technique. Do they get defensive? Shut down? Roll their eyes? Or do they nod, apply the feedback, and try again? Coachability is mental toughness in action.
They compete when it’s hard. Anyone can play well when shots are falling. Mental toughness shows up during a cold streak, when you’re tired, when you’re down 15. The players who keep competing—keep defending, keep cutting, keep talking—are the ones coaches want on their roster.
They prepare the same way every time. Routines matter. The mentally tough players I work with don’t need to “get up” for big games because they treat every practice and every game the same way. Their preparation doesn’t depend on the opponent or the stakes.
Why Most “Mental Toughness Training” Fails
A lot of mental performance content overcomplicates this. You’ll read about neuro-linguistic programming, cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, heart rate variability training—tools that might help elite professionals but are irrelevant for 99% of youth and high school players.
The basics matter more:
- Can you focus for an entire practice without checking out?
- Can you miss three shots in a row and still want the fourth one?
- Can you hear criticism without pouting?
- Can you show up ready to work on days you don’t feel like it?
If a player can’t do these things consistently, no amount of sports psychology is going to fix it. Master the fundamentals of competing first.
How to Actually Build Mental Toughness
Put Players in Uncomfortable Situations
Mental toughness develops through stress, not around it. Practice should include situations that are hard:
Pressure free throws. Make players shoot free throws when they’re tired, with consequences for misses. Run a sprint for every miss. Or
make the whole team’s conditioning depend on one player’s free throw shooting. This simulates pressure better than any visualization exercise.
Competitive finishing drills. Keep score in everything. Players need to experience winning and losing in small doses constantly so neither feels unfamiliar when the stakes are real.
Play against better competition. Nothing builds toughness like getting challenged physically and having to figure it out. Seek out better competition rather than avoiding it.
Address the Response, Not Just the Mistake
When a player makes a physical mistake—a bad pass, a missed rotation—I correct the technique. But I’m paying equal attention to their response. Did they hang their head? Did they blame a teammate? Did they immediately get back on defense and compete on the next play?
The response matters as much as the correction. Good coaches address both.
Build Routines That Don’t Depend on Feeling
Players who rely on “feeling good” to perform well are mentally fragile. Routines create consistency independent of mood.
Pre-game routines. Pre-free throw routines. Practice preparation routines. These should be the same whether you’re playing for a championship or an empty gym on a Tuesday.
When a player tells me they “weren’t feeling it” during a bad performance, that’s a red flag. Mentally tough players perform regardless of how they feel because their preparation doesn’t depend on emotion.
Let Them Struggle
Parents and coaches sometimes protect players too much. They make excuses for them, argue with refs for them, pull them from challenging situations before they can work through difficulty.
This is counterproductive. Players need to experience failure, struggle, and disappointment in controlled doses. They need to learn they can survive a bad game and come back stronger. If adults constantly rescue them, they never develop the confidence that comes from working through adversity themselves.
What Players Can Do On Their Own
Control What You Can Control
You can’t control refs, playing time, teammates’ effort, or whether shots fall. You can control your effort, your attitude, your preparation, and how you respond to adversity.
Mentally tough players obsess over what they control and ignore what they don’t. This sounds simple but requires constant practice.
Develop a Short Memory
Basketball requires moving on quickly. Miss a shot? Next play. Turn it over? Next play. Get scored on? Next play.
Players who dwell on mistakes compound them. One bad play becomes two, then three, then a bad quarter, then a bad game. The skill of letting go and refocusing immediately is trainable—but only if you practice it consciously.
Embrace Hard Coaching
Some of the best coaches I know are demanding, direct, and sometimes loud. Players who can only perform for coaches who coddle them are limiting their own development.
If you want to play at higher levels, you need to be able to hear hard truths, absorb criticism quickly, and use it to improve—without needing a conversation about your feelings first. This is a skill. Develop it.
Put in Work When No One’s Watching
Mental toughness and work ethic are closely related. Players who only work hard when coaches are watching, when the gym is full, when someone might post them on social media—they’re not mentally tough. They’re performers.
The players who become something special are the ones putting in work alone. Early mornings, empty gyms, nobody filming. That’s where toughness is built.
A Note for Parents
Your kid’s mental toughness development depends significantly on how you respond to their struggles.
If you make excuses for them after bad games, they learn to make excuses. If you blame coaches or refs, they learn to blame external factors. If you rescue them from every difficult situation, they never learn they can handle difficulty.
The best thing you can do is let them struggle, support them without fixing everything for them, and model the response you want them to have. Stay positive but stay out of the way.
The Bottom Line
Mental toughness isn’t about psychology tricks or expensive training programs. It’s about how players respond to adversity, day after day, in practice and in games.
It’s built through:
- Facing hard situations rather than avoiding them
- Taking ownership rather than making excuses
- Responding to coaching rather than resisting it
- Showing up prepared regardless of how you feel
- Putting in work when nobody’s watching
Some players have more natural resilience than others. But every player can improve their mental toughness through deliberate practice—just like shooting or ball-handling.
The question is whether they’re willing to do the work when it’s uncomfortable. That willingness is mental toughness itself.
I require work ethic and coachability from every athlete who trains in my gym. Those two traits predict success better than any physical measurement. If you’re serious about development, start there.
Statistics on Basketball Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation for Those Who Want to Dive Deeper
Here are 10 relevant statistics on the roles of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in basketball success and happiness, cited from the provided search results:
1. A majority of college male basketball players participate for intrinsic reasons more than extrinsic reasons, according to a study of 12 players.[1]
2. Players with higher intrinsic motivation and task orientation scores participate in basketball because they desire and enjoy the satisfaction of learning and developing new skills.[1]
3. Players with higher extrinsic motivation scores tend to experience greater a motivation (lack of motivation) compared to those with higher intrinsic motivation.[1]
4. Verbal aggression from a coach had a positive correlation with extrinsic motivation in a study of 180 Greek teen basketball athletes.[2]
5. Participation in organized after-school sports is an important factor related to students’ competency and happiness in physical education.[2]
6. Among 1,258 elite youth athletes in the USA, key motivating factors included fun, socializing, competition opportunities, and the thrill of play.[2]
7. In a study of 256 female high school basketball players in Korea, motivation related to skill development, fulfillment, amusement and health had a positive effect on task-goal orientation.[3]
8. The same study found motivation for skill development, accomplishment and health was associated with greater self-goal orientation among the players.[3]
9. In a study comparing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation groups, the extrinsically motivated group shooting for awards 3 times a week had 6.9 percentage points higher free throw percentage in games compared to the intrinsically motivated group.[4]
10. A Spanish study of 180 young basketball players found a positive relationship between perceived performance and intrinsic motivation.[5]
Citations:
[1] https://openriver.winona.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=leadershipeducationcapstones
[2] https://soar.suny.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12648/4036/pes_synthesis/94/fulltext%20%281%29.pdf?
[3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8819225/
[4] https://commons.und.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4982&context=theses
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7767293/
