Tip #9 Write Your Big Goals Down
What I mean by this is not necessarily writing down goals associated with tryouts, but just your general big goals that you want to accomplish this season. What this does is it sets your purpose for the work that you do. You want to work beyond tryouts and beyond making the team, so setting goals that are associated with that are important.
You want to think about your big goals and your long range plan, and try outs and the season are a part of that plan. Think about tryouts being your next milestone, know you want to come in and have a great performance;but as far as visualization and work ethic you want to visualize far beyond the tryout experience.
- Making the starting line up
- Being All Conference team
- Winning State Championship
- Earning college basketball scholarship
These are the types things you want to be visualizing and working towards, and preparing for tryouts being a step towards these big goals.
Tip #10 Visualize The Environment And Your Performance
Our last tryout tip focused on visualizing and writing down your big goals beyond tryouts, thinking more about long term and your career. Now that you’ve done that I want you to take a step back and look at the upcoming milestone, which is tryouts.
What I want you to do today is really visualize yourself going through that tryout experience and what you hope to accomplish performance wise.
- I want you to visualize what you feel like that tryout experience will be like externally, as far as things outside of your control.
- How intense it will be
- How fast it will be
- Your competition
- Know that guys will be rushing, excited, making mistakes
Really just picture the energy of the gym and the whole experience.
2. Visualize your performance and the things you want to execute in that tryout experience.
3. Review the work you have been doing the last couple months and recognize any adjustments that need to be made to your training program. Whether its:
- Being more intense
- Being less intense
- Running more
- Lifting more
- Shooting more
Whatever it is that needs to be done to really execute your game plan going into tryouts, now is the time to make those adjustments!
With 20 days left you still have time to make HUGE gains in your tryout situation.
Tip #11 COMPETE COMPETE COMPETE
What competing means to us as it relates to tryouts is beating yourself on a daily basis.
- Beating yourself in your mile time
- Beating yourself on the bench press
- Beating yourself in your shooting drills
Focus on getting up every day to out perform yourself in your drills and in your exercises from the day before. An important part of this tip involves tracking your results. Tracking your results involves counting how many shots you can make out of 50, knowing how strong you are by tracking how many times you can push up a certain weight, knowing how fast you are by recording your mile times.
While your goal is to compete with yourself and continue to beat your PR’s and shot records, you can’t expect to beat your times and shot numbers literally every day. There are going to be peaks and valleys, but your intention and focus is to beat yourself every day.
If your purpose is the same every day, then you can only go up from where you’re at and will be ready to roll by tryouts!
Tip #12 Identify The Sticky Points
The idea of this tip is to really take an inventory of those areas in which you may be struggling and put a lot of awareness and concentration in that area.
A lot of people tend to avoid areas of struggle, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you ignore these areas.
If it’s the mid range pull up jump shot you’re struggling with set your purpose, set a specific number of shots you’re going to take, and put extra emphasis on them.
Know the areas you struggle in just as well as you know the areas you excel in.