Case study youth basketball player

[Transcript] I had a defining moment when I worked with a  14 year old player some years ago, let’s call him Tod, who came to me with his parents saying that he was on the verge of quitting basketball because he wasn’t getting playing time on his travel team.

Tod had been a standout player for the last 2 years but this season, for some unexplained reason, according to his dad who said:  “it’s like his skills just disappear whenever he steps onto the court in a competitive game. In practice, he’s amazing and dominates. He knows it, we know it, the coaches know it, we’ve tried everything….and yet, it continues.”

Tod took his dad’s advice early in the season and went to the coaches and asked them what he needed to do to improve his game and get more playing time. They both said that he needed to get more aggressive, take more chances, push himself harder and to just believe in himself.

So Tod did everything he could to follow that advice. And yet, 2 months later, he’s still sitting the bench far more than he should be with his talent.

I could see Tod’s eyes water as his dad told the story from his perspective.  His dad, as far as I could tell, seemed to be the ideal sports parent (and I’ve seen plenty who aren’t, believe me).

Everyone was SO frustrated, including the coaches who later told me that Tod is the hardest working kid on the team and has all the talent in the world if he would just use it. They were at a loss but couldn’t keep throwing him in there and risking the team losing crucial games.

I was so moved by how this kid’s entire life seemed to be at risk and all determined by how he showed up on the basketball court. It was a major defining point for Tod and it was affecting his whole family. I felt like in a decade from now, He was either going to be D1 All american or he was going to be picking up food behind a dumpster and fighting addictions.

I vowed and committed that I would get this kid past this mental/emotional hurdle. I had some basic tools at that time but I knew the normal stuff wasn’t going to cut it for Tod. I knew we had to somehow go deeper. We had to go to the core of the problem and eliminate it there.  We had to go where his coaches and his parents had no idea what was really going on with him.

I took my researching skills to a new level and I hunted the ends of the earth to find answers… and to cut to the chase, I finally found something that would change this kid’s life forever and mine too.  I discovered that there is a sequence to reaching the causes of these types of stubborn mental blocks.  It’s like a combination lock that even if you have the right numbers, you still have to do it in the right order to open the lock.