How to Build a Pre-Game Routine That Actually Works

Your kid gets to the field an hour early and spends fifty of those minutes doing nothing in particular.

Some stretching. Some standing around. Some scrolling.

Then the whistle goes and they spend ten minutes a half step behind. By the time they feel like themselves, the game has already decided what kind of game it is.

Or the opposite. Wound tight in the parking lot, everything left in the warm-up, flat by the second quarter.

Two different problems, same cause. Nobody gave their attention a job, so the moment handed it one.

So here is the hour, written out. Read it first and decide afterward whether it is your kid's problem.

What should my athlete do in the hour before a game?

Six things, in order, on a clock. Park what is on their mind. Trade expectations for two jobs. Warm the body without grading it. Rehearse the first play in first person. Give themselves specific reasons to be confident. Then welcome the nerves instead of fighting them.

Move the clock to fit your sport's arrival time.

T-minus 60. Park it. Whatever is loud in their head from school or home, they write down. Phone notes, back of a receipt, does not matter. Then it goes in the bag and stays there. Nothing on that list can be solved on the field.

T-minus 50. Two jobs, not one expectation. "Have a big game" is a verdict waiting to happen, not a job. Instead, two things they control, one physical and one mental. Get to the ball early. Let go of mistakes in one breath. Two is the limit. Three is a checklist and they will quit running it.

T-minus 40. Warm the body up, do not grade it. A rough warm-up is not a forecast. Nobody has ever been asked after a game how their batting practice went. The warm-up is not an audition, and it is not for fixing mechanics. Mechanics were due Wednesday.

T-minus 20. Rehearse the first one. Not a highlight reel. The first serve. The first at-bat. The first fifty meters. From behind their own eyes, in real time, felt rather than watched like film. Rehearse the opening.

T-minus 10. Confidence on purpose. Three specific reasons they have earned a good day, from the last two weeks. Not "you got this." Things that happened. I hit the corner eleven times out of fifteen Tuesday. I came back from down 4-1. Confidence built from evidence survives a bad first quarter. A pep talk does not.

T-minus 2. Let the nerves be nerves. Shaky hands and a fast heart are the body getting ready. That is fuel, and every good athlete feels it. The ones who struggle are the ones reading it as a warning, and the label they put on it in that moment is most of what decides the next ten minutes.

That handles the hour. It does not handle the four seconds before a serve.

What is a pre-shot routine, and how is it different?

A pre-game routine gets an athlete ready to compete. A pre-shot routine gets them ready for one rep, in the seconds before a self-paced skill: a serve, a free throw, an at-bat, a putt, a start, a shot. Same idea, much shorter clock, and it repeats a hundred times in a competition.

Four beats.

Clear. The last rep is over. Good or bad, it is gone. One breath, clean slate.

Decide. Pick the plan and commit. Which serve. Which target. Which pitch they are hunting. This is where routines fall apart most often, and an athlete still deciding at contact will guide it instead of hitting it.

See it. One quick picture or feeling of the rep they intend to make, specific and in first person, rehearsed rather than wished for.

Go. One cue, then react. See the ball. Smooth. Target. One, not three swing thoughts. The first three beats earn the right to stop thinking on the fourth.

Cole and Lane are high school shotgun shooters, about as pure a test of this as a sport gets. The gun does not care how fast you are. There is a target, a station, and whatever is happening between the ears in the seconds before the call. Both built a real routine. Both got promoted a class, both shot at nationals in Sparta, and both set personal bests this year.

What does it look like in my kid's actual sport?

Beat by beat, for three of them. Find the closest match and change the nouns.

• Tennis serve. Clear: turn away from the court, one breath. Decide: wide or body. See it: feel the toss and the contact. Go: the same number of bounces every time, then one cue. "Up and through."

• Baseball or softball at-bat. Clear: out of the box, one breath, dump the last pitch. Decide: the pitch you are hunting and where you want it. See it: one practice cut that feels like the swing you want, not a mindless waggle. Go: eyes to the release point.

• Track or swim start. Clear: the warm-up is not information. Decide: how the race plan opens. See it: feel the first three strides or the first pull. Go: eyes on one point, react to the gun.

• Skeet or trap station. Clear: the last bird is finished, whatever it did. Decide: hold point and break point, chosen before the gun comes up. See it: the line the target takes and where it ends. Go: call for it and let the eyes work.

Notice what is missing from all four. There is no self-coaching in there anywhere, nothing about mechanics, and nothing at all about the result.

The routine fills the mind with the job so there is no room left for the scoreboard. You do not block out doubt by trying to block out doubt. You crowd it out. Same reason decisiveness and trust matter under pressure, and one reason some athletes play great in practice and tighten up in games.

Why does my athlete lose the game before it starts?

Because attention goes somewhere whether anyone directs it or not. With no plan for the hour before competition, an athlete's mind fills that hour on its own, with the scoreboard, the coach in the stands, last week's bad game, and the kid warming up across the net. A routine occupies that space on purpose.

You can usually see the unassigned hour from the passenger seat. Your athlete is somewhere else on the drive over, quiet in the way that is not restful. They win the warm-up and lose the game, or they lose one warm-up rep and spend the afternoon paying for it. The first five minutes are reliably their worst five minutes, as though the game started before they got there. Their pre-game is different every single time, borrowed from whatever the group happened to be doing that day. And something from school is still riding along at first whistle, a grade or a group chat or a fight with a friend that nobody at the field knows about.

Talent has nothing to do with any of that. What every one of those has in common is an hour nobody ever assigned.

Read that paragraph again and you will probably find the one sentence that is yours. That sentence is the whole diagnosis, and it is a thirty-minute conversation, not a season. Book a free 30-minute consultation and we will build the first version of your athlete's routine on that call.

What if the routine gets interrupted?

It depends how close they are to executing. Far out, they refocus on the fly. Close in, they stop and start over. The rule: never fire the rep with a bad picture in their head.

A pitcher can step off. A hitter can step out. A server can catch the toss. A returner does not get that choice, so they refocus fast and move on.

The real skill is noticing the interruption at all. Rushing. Second-guessing the plan. Seeing the miss instead of the make. Most athletes never learn to hear those. More in anxiety and overthinking in sports.

How long until it actually works?

Give it two weeks in practice before it shows up in a game. A routine is a skill, not a decision, and a new one debuted on game day is one more thing to think about. Run it in training first, including the interrupted version, until it is something they do rather than something they remember to do.

Then watch for drift. Once it goes automatic, the physical part keeps running long after the mental part quit. The bounces are still there and nobody is home.

Here is a junior tennis player describing the other side of it, in her own words:

That last line is the whole thing. Out there, alone, a few seconds before the next point. A routine is what an athlete carries into that space so they are not standing in it empty-handed. It is one of the 21 mental skills every athlete needs, and one of the first ones we build.

Frequently asked questions

What should my athlete do in the hour before a game? Six things in order. Write down and park whatever is on their mind from school or home. Set two process goals instead of an expectation. Warm the body up without judging it. Rehearse the opening play in first person. List three specific recent reasons to be confident. Then treat the nerves as fuel.

What is the difference between a pre-game routine and a pre-shot routine? A pre-game routine covers the minutes before competition and gets the athlete into a performing mindset. A pre-shot routine covers the seconds before one rep, like a serve or a free throw, and repeats all game. They solve different problems, and most athletes need both.

My athlete has superstitions. Is that the same as a routine? No. A superstition tries to influence the outcome through luck, like a lucky pair of socks, and it usually adds anxiety when it gets disrupted. A routine directs attention and prepares the body for the next rep. If losing the ritual rattles them, what they have is a superstition, not a routine.

Should my athlete keep the routine if they are having a bad warm-up? Yes, and especially then. Warm-up quality predicts very little about competition, and judging it is one of the most common ways athletes talk themselves out of a good day before it starts. Run the routine as written and let the game begin.

Can we build a routine at home without a coach? You can start one. Write the six pre-game steps and the four pre-shot beats on an index card and run it in practice for two weeks. Where families need help is diagnosing which beat is actually breaking down, because it is rarely the one they assume.

Where to start

Pick one skill your athlete performs over and over. The serve, the free throw, the at-bat, the start. Build the four beats for that skill this week and run it in practice, not in a game. Add the pre-game hour next week.

Index card, four lines, two weeks. That is the whole assignment, and plenty of families get it working on their own from here.

The part that is hard to do alone is finding which beat is actually breaking. Nine times out of ten it is not the one anybody guessed, and watching an athlete run their routine once is usually enough to see it. That is a 30-minute call and it costs nothing: victoryperformance.co/schedule, or (757) 863-1349 if you would rather text.

About the author

Dr. Amy Thompson is the founder and head coach of Victory Performance. She is a triple board-certified physician — a pediatrician, adolescent medicine specialist, and sports medicine physician — and a certified mental performance coach, holding both the Mental Game Coaching Professional (MGCP) certification from Dr. Patrick Cohn and the Mental Performance Mastery (MPM) certification from Brian Cain.

She ran cross country at the University of California, Berkeley, competed internationally as a figure skater, and trained at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. She has coached athletes from middle school through the professional level.