Team Dynamics:
Cohesion & the Outsider
Most coaches think team chemistry is about everyone getting along. It isn't. And confusing social comfort with task cohesion is one of the most common and costly mistakes in group performance environments.
Sport psychology research distinguishes two types of team cohesion. Understanding the difference — and their relationship to performance — determines what you actually intervene on when you walk into a team environment.
You don't need a team that loves each other. You need a team that trusts each other to do their jobs. Those are different things, and building programs around social cohesion when task cohesion is the gap is a common and expensive mistake. Diagnose which one is actually the problem before you design an intervention.
The SDT Read of a Team Environment
The same three psychological needs from Week 2 operate at the team level — but the way they're frustrated is different, and so is the intervention. In a team, autonomy frustration shows up as players feeling like they have no voice. Competence frustration shows up when athletes don't understand why they're doing what they're being asked to do. Relatedness frustration is the one most coaches miss — it's not just whether the team gets along. It's whether every individual on the team feels genuinely connected and valued within the group.
That last point is where the certified IP coach's most specific job in a team context lives: identifying who is on the outside of the group, and working with the coaching staff to find contextual ways to bring them in.
The Outsider Problem
Every team has outsiders. Some are new to the group. Some are struggling with performance and have withdrawn socially. Some have a personality or communication style that creates friction. Some are from a different cultural or socioeconomic background than the core of the group. Some have simply never been seen clearly by the people around them.
Left unaddressed, the outsider problem compounds: the athlete who feels disconnected underperforms, their underperformance increases their disconnection, and the cycle accelerates. The coaching staff, focused on the performance gap, often makes it worse by intervening tactically and mechanically while the relatedness need remains unmet. The Ravizza principle applies here precisely: you cannot coach the baseball out of the person.
Observation before intervention
Map the social geography of the team. Who sits with whom at meals? Who initiates contact with whom? Who does the coach address most — and least? Who gets pulled aside for individual feedback, and who gets ignored? You cannot identify outsiders from the coach's vantage point alone — that view is structurally biased toward the athletes who are performing and who seek contact.
Identify the contextual entry point
The solution is almost never "have the coach talk to them more." That can feel like surveillance. The intervention is contextual — finding naturally occurring moments where connection is possible: shared travel time, warm-up routines, post-practice work, off-field interactions. The goal is organic integration, not forced inclusion that signals to the athlete that someone noticed they were on the outside.
Use the coaching staff as the vehicle
In most cases, you're not the one building the connection — you're helping the coaching staff see who's missing and how to reach them. This is organizational consulting through the MI frame: open questions, evoking rather than prescribing, building the staff's own awareness of the dynamic rather than handing them a diagnosis. Coaches who understand why the outsider problem matters will find their own solutions. Coaches who are told what to do will comply without insight.
Track relatedness alongside performance metrics
If the only data being collected is performance data, the relatedness gap will never appear in the review. Build in a simple relational check — not a lengthy survey, but a consistent pulse on whether athletes feel seen and connected. The simplest version: ask coaches to rate each athlete's perceived relatedness on a 1–5 scale monthly and compare trends. Declining relatedness scores predict performance problems before they appear in the data.
Team-building exercises that force social connection — trust falls, ropes courses, mandatory group dinners — address social cohesion when task cohesion and relatedness are separate needs. They're often resented by athletes who feel their time is being managed, and they signal to outsiders that someone noticed the gap in a way that can increase self-consciousness. Build connection through the work, not around it.
Team Audit
Think of a team environment you're currently working in, or have worked in recently.
Coaching Coaches:
The 3Cs Framework
Before any coach touches mechanics, tactics, or technique — three questions need honest answers. This is not a soft framework. In professional baseball, it was a hard prerequisite. The Ravizza principle is not a philosophy. It's an operating procedure.
"We aren't coaching baseball players. We are coaching people that play baseball."
When IP coaches work with coaching staffs, the primary product isn't a set of mental skills tools — it's a different set of questions the coaches ask themselves before they intervene. The framework comes directly from professional baseball, where the language of SDT was translated into something a pitching coach or hitting instructor could use in the dugout without a psychology degree.
Autonomy became Choice. Relatedness became Connection. Competence became Confidence. The principle was the same: if any of the three are absent, physical and tactical interventions will underperform or fail. Close the human gap first.
Choice doesn't mean athletes decide everything. It means they have genuine input within structure — a real voice, not theater. The coach who asks "would you rather work on this or that today?" and means it is practicing autonomy support. The coach who asks the same question and ignores the answer isn't.
In practice: Give players a right choice — two options the coach is genuinely comfortable with. Explain the rationale behind practice design in language the athlete can use. Ask for feedback on what's working. Mean it.
Connection is the coach's job — not the team's. Coaches who delegate all social integration to teammates are abdicating the most important environmental design responsibility they have. Every player on the roster should feel known by at least one coach, personally, beyond their role performance.
In practice: Scan the roster for outsiders. Find the athlete who isn't getting pulled aside, isn't getting eye contact, isn't being spoken to as a person. Fix that before adjusting their swing.
Athletes who don't understand the why behind practice design mentally check out. They comply physically while disengaging cognitively — which is exactly the opposite of what makes practice effective. Competence support means communicating purpose clearly, in language appropriate to the athlete's developmental stage.
In practice: Before any drill, the coach can state the purpose in one sentence the athlete actually understands. Not the coach's technical rationale — the athlete's functional benefit. "This is making you better at X because Y."
The Pre-Intervention Checklist
In professional baseball, coaches were trained to ask all three questions before intervening on any individual player. Not as a lengthy process — as a five-second mental check before walking across the field. If any answer was no, the task was clear: close that gap first. Physical, tactical, and mechanical interventions are significantly more effective when the human foundation is in place.
When you teach the 3Cs to a coaching staff, you're not teaching them psychology — you're giving them a pre-intervention protocol that protects their technical work from the most common reason it fails. Frame it that way. Coaches who understand the 3Cs as a performance tool, not a relationship exercise, adopt it. Coaches who hear it as "be nicer to your players" usually don't.
Autonomy Support in Practice Design
The most practical autonomy-support move in a coaching context is the right choice: offering athletes a genuine selection between two options the coach is fully comfortable with. This is not the same as asking athletes to design their own training. It's structured freedom — which is exactly what the SDT research means by autonomy support.
The second practical move is communicating why in developmentally appropriate language. What's appropriate for a 10-year-old youth athlete is different from what's appropriate for a 22-year-old professional. The developmental frame (Lesson 4) determines how you calibrate that communication. But at every level, athletes who understand the purpose of their work are more cognitively engaged — and cognitive engagement is what makes physical practice produce the neural adaptations you're after.
3Cs Application
Parents as Secondary Clients
The car ride home after a bad game is one of the highest-leverage moments in an athlete's development. Most parents are wasting it. This is not a criticism of parents — it's a design problem. They haven't been given a better tool.
When you work with youth athletes, you're working with families — whether you intend to or not. The parent who drives their kid to your sessions and then dismantles the work on the car ride home is not your adversary. They're a system variable you haven't yet addressed.
The certified IP coach sends parents the mental performance guide proactively — not because parents requested it, but because the work requires it. Waiting for parents to cause a problem before engaging them is reactive. Building parent education into the standard operating procedure of youth work is just good design.
The framing matters here: parents are not coaches. They're not second-string sport psychologists. They're the athlete's primary safe space — the person the athlete processes their experience with after you and the coaching staff are gone. That role is more important than any technical support they could provide, and doing it well requires a completely different approach than coaching does.
The Role, Clearly Stated
Most parental interference in youth sport is driven by unexamined values. The parent who yells from the stands, dissects every at-bat on the drive home, or contacts coaches about playing time isn't trying to harm their child. They're living out their own achievement needs through the athlete — and nobody has ever named that clearly to them. The conversation that addresses this is uncomfortable and necessary. The alternative is watching it undermine everything else you're doing.
OARS for Parents
The same MI framework that governs your coaching conversations applies directly to parent-athlete conversations — and parents can learn to use it. The guide you send parents is a translation of OARS into language that doesn't require a psychology background. The examples below come directly from that framework.
| Skill | Don't Say | Try This Instead | |
|---|---|---|---|
| O | Open Questions Can't be answered yes/no. Require reflection. |
"Did you stay focused?" "Did you have fun?" | "What was going through your mind during that at-bat?" "What did you notice today?" |
| A | Affirmations Validate feelings. Not generic praise. |
"You played fine." "Don't be so hard on yourself." "Good job!" | "That sounds really frustrating." "I can see how hard you're working on this." "It makes sense you'd feel disappointed." |
| R | Reflective Listening Play it back. Let them hear themselves. |
"Forget about that mistake." "Just focus next time." "What were you thinking?!" | "So after that error, your mind kept going back to it instead of the next play." (Then wait.) |
| S | Summaries Reflect their plan back. Creates ownership. |
"Here's what you need to do next time..." Imposing the plan. | "So you want to try that reset routine after mistakes, and you're going to do the mindfulness practice before bed. Is that right?" |
The Car Ride Home
After a difficult performance, the car ride home is a high-stakes relational moment. The athlete is emotionally activated, often self-critical, and monitoring their parent's reaction carefully. What happens in that car shapes whether they open up or shut down — not just tonight, but as a pattern over time.
The single most effective intervention for parents is this: the 24-hour rule after losses, combined with one genuine open question after any game. Wait before evaluating. Then ask one question that can't be answered with yes or no. Then — this is the hard part — listen without fixing it.
The question doesn't need to be sophisticated. "What's on your mind right now?" is enough. What follows is an OARS conversation, even if the parent doesn't know that's what it's called.
Parents who are over-invested in outcomes are not managing their own arousal any more effectively than the athletes are. The Evans model applies. A parent at an 8 in the stands — tense, disappointed, anxious — transmits that state to their athlete in real time. Helping parents recognize their own intensity number, and what moves it, is part of the work. A parent who can regulate their own emotional response during a game is giving their athlete a calm external environment at exactly the moment they need one.
Parent System Audit
The Developmental Frame
Applying a professional performance framework to a 10-year-old is not rigorous. It's harmful. The right framework depends entirely on who's in front of you and what that person actually needs at this stage of development.
One of the most consequential mistakes in youth sport is importing frameworks designed for professional or elite athletes into developmental contexts where they actively cause harm. The pressure structures, outcome orientations, and performance intensities that are appropriate for a 25-year-old professional attempting to extend a career are the same structures that drive early attrition, burnout, and lasting negative associations with sport in developing athletes.
The sport psychology research on long-term athletic development is unambiguous on one finding: for athletes 13 and under, the single best predictor of future elite performance is not winning records, physical metrics, or early specialization. It is whether the athlete had fun at practice and in games.
Read that again, because it contradicts most of what youth sport culture currently does. Fun — not excellence, not winning, not early identification of talent — predicts elite development. The mechanism: athletes who enjoy the sport environment stay in it long enough to develop. Athletes who don't, leave. And the ones who leave are not the ones who lacked talent.
Early sport specialization — year-round single-sport focus before age 13 — is consistently associated with higher injury rates, higher burnout rates, and lower rates of reaching elite performance than late specialization models. The athletes who peak earliest in youth sport are often not the athletes who are still competing at 20. The selection of elite athletes from youth populations is far less predictive than it appears. Build for love of the sport first. Performance follows.
Framework by Developmental Stage
| Stage | Primary Goal | What Works | What Harms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 13 Sampling |
Fun, engagement, love of sport. Multi-sport participation. Movement literacy. | Games over drills. High energy environments. Positive relationships with coaches. Intrinsic motivation cultivated through enjoyment. | Outcome emphasis. Early specialization. Performance pressure. Parental intensity misdirected toward winning. |
| 13–18 Specializing |
Skill development, identity formation, values clarification. Increasing commitment. | Beginning values work. Process emphasis. Increasing structure and skill specificity. Identity as athlete alongside other identities. | Elite-level performance pressure. Treating developing athletes like professionals. Identity collapse into sport only. |
| 18–22 Investing |
Full commitment, mental skills development, performance optimization, identity integration. | Full IP framework applies. MBAT, arousal regulation, defusion, behavioral standards. Increasing outcome accountability. | Skipping the values foundation and going straight to performance tools. Treating collegiate athletes like professionals before they're ready. |
| Professional Elite |
Performance optimization, career longevity, identity resilience through the full arc of a career including its end. | Full IP framework. 3Cs with coaching staff. Case conceptualization at the organizational level. Transition planning alongside performance. | Ignoring identity and values work in favor of pure performance output. The athletes who burn out earliest are the ones whose identity was only ever "athlete." |
Before you begin any engagement — individual, team, or organizational — the first question is: what developmental stage is this population in, and what does that mean for what I emphasize? The tools are consistent across stages. The emphasis is not. A 10-year-old who tells you they're not having fun in practice is telling you the most important performance data available. A 25-year-old professional saying the same thing is a different problem requiring a different response.
What Changes — and What Doesn't
The underlying principles are stable at every developmental stage: people need autonomy, competence, and relatedness to thrive. Values are more durable than goals. Attention is trainable. Connection to meaning sustains motivation when outcomes fluctuate. These are not developmental-stage-specific findings — they're human constants.
What changes is the language, the intensity, the structure, and the emphasis. An 11-year-old doesn't need a formal values clarification exercise — they need a coach who asks them what they love about the sport and actually listens to the answer. A 23-year-old professional needs the same thing, in a more sophisticated container. The IP coach's job is to find the right container for each person and population.
Developmental Self-Assessment
Systems-Level
Conceptualization
An athlete doesn't perform in a vacuum. They perform inside a team, inside a coaching relationship, inside a family system, inside a developmental moment. Seeing all of it simultaneously — and knowing where to intervene — is the skill that separates adequate coaches from exceptional ones.
The individual case conceptualization from Week 3 asked: given what I know about this athlete, what's the actual problem I'm solving? The systems conceptualization asks the same question at every level of the environment simultaneously. Sometimes the individual is the entry point. Sometimes the problem is the coach. Sometimes it's the parent. Sometimes it's a team dynamic that is producing individual symptoms in the athlete in front of you.
A certified IP coach can hold all four levels and read them in relation to each other. That capacity is built through practice — through deliberately doing this analysis on real cases, iterating, and developing the clinical instinct for where the leverage actually sits.
The Systems Canvas
Complete this for one current case — the most complex situation you're currently facing or have faced recently. Work through all four levels before determining the entry point. The sequence matters: diagnosis before intervention.
Week 5 Assignments
Week 5 Integration Reflection
This week expanded the frame from individual athlete to the full system they operate inside. The final reflection asks you to hold all of it simultaneously.