Pressure Shows Up Before the Miss: What Coaches Often Don’t See
- Suzi Freeman
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Most coaches don’t miss pressure. They just see it after it has already affected performance. By the time an athlete misses a kick, rushes an operation, or looks tentative in a big moment, pressure has usually been present for a while. It didn’t start with the miss. It started earlier, in ways that are easy to overlook when the focus is on outcomes.
Pressure is not sudden, it has patterns. And those patterns often show up before performance changes. Athletes don’t usually say, “I felt pressure and it caused the miss.” What they describe instead are subtle shifts they didn’t think mattered at the time.
“I felt rushed even though my routine was the same.”
“I was locked in, but everything felt tight.”
“I wasn’t nervous, just aware of everything.”
Those statements are pressure signals.
Recently, I worked with a specialist who had been highly consistent in training but struggled during a stretch of evaluation heavy practices. On the call, he walked me through his reps in detail. Nothing sounded obviously wrong. Mechanics were clean. Execution was mostly there. But as he talked, a pattern emerged. His tempo had changed. He was shortening his breath before the rep.
He wasn’t distracted, he was over focused. He said, “I felt like I had to be perfect.” That wasn’t a skill issue.That was a regulation issue. Once we identified it, the solution wasn’t more reps or more correction. It was stabilizing his system. Re-establishing rhythm. Reducing urgency. Letting execution return to baseline. The next evaluation looked like practice again.
This is where pressure often gets misread. Coaches are trained to look for breakdowns in technique, effort, or focus. But pressure rarely announces itself that way at first. It shows up in behavior. In tempo. In how an athlete carries themselves between reps. In how much they are trying to control instead of execute.
If those early signals go unnoticed, pressure compounds. Athletes start pressing. Coaches respond to outcomes. Everyone feels the urgency rise. And performance drops feel sudden when they aren’t.
The best coaches don’t eliminate pressure. They recognize it early. They understand that pressure doesn’t mean an athlete is weak or unprepared. It means the environment just got louder, and the system hasn’t fully adapted yet.
When pressure is identified early, intervention stays small. A reminder to slow down. A reset of routine. A cue that brings the athlete back into rhythm instead of pushing them forward emotionally.
That’s how confidence is protected. That’s how trust is maintained.
Pressure doesn’t ruin athletes.
Misreading it does.
When coaches can recognize pressure as a predictable response instead of a failure, they create stability. And stability is what allows athletes to perform the same way when the stakes rise.
Pressure has patterns. Those patterns are visible. Once you learn to see them, performance becomes far less mysterious.
By: Coach Suzi Freeman, Mental Performance Coach & Master NLP Practitioner
Coach Suzi focuses on Special Teams Players
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