“Always have the mindset you’re going to go out there and you’re gonna win that match,” Ethan Medina, sophomore wrestler and football player, said about the necessary mindset athletes need to have to perform well in their sport. “If you’re already thinking you’re going to lose, you’re already beating yourself.” 

Medina knows the effects of a negative mindset from personal experience last year during a wrestling match.

“When I’ve had a negative mindset going in for wrestling, it was this kid that I have gone against before and he beat me; it was a close match,” Medina said. “I knew he was a tough competitor and I was just thinking, ‘it’s going to be the same as before,’ and it ended up being the same as before.”

Such thinking can not only affect the outcome in a sport, but can personally affect athletes and cause a coil of negative thoughts. 

“If you get in a downward spiral of thinking negatively [from] one little mistake or one negative thing, it just starts to affect you physically, along with mentally, which just leads to more bad things happening,” Randal Dunbar, girls cross country and boys track and field coach, said. “If you have a positive attitude and something negative happens, you can overcome it in overcoming adversity to have a positive effect.”

Dunbar has had past experiences with athletes who had negative mindsets and focuses on “reassuring them of being a good athlete” and “redirecting, whether it’s a team or an individual, towards positive thinking,” saying although it is hard to change someone’s mindset, it is the job of the coach.

“I use comedy most of the time to hopefully give [the athletes] some positive emotions,” Dunbar said. “Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you need to give them positive scenarios and give them a little bit of success to steer them in the positive direction.”

And success can be as simple as a single point. 

“Just be confident [and] remember to take deep breaths,” Olivia Ryt, sophomore tennis player and bowler, said. “You can only control one point at a time. Our coach tells us that every time.”

To help maintain a positive mindset, “always find something positive [and] something that makes you happy,” according to Medina. “As long as it makes you happy,” a positive mindset can be applied to anything, he says. 

“When you have a negative mindset, it can really cause not just an impact on what’s going on [in the sport], but it can also have an impact on your whole day, and you can just continue being in a bad mood when you’re not in the right headspace,” Medina said. “I feel like being in the right headspace is a very positive thing that we should all be doing.”