Getting Your Mind Right:The Truth About Game Preparation

There's No One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Locking In.

The locker room before a big game is one of the most fascinating places in all of sports. Look around and you'll see a dozen different worlds happening at the same time. One athlete has headphones on, eyes closed, nodding to a beat that only they can hear. Another sits in complete silence, staring at the floor with an intensity that could cut through steel. Someone else is cracking jokes, laughing loud, seemingly without a care in the world. In the corner, a teammate is going through a very specific pre-game ritual — the same one they've done before every single game since middle school.

Who's doing it right?

The answer is simple: all of them.

The Myth of the "Right Way" to Prepare

Somewhere along the way, sports culture developed this idea that there is a correct way to mentally prepare for competition. Get serious. Get quiet. Get intense. Look mean. Don't smile. Act like you've been here before.

But that narrative has always been incomplete, and frankly, it has done a lot of damage to athletes who prepare differently.

The truth is that mental preparation is deeply personal. It is wired into your personality, your experiences, your nervous system, and your relationship with the sport you play. What unlocks focus and confidence in one athlete can completely derail another. And the sooner we as coaches, teammates, and fans understand that, the better our locker rooms and our performances will become.

What Does "Locking In" Actually Mean?

We throw the phrase around constantly.

"It's time to lock in.""She was completely locked in tonight.""He couldn't get locked in and it showed."

But what does it actually mean to be locked in?

At its core, locking in is the ability to bring your full attention and intention to the present moment of competition. It means the noise of the crowd, the pressure of the moment, the fear of failure, and the weight of expectation all fade into the background. What remains is just you, your teammates, and the game in front of you.

Psychologists often refer to this state as "flow" — a concept introduced by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is that optimal mental state where performance feels almost effortless. Time slows down. Decision-making becomes instinctive. The body does what years of training have prepared it to do without the conscious mind getting in the way.

The interesting thing about flow? You cannot force it. You can only create the conditions for it.

And those conditions look completely different for every single athlete.

The Music People

For a huge number of athletes, music is the gateway to their optimal performance state. There is actual science behind this. Music can regulate arousal levels, meaning it can pump you up when you need energy or calm your nervous system when anxiety is creeping in. It triggers emotional responses, blocks out distracting thoughts, and for many athletes, specific songs become deeply anchored to feelings of confidence and past success.

Think about the athlete who has had the same pregame playlist since they first made the varsity roster. Those songs aren't just songs anymore. They are a mental trigger. They say, "This is who you are. This is what you do. It's time."

For these athletes, silence can actually be their enemy. Without that musical anchor, they feel exposed, uncentered, disconnected from their competitive identity.

The Silence Seekers

On the other end of the spectrum are the athletes who need quiet to find themselves before competition. Music feels like clutter to them. Noise and conversation pull them away from the internal place they need to access.

These athletes are often deep internal processors. They need to visualize. They need to run through scenarios in their head. They need to have a private conversation with themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it. Noise interrupts that process.

For them, the locker room chatter, the music blasting from someone else's speaker, the coach's pregame speech can all feel like static. Their version of locking in requires stillness, and that is completely valid.

The Ritual Holders

Then there are the athletes who live and breathe by their pregame rituals. The specific order in which they put on their uniform. The number of times they bounce the ball before a free throw. The exact meal they eat at the exact same time before every competition. Touching a certain spot on the court or field. A specific handshake. A prayer. A phrase repeated in the mirror.

These rituals are often dismissed as superstition, and sometimes they are poked fun at. But the psychological value of a pregame ritual is very real. Rituals create certainty in an environment full of uncertainty. Competition is unpredictable. Outcomes are never guaranteed. But the ritual? That you can control. And in controlling it, you signal to your brain that you are prepared, that you are in the right space, that everything is as it should be.

Disrupting an athlete's ritual is not a small thing. It can genuinely unravel their mental preparation in ways that affect their performance. It deserves to be taken seriously.

The Loose and Laughing Ones

Perhaps the most misunderstood pre-game personality is the athlete who appears not to take it seriously at all. They're joking around. They're relaxed. They seem almost indifferent to the magnitude of what is about to happen.

Coaches sometimes pull these athletes aside. Teammates occasionally give them a look. The unspoken message is: "Shouldn't you be more serious right now?"

But here is what those reactions miss: for many athletes, lightness IS their locked-in state.

Laughter and looseness reduce cortisol, the stress hormone that tightens muscles, clouds thinking, and slows reaction time. Some athletes perform at their absolute best when they are relaxed and playful. Their way of locking in is actually letting go of the pressure rather than feeding into it. The moment they get too serious, too tense, too in their own head, their performance suffers.

Dismissing this approach as a lack of seriousness fundamentally misreads what that athlete needs.

Can You Really Lock In When the Whistle Blows?

Here's a question worth sitting with: does all the preparation actually work? Can you really flip a switch when competition begins?

The honest answer is — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and that's okay.

There are games where everything clicks from the first second. The preparation worked perfectly, the mental state is right, and the performance reflects it. And then there are games where it takes a quarter, a period, or even longer to find your rhythm. And there are rare occasions where it just never fully comes together mentally, no matter how hard you try.

What good game preparation actually does is raise the floor. It makes the bad days less bad. It makes the average days more consistent. It gives you a process to return to when the game gets hard or when your mind starts to wander into doubt.

Locking in is not a light switch. It is more like a dial that your preparation helps you turn in the right direction. The pregame routine, the music, the ritual, the silence — all of it is turning that dial before the whistle even blows.

The Most Important Thing We Can Do for Each Other

Here is where it all comes back to something bigger than technique or psychology.

The single most important part of game preparation is respecting that every athlete is different.

What works for you may not work for the person next to you. Your pregame intensity might be someone else's anxiety trigger. Your need for silence might feel isolating to a teammate who draws energy from connection. Your ritual might look strange to someone who doesn't understand where it comes from or what it means to you.

It is not your job to understand every single approach. It is your job to respect it.

When we mock a teammate's ritual, we are not just making fun of a habit. We are potentially dismantling the mental architecture they have built to compete at their best. When we force an athlete into a pregame mold that doesn't fit them, we are prioritizing our idea of what preparation looks like over their actual performance needs.

Great teams understand this. Great coaches understand this. The locker room that allows every athlete to prepare in their own way — without judgment, without ridicule, without pressure to conform — is the locker room that breeds trust. And trust, more than any playlist or ritual or pregame speech, is what makes teams perform when it matters most.

Final Whistle

Game preparation is one of the most personal things an athlete does. It is the bridge between practice and performance, between who you are every day and who you need to be when the lights come on.

There is no wrong way to cross that bridge — as long as it gets you to the other side.

So whether you're the one with the headphones in, the one sitting in silence, the one laughing with teammates, or the one going through the same ritual you've had for years — own it. Protect it. Trust it.

And when you see your teammate doing it differently than you?

Respect it.