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A coach can’t order a team to move as one. But sync can be built — and it’s built one position group at a time. The detailed how, from the infield to the back four.Tell a tense team to “calm down and lock in” and watch what happens. Usually nothing. Sometimes worse than nothing.I’ve done it myself, early on, from the third-base box — relax, settle, breathe — and I’ve watched a whole infield nod and stay exactly as tight as it was. The words bounce off. Not because the players don’t want to settle. Because “calm down” isn’t an instruction a nervous system can follow on command, and “play as one” isn’t a switch a coach gets to flip.So I stopped trying to order it and started trying to build it. And the thing I had backwards for years was the unit. I was coaching the team. The sync lives somewhere smaller.You don’t sync a team. You sync its position groups — then you sync the units to each otherHere’s the moment I watch for now. Close game, late, runner on. And the infield goes quiet. Not panicked — quiet. The chatter that ran all game just stops. Each kid pulls inside his own head, and you can watch the unit come apart in real time: the shortstop and second baseman quit checking each other on the double-play depth, nobody calls the play, and the next ground ball turns into four players reacting alone instead of one group moving together. For a long time I read that silence as focus. It’s the opposite. Silence is the sound of a unit desyncing. So now I don’t shout instructions into it — I send the catcher out to walk the ball back and get them talking again. One sentence between them. The talk comes back, and the unit comes back with it.WHAT THE SCIENCE ACTUALLY SAYS Sync is behavioral, trainable, and tighter than people thinkMoving together bonds people, chemically — a rowing crew training in sync produced a bigger endorphin surge than the same workout done alone (Cohen and colleagues, 2010). But there’s a catch the field tends to skip: the bonding shows up only when synchrony carries shared intent. Choreography for its own sake does little.And the kind of sync that actually moves performance is behavioral, not mystical. In a 2023 study of a volleyball team, feeling synced and being physiologically synced weren’t even correlated (Tamminen and colleagues, University of Toronto). What predicts performance is players talking, moving, and acting in time — and that behavior rides on a quieter foundation: a shared mental model. When teammates share one organized picture of the job, they anticipate each other and coordinate even when there’s no time to talk (Mathieu and colleagues, 2000). Which points somewhere specific: a shared picture and tight timing are hardest to build across eleven people, and easiest across the four or five who already share a job.THE UNLOCK Start with the position group, not the teamThe full team is the wrong unit to chase. Too big for a shared picture to stay sharp, too big for one person’s calm to reach everyone, and it rarely shares a single tightly-timed task. The position group is the opposite on every count — the infield, the battery, the double-play combo; the offensive line, the secondary; the back four, the midfield triangle; the setter and her hitters. Four reasons these are the units that actually move as one:They share one job — a double play, a pass-block, an offside trap, a setter-hitter tempo, tightly timed and owned together. They’re small enough that contagion reaches everyone — calm and panic both travel faster across four than across eleven. They rep together constantly, which is the only soil a shared picture grows in. And their job literally is behavioral synchrony — the thing the research rewards. Sync isn’t a nice-to-have for these groups. It’s the position.And it can be coached on purpose. In a season-long soccer case study, a staff deliberately built shared mental models into a squad — not waiting for chemistry, installing it (Gershgoren and colleagues, 2013). Here’s the build, on one card. &nbsp;<figure id="figure-uj7zujd21qmr3s8kyz"><img id="uj7zujd21qmr3s8kyz" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/320dMSMTiiaA9j0JAGqEoVFBxEhPDiPcQTI0xiJxV6B3yoQAVumyQJB5CX4ObUNS.png" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 rounded-sm md:rounded-md lg:rounded-lg" style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="undefined" data-positiony="undefined" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/320dMSMTiiaA9j0JAGqEoVFBxEhPDiPcQTI0xiJxV6B3yoQAVumyQJB5CX4ObUNS.png" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: center center;"></figure>The six moves, in detail. 1. &nbsp;Give the unit one sentence for what “in sync” means.That single shared definition is the mental model, made plain. Infield: we’re in sync when everyone knows the play before the pitch. Back four: we step as a line, not as four guys. O-line: we ID the front and call it as one. One sentence does more than a playbook, because it’s the picture every player checks himself against in real time, when there’s no time to ask.2. &nbsp;Build the unit’s communication ritual — same every rep.This is the behavioral synchrony you can actually drill. The call, the tap, the glance, before every play, identical — the infield’s pre-pitch cadence (outs, runners, “ball to me I go to two,” a look, a glove tap), the O-line’s line call, the back four’s “step / hold / drop.” Make it automatic and constant, because a ritual is the only kind of communication that survives speed.3. &nbsp;Name the unit’s voice — and coach that player specifically.Every group has a quarterback: the catcher, the center, the center-back, the setter, the free safety. That player sets the unit’s clock and its temperature no matter what -- whether you’ve told them to or not. So tell them, and coach them on it directly — tempo and tone, not just reads. Their job in a wobble isn’t a speech; it’s to be the steady voice and the slow body the others borrow from.4. &nbsp;Install a unit reset — smaller and faster than the team breath.A group of four or five co-regulates tighter than a group of eleven, so give the unit its own reset: the battery gathering after a walk, the O-line’s huddle-and-exhale after a sack, the back four regrouping before the restart. Same cue, same beat, every time. It’s the team breath miniaturized — and because the group is small and shares the moment, it actually lands.5. &nbsp;Rep the unit together, under representative pressure.Sync is nothing but shared reps. You build it by drilling the turn, the trap, the combo block, the setter-hitter connection — together, against live looks, not air. The double play doesn’t work because four players are calm; it works because they’ve run it until the feed, the footwork, and the release are timed to a runner they can barely see. You cannot sync a group you only assemble on game day.6. &nbsp;Read the unit’s state, not just the individuals.Coach the group as one organism, and learn its tell. For almost every unit, the tell is talk: a silent unit is a desynced unit. When the chatter dries up — the way it did in that quiet infield — that’s your cue, not to fix one player, but to reset the group. The communication isn’t a byproduct of being in sync. It’s the thing that keeps them there.BASEBALL · THE INFIELD: The turn at second is pure synchrony — feed, footwork, release, all timed to a runner half-hidden behind the bag. It holds because the four share one picture of who covers, who’s the relay, and where the ball goes with the game on the line, repped until it’s wordless. The catcher is the voice. The dirt-drag between hitters is the reset.SOCCER · THE BACK FOUR: A back four is in sync when it steps as a line, not four individuals — and the offside trap is the purest test there is, because one player a half-step late breaks the whole thing. You build it with one voice (the center-back), three calls obeyed without debate (step, hold, drop), and reps against a scout-team runner until the line moves like a single body.VOLLEYBALL · THE FRONT COURT: Setter and hitters live on tempo — the “connection” is a shared clock. In sync means the hitter knows the set’s speed and spot before the ball leaves the setter’s hands, because the tempo is a shared model, not a guess. Between points the front court resets together: a word, a touch, eyes up, same place to start the next rally.FOOTBALL · THE OFFENSIVE LINE: Five men against a moving front. In sync means they ID that front and call it as one, so a stunt meets a unit that already agreed who has whom. The center is the voice; the combo block is two men sharing one defender on a shared count; the snap cadence is the unit’s shared breath. Silence is the tell — a quiet line is a desynced line.Then stitch the units into a team Synced units don’t add up to a synced team on their own. The team layer is real, but it sits on top of unit sync, not instead of it.Drill the seams between units — that’s where teams actually break. Two perfectly synced units that don’t talk to each other still lose. The breaks happen at the handoffs: infield to outfield on relays and cutoffs, back four to midfield on the press trigger, the line to the quarterback on protection IDs. Drill the seam on purpose — it’s the most-skipped and highest-leverage rep there is.One team breath, identical every time. The whole-team version of the unit reset: a pregame ritual and one in-game reset you use on purpose — after a run scored on you, a goal conceded, a timeout. Same count, same word, rehearsed when nothing’s on the line so it survives a night when everything is.Let your unit voices become the team’s thermostat. States are contagious — calm leaks, so does panic. The catcher, the center-back, the setter, the captain are already broadcasting. Regulate those few and the signal spreads across every unit. The body talks before the mouth does.Give the whole team one language for states. If half your players say “I’m fine” and mean terrified, nobody can co-regulate anybody. A shared vocabulary fixes that. One example is our Weather States™ framework — a fast read where each player names today’s weather, Sunny, Cloudy, or Stormy — so a teammate can read another and reset him in a single word across a full field. It’s the difference between “something feels off” and “he’s in the storm, go settle him.”Make warmups synchronized — and make them mean something. Don’t run unison drills as choreography. Frame them as ritual and say out loud what they’re for. It takes one sentence. Not “everybody in,” which is just a logistics call, but something like: “This isn’t a drill. This is us getting ready together — same breath, same beat.” That line is the switch.&nbsp;Be an anchor yourself. A coach white-knuckling the clipboard and shouting “relax” is teaching the opposite of the lesson. Your staff’s regulation is part of the team’s — you’re the loudest thermostat in the building. Model the breath. Run the reset. Stay slow when the moment speeds up.The honest ceiling And here I’ll be straight, the way the field too often isn’t. The studies are real but young. Many are small and maybe not statistically significant. The line from a synced-up unit to a win on the scoreboard is still more reasonable inference than settled fact. The mechanisms — that synchrony bonds, that calm spreads, that a shared picture lets a group coordinate without talking — are well established. The payoff on the field is promising, not guaranteed. This is an edge measured in single digits. It won’t replace talent, reps, sleep, or good coaching.But the position group is where that edge compounds, because the timing is tighter and the players depend on each other more. Frame it as a free, trainable, repeatable way to give a unit real but modest control over how it operates together — built one sentence, one ritual, one voice, one rep at a time — and they’ll keep it. The keeping is the whole point.So the next time you watch a double play turned clean under pressure, or a back four step as one and catch a striker offside, don’t call it chemistry and leave it there. It’s a shared picture, a single voice, and a thousand quiet reps. Which means it’s something you can build — starting Tuesday, starting with one group.Your turn, coaches: What’s the first sign you see that a unit has come apart — and what brings it back? I’d like to hear what you watch for.&nbsp;Scott Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset™, a mental performance platform built for high school and college athletic programs. He has spent fifteen years in and around competitive sport as a coach, scout, and mental skills practitioner — working with baseball and soccer athletes from youth development through the college level. His work focuses on the practical gap between knowing mental performance concepts and owning them under pressure. He has certifications from Brian Cain's MPM program, the National Federation of High School Mental Performance program, and Georgetown Leadership &amp; Coaching Institute. He holds an MBA from NYU, an MA in International Conflict Resolution from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master's Degrees in Psychology from ITP. You can learn more at gamereadymindset.com, or reach me directly at scott@coachwilder.com. I love talking about this workRESEARCH SOURCESMathieu, J. E., Heffner, T. S., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., &amp; Cannon-Bowers, J. A. (2000). The influence of shared mental models on team process and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(2), 273–283.Gershgoren, L., Filho, E. M., Tenenbaum, G., &amp; Schinke, R. J. (2013). Coaching shared mental models in soccer: A longitudinal case study. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 7(4), 293–312.Tamminen, K. A., Danyluck, C., Bonk, D., &amp; Chen, R. (2023). Syncing to perform? Journal of Sports Sciences, 41(11), 1033–1046.Cohen, E. E. A., Ejsmond-Frey, R., Knight, N., &amp; Dunbar, R. I. M. (2010). Rowers’ high. Biology Letters, 6(1), 106–108.Tarr, B., Launay, J., Cohen, E., &amp; Dunbar, R. (2015). Synchrony and exertion during dance independently raise pain threshold and encourage social bonding. Biology Letters, 11(10), 20150767.

Get In Sync

<h2>Backward Thinkers </h2>THE INSTINCTMost of us fix what’s in front of us. The bad at-bat. The missed assignment. The pitch that got away. We zoom in, tighten up, and try to force the next moment to go right by gripping the current one harder.It feels like focus. It feels like competitiveness. It rarely is.What it actually is — in most cases — is reaction. We are responding to the last thing that happened instead of preparing for the next thing that matters. And the harder we grip, the smaller our thinking gets. The smaller our thinking gets, the worse we perform. It’s a loop most athletes and leaders know well, even if they can’t name it.The best competitors break that loop. And they do it by doing something counterintuitive. They stop looking forward and start looking backward.“The harder we grip, the smaller our thinking gets.”WHAT STRIDER DOESI read a recent New York Times piece on Braves pitcher Spencer Strider. He is one of the best pitchers in baseball, and what stood out wasn’t his velocity or his mechanics. It was how he manages his mind between pitches.When Strider gets in trouble on the mound, he doesn’t zoom in. He steps outside himself and watches the moment in the third person — like he’s studying another pitcher, not drowning as his own. The noise quiets. The picture gets clearer. He stops reacting and starts deciding.Then he does something even more interesting. He reverse-engineers.He starts from the outcome he wants and works backward to what has to be true to reach it. Not “what’s wrong with my mechanics right now” — but “what does the result look like, and what needs to happen for me to get there?” He’s building the path from the destination back to the present, not stumbling forward hoping the path appears.That is a different kind of thinking. That is a backward thinker.WHAT JOBS KNEWIt reminded me of something Steve Jobs said at Stanford in 2005. Standing in front of graduates who were anxious about the future, he told them to stop trying to connect the dots forward.“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward.” — Steve Jobs, Stanford 2005We have always treated that as career advice. Trust the detours. Follow your curiosity. The dots will make sense eventually. But I think Jobs was also describing something deeper — a way of thinking the best performers use not just in life planning, but in the heat of competition.Jobs wasn’t telling those graduates to be passive. He was telling them that clarity comes from looking at where you’ve been and where you want to go — not from staring at the chaos of the present moment and trying to will your way through it. Strider does that in real time. On the mound. Under pressure. That’s the difference.WHY IT’S TRAINABLEHere is what matters most: this isn’t a personality trait. It’s not something Strider was born with. It’s a skill. And like every mental skill, it can be taught, practiced, and built into how a team prepares.The third-person perspective — stepping outside the moment to observe it — is what researchers call psychological distancing. Studies show it reduces emotional reactivity, improves decision-making under stress, and helps athletes perform more consistently in high-pressure situations. It is not a trick. It is a documented, trainable cognitive tool.Reverse engineering is the same. When athletes and coaches rehearse outcomes — starting from what success looks like and building the steps backward — they wire their brains for clearer thinking when pressure is highest. Jobs trusted the dots would connect. Strider connects them on purpose. That is the evolution.THE PRACTICEBefore the game, ask your athletes to reverse-engineer their performance. What does a great at-bat look like today? What does a confident first serve feel like? Start there. Then work backward to the preparation that makes it possible.During competition, when things go sideways — and they will — give your athletes a reset cue: not “what just happened to me” but “what would I coach right now if I were watching this from the outside?” That single reframe changes everything.After competition, connect the dots backward. What worked? Where did you trust yourself, and where did you grip too hard? The answers are already there. You just have to look backward to find them.Leaders, coaches, athletes: the next moment doesn’t need to be forced. It needs to be built. Step outside it. Look back from where you want to be. Reverse-engineer the path. Then trust yourself to walk it. That’s how backward thinkers win.Scott Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset (TM), an emerging player in the sports mental performance field. Learn more at grmsports.com CommentsComments settings

Backward Thinkers

3 Key Takeaways&nbsp;<ul><li>The harshest voice in an athlete’s head often started as a coach’s voice. What we criticize, they internalize.</li><li>Performance isn’t only about adding ability — it’s about subtracting the mental interference that blocks the ability already there.</li><li>The smallest coaching shift — from telling a kid what’s wrong to asking what they noticed — can unlock a player stuck in their own head.</li></ul>When I was a kid playing hockey, I started shooting wrist shots.&nbsp;One of my coaches was not happy.Growing up the slap shot was king — the big wind-up, the crack off the boards, the powerful, sexy shot everybody wanted on the highlight reel. The wrist shot was considered soft. A lesser choice. I shot it anyway. Because I’d watched how Wayne Gretzky played, and something about the quick, deceptive release made sense to me. It felt right in my hands.&nbsp;My coach was old school. And every time I picked the wrist shot, he got on my case. He criticized my form. He criticized my decision. The message was clear: that’s the wrong choice, made the wrong way. What he never once did was ask me how it felt. He never looked at where the puck actually went. He just knew what a shot was supposed to look like — and mine didn’t.&nbsp;Years later, of course, the wrist shot took over hockey. The quick release became the most dangerous shot in the game. But here’s what stuck with me, long after the hockey stopped: it wasn’t the criticism of the shot that lingered. It was what the criticism did to the voice in my head.&nbsp;The voice in your head usually had a teacher&nbsp;There’s a book a lot of coaches know — The Inner Game of Tennis, written by a coach named Tim Gallwey in 1974. Its central idea has never left me. Gallwey said every athlete is really two players at once.&nbsp;There’s Self 1 — the talker. The voice in your head that judges, instructs, and criticizes. Wrong choice. Bad form. Everyone saw that.&nbsp; And there’s Self 2 — the doer. The body and all the skill it’s quietly built through thousands of reps. The part that already knows what to do, if you’ll let it. The problem, Gallwey said, is that Self 1 won’t trust Self 2. It hovers. It nags. It grabs the wheel. And the body, getting micromanaged, tightens up and stops flowing.&nbsp;My coach thought he was fixing my shot. What he was actually doing was teaching me to doubt the thing that felt right.&nbsp;Here’s the part I didn’t understand until I was much older: a lot of Self 1 gets installed from the outside. Every time a coach tells a kid “that’s wrong, that’s bad, why do you always,” they’re not just correcting a shot. They’re handing the kid a new voice — one that will keep nagging long after the coach is gone.&nbsp;What the inner game actually says&nbsp;Gallwey boiled it down to a formula simple enough to write on your hand:&nbsp;Performance = Potential − InterferenceYour performance isn’t just how good you are. It’s how good you are minus how much your own head gets in the way. That changes the whole job. We tend to think athletes improve by adding — more instruction, more cues, more “try harder.” But a huge amount of the time, they improve by subtracting. By quieting the interference so the skill that’s already there can come out.&nbsp;This is why “just bear down and try harder” so often backfires under pressure. Trying harder usually means thinking harder — which makes Self 1 louder. And a loud Self 1 is the interference.&nbsp;My wrist shot didn’t need more instruction. It needed a coach who’d get out of the way long enough to see where the puck went.&nbsp;The takeaway: ask before you tell&nbsp;Here’s the shift I wish my coach had made, and the one I’d offer any coach now. The one I try and practice. When a player does something you want to correct, your instinct is to tell them what’s wrong. But every time you do, you install another nagging voice. Instead, try asking what they noticed.&nbsp;“Where was your elbow that time?” “How did that one feel compared to the last?” “What did you see before you made that pass?”&nbsp;When the awareness comes from inside the athlete, it sharpens Self 2 — the doer. When it comes as criticism from outside, it just feeds Self 1 — the nagger. Same information. Completely different effect on the kid.&nbsp;Direct instruction still matters, especially when someone’s first learning a skill. But when a player is tight, pressing, stuck in their own head — that’s exactly the moment to stop telling and start asking.&nbsp;What to do nextIf you coach, pick one player this week who’s overthinking — and instead of correcting them, ask them what they felt and what they saw. Watch what happens when they discover it themselves.&nbsp;And if you’re the athlete: the next time the voice in your head starts grading every move, remember it’s only Self 1 talking. Your job isn’t to win the argument with it. It’s to give it something quiet to do — watch the puck, feel the release, see the target — so the part of you that already knows how to play gets to play.&nbsp;My coach was sure he knew what a shot should look like. The game eventually proved him wrong. But the real lesson was never about the wrist shot.&nbsp;It was about who gets to hold the wheel.&nbsp;Mental performance shouldn’t be left to chance.&nbsp;Train it. Track it. Improve it.&nbsp;#gamereadymindsetScott K. Wilder is the founder of Game Ready Mindset (TM), a mental-readiness company for high school and collegiate athletic programs. He writes and coaches on training the mental side of sport. Reach him at scott@coachwilder.com or check out grmsports.com

Coaches don't ask 'how does it feel.'

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Get In Sync

Backward Thinkers

Coaches don't ask 'how does it feel.'