Squash Coach Mike Johnson on the Psychology of Squash

I was lucky enough to work alongside Mike Johnson during Princeton Squash Camp’s Junior Elite weeks earlier this summer at the start of June.  Mike has a very simple approach to the game of squash, including the mental side.  As part of the camp’s Sunday evening program, I work with the lead coach of the camp to give a 45-minute workshop/lecture on the Psychological Aspects of Squash.  I have been doing this since 1987  (so about 5,500 junior camper-units – although there are some repeats in there:), and usually we help the campers analyze and compare their best and worst squash performances.

Wimbledon 2009: Psychological & Tactical Lessons for Squash Coaches

My prediction for the Gentlemen’s Singles was wrong – I was sure Andy Murray (with his big biceps) was ready to take Wimbledon and Federer with Nadal out of the way.  With Federer appearing to suffer some doubts and lack of confidence recently (obviously alleviated somewhat by his French Open win), I thought Murray’s increasing confidence would carry him through the pressure of the British press – apparently not.

The ability to keep pressure off in both squash and tennis is key.  I just finished two weeks of squash camp with Mike Johnson (former coach of Fitzgerald, Eyles and Ricketts amongst others) and he reckons this ability is the most important for players to acquire.  According to Johnson,  the inability to keep pressure off  (“I must win this match”) is the number one reason players underperform.

It was very clear in the Wimbledon women’s final that the William’s sisters are the dominant force in women’s tennis today (check the video!).  Their father played the key role in keeping the pressure off them in their formative years – forbidding them to play in junior tennis tournaments from the age of 12-14.  My hypothesis is that this allowed them to develop that “go for it” attitude which obviously has become a habit.  The lack of tournament pressure also allowed them to develop a variety of skills unhindered by the need to “win that match today”.  My two weeks with 70 of the U.S.’ top junior squash players has reconfirmed my belief that the “need to win” is the number one barrier to making necessary changes in one’s squash technique and tactics.  Many junior squash players are unwilling to accept the temporary drop in performance that would come with a grip change for example.  Since accepting a temporary performance decrement in exchange for future gains is logical, there must be external forces (parents, coach, tournament environment) acting on the junior.

Squash is much more tactical than singles tennis, especially tennis played on grass (with an average of less than three shots per rally).  Doubles tennis on the other hand, is at least as tactical and perhaps more so: the addition of the net game, poaching and faking, variety in positioning (both up, both back, Australian), use of the lob (rarely seen in singles), etc.  It was great to see the Canadian Nestor come through for the second year in a row.  I never worked with Nestor but did work with Canadian Sebastien Lareau (Olympic Doubles Medalist), and last week at Princeton ran into Canadian and former world number 1 doubles Glenn Michibata (with Grant Connell) – now coaching the men’s tennis team at Princeton.  Why has Canada produced so many top-ranked doubles players over the last 10-15 years?  It has to do with Tennis Canada’s Tactics First Approach to training their tennis coaches.  Their tactics first approach has been the official coaching method in Canada since at least 1985.  Although the Canadian tennis players are too few and not talented enough to regularly break into the top 100 in singles – in a sport which prioritizes tactics, they have dominated (per capita) the top ranking spots over the last 15 years. Smart play can overcome a lack of physical talent – a great lesson for sqush coaches.  in order to develop this “squash intelligence” coaches need to use a Tactics First Approach.

Application for Squash Coaches:

1. Help keep the pressure off your junior squash players through proper goal setting (task not win goals) and an emphasis on longterm development.
2. Use a Tactics First Approach to develop squash intelligence in your players

Mental Training for Beginning Squash Players

Most of the attention in the sport psychology domain is given to advanced and elite adult players.  In an ideal world, squash coaches would start to guide their proteges towards mental toughness at the very start of their squash lives.

In the early 1990’s I helped Tennis Canada develop mental training and sport psychology priorities for every age group in their junior tennis programs:  periodized annual mental training programs to be implemented in Canadian indoor clubs for each of their junior age groups:  U11, U14, U18.

At each stage of development, different psychological qualities were prioritized – for example tennis intelligence, courage, leadership, etc.  In effect what we did was  develop psychological specifics what we would now describe as stages of a Long Term Athlete Development Plan (LTAD).

While many of the technical and physical aspects of published LTADs are very concrete and specific, the psychological aspects tend to be general and vague – reason being that the sport scientists developing the LTADs work primarily in the areas of physiology and motor learning – not sport psychology!

Here is a link to great example of mental training for beginning tennis players – which will apply 100% to beginning squash players – thanks International Tennis Federation (ITF)!

ITF Mental Training for Tennis Beginners

Psychology of Squash: Positive Self-Talk During Practice

Being positive and focussed on the task at hand is one of the key characteristics of the Ideal Performance State for squash.  However being positive is a skill or ability that cannot necessarily just be turned on or off at will – particularly in very important, closely contested, stressful matches when one is not playing their best.

In order to be able to keep thoughts positive and focussed on actual squash performance (versus “how bad you are playing” or “that was a horrible referee call”) in an important match, squash players need to practice controlling their thoughts in practice and training situations – “you play the way you practice”.  This idea of using mental skills in progressively more stressfull and match-like conditions is one of the principles behind a periodization approach to implementing a psychological skills training program.

Squash coaches need to be able to coach their squash athletes on these mental aspects in addition to their regular technical-tactical coaching.   In this short video clip I introduce my team to the idea of using positive self-talk during practice.  At this stage of the season (specific preparation period) I am suggesting they tailor their self-talk to their technical goals (e.g., “lead with the butt on your swing”).

Application for Squash Coaches:

1. Give your athletes a chance to use mental skills in practice before expecting them to use them sucessfully in matches.
2. Help the athletes develop self-talk to use in practice that is related to their squash goals.

Psychology of Squash: The Ideal Performance State

In 1983 Sport Psychologist Jim Loehr published an article in a little known Journal published by the Coaching Association of Canada.  Shortly thereafter, Loehr exploded onto the international tennis scene, spending the next 10-15 years consulting with many of the world’s top professional tennis players, frequently through his association with Nick Bollietieri and his tennis academy.  What was great about Loehr’s article on the Ideal Performance State was that is was concise and easy to understand – and therefore highly usable – a key quality for squash coaches.  Nowadays, Loehr spends time giving $35,000 speaking engagements to some of the world’s top business executives.  Since 1983 he has published almost a dozen books on sports and performance psychology (go to Amazon.com) – most of them very applied and practical.

Nicol David, World #1

In his article, Loehr argues for the existence of a special psychological state that occurs during an athlete’s best performances.  An athlete’s Ideal Performance State (IPS) consists of high energy, positive feelings, and can be described using adjectives such as energized, physically relaxed, mentally calm, self-confident and focused in the present.  Loehr’s IPS model has never been scientifically validated by the sport psychology academic community, and in the academic world has been supplanted by Hanin’s Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning, and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow model – both of which I teach in my Psychology of Sport class at Smith College.

Squash Coaches: Evaluate Your Season & Program

While most of the squash world soldiers on towards season-ending championships in May, the U.S. college and high school squash scene has ground slowly to a halt – which means it is time for squash coaches to evaluate the success of their squash coaching interventions.

A coach’s win-loss record is one indicator of success, although since the best academic schools in the U.S. tend to attract the best players, they should have the best win-loss records, so there is not much information to be gained from this statistic.  The same could be said of those schools that recruit “enthusiastically” – if they start the season off with the best players and end up winning, it is difficult to parse out the benefit of coaching.

Evaluating your season or program does not have to be a complicated process.  Squash coaches can glean useful information from five simple questions developed by sport psychologist Terry Orlick.  Orlick was one of the first sport researchers to use qualitative (i.e., interviews) research methods to examine the psychological behaviors or world class athletes, and has written a number of very useful easy to read books on sport psychology for athletes and coaches.  You can download a number of his articles as .pdf files for free at his website the Zone of Excellence .  His 1988 article, Mental Links to Exclellence is a must read for squash coaches who want to really understand psychological performance.

The Psychology of Squash: Staying Focused Between Points

What is great about squash in comparison to many other sports is that each of the four performance elements are important:  technique, tactics, physical and psychology.  Unlike team sports, once the match is underway, there is no coaching allowed during actual play, and minimal pauses allowed for reflection and mental preparation.  This places the utmost importance on a player controlling their mental state between rallies – the average between point break being about 10 seconds – even more important since the switch this year to point-a-rally (PAR) scoring  for both men and women.  Players cannot afford to lose their focus for even a minute now, since it is so easy now to let a match get away, and so difficult to work your way back from a big deficit.

The importance of using the between-point time in racquet sports to control an athlete’s mental state was first recognized by well known sport psychologist Jim Loehr.  Although I have found some of his material and talks (he now charges $35,000 to top companies for speaking engagements on Energy Management) to be overly dramatic, Loehr pioneered the development of many practical, easy to use mental tools for tennis, which is an important accomplishment in a field which can get a little too ethereal.

I first ran into Loehr when he was the guest speaker at the 1984 World Professional Squash Association (WPSA) Teaching Pro Conference in 1984.  I was so intrigued by his dismissal of my mention of  Tutko and Tosi’s book Sport Psyching that I had just reread (purchased and read originally in 1976) that I went back to school to get a Master’s in Sport Psychology and Coaching.  I used his book Mental Toughness Training for Sports as the training manual for my first consulting job (hired by National Coach Tony Swift)  in 1986 at Squash Canada’s National Training Center in Toronto.

16-Second Cure Video

In response to the McEnroe influenced mid-eighties tennis trend of out of control behavior between points, Loehr produced a video entitled “The 16-Second Cure” which detailed a four-step, between point, on-court routine (that took 16 of the allowed 25 seconds) whose purpose was to maintain the ideal performance state of relaxation, positiveness, activation and focus – mostly through the use of breathing and serve and return rituals.

It did not take me very long to develop the squash-specific adaptation of Loehr’s idea:  The 10-Second Solution.  Soon several generations of Canadian Junior National Teams, and thousands of U.S. juniors passing through the USSRA National Training Center (later Princeton Squash Camps) were being rated and trained on their between-point behavior – even playing conditioned games where the winner was the player who displayed the best focus.

I remember doing a “mental” charting of one Canadian Junior back in the late 80’s who had an astounding 36 negative between-point behaviors or vocalizations in the first game we charted.  I think he reduced it down to a dozen or so after being presented with the hard evidence (a standard scoring sheet with (+) or (-) notations along with comments in the columns).  Here is an example of another rating form we used to chart players – it could be completed by either the squash coach or a fellow player.

Between Point Behavior Rating Form

And here is a short video of a player who is not following the four steps:

Application for Squash Coaches

1. You can use notational analysis (charting) of a squash players between-point behavior to help evaluate their mental performance.
2. The four steps of the 10-Second Solution provides a simple framework to analyze and teach players to stay relaxed and focused during their matches – lots of good (and a few bad) examples on YouTube.
3. Loehr’s  books provide many useful tools that can be adapted for squash.

What should a squash player visualize?

The good thing about many self-help books on sport psychology is that they often have visualization scripts that a squash coach could read aloud to his or her athletes, or many general suggestions (e.g., “imagine yourself playing well”) for what to visualize.

The bad thing is that these set scripts and general suggestions are too vague to be of real help to our squash athletes.  Imagine the similar situation of coaching our players on court with the feedback: “get your racquet back earlier” or “bend your knees” or “follow-through”.  Unlikely to be of help to the serious, thoughtful player who already has the basics.  As squash coaches, we are also hampered by the fact that there are no “Mental Training for Squash” books out there that directly address our needs.

So what should we tell our players to visualize?  Based on my 22 years of sport psychology consulting there are three practical sources of visualization content that squash coaches can use.  I have outlined them in the chart below.

Sources of visualization content for squash players.

Player’s Goals

If your squash player’s three main goals are to:  1) Improve quickness; 2) Be tougher on key points; and 3) Play tighter length court of the back-court – then these scenarios are exactly what they should be visualizing.  The more specific the squash coach can be with visualization instructions, the more benefit the player will get from doing the mental training.  For each goal the coach could develop three visualization scenarios to reinforce the accomplishment of the player’s goals – in the example here scenes that support goal #2.

2.a.  Visualize playing from 8-8 in the 5th.

2.b.  Visualize playing from 0-0 in the 5th.

2.c. Visualize coming back from down 7-2.

Training Phase

For those squash coaches who use periodized (periodised for you non-North American Commonwealth natives:) annual training plans, visualization content will change as you move through the year to support the main training goals of each phase.  The main directives for each phase are contained in the above chart.  You can read about periodized mental training programs in my article here.

Focus Plan

A Squash Focus Plan is a written plan with three parts that a player uses to stay totally focussed during a squash match:

1) Pre-match:  The list of activities, physical (jogging, stretching, etc.) and mental (breathing, visualization, etc.), that a player does to get warmed up and into the “zone” in the 60 minutes prior to a match.

2) Match Focus: List of reminders (technical, tactical, mental) that a player needs to focus optimally during a match.

3) Distraction Control or Focus Plan:  list of problematic situations or distractors that might cause a player to lose focus – and a specific solution for each (e.g., cue words, breathing, etc.).

An important part of using a Focus Plans is to have your athlete visualize each part of the plan being carried out under different conditions (different tournaments, opponents, styles of play, etc.).  A highly recommended resource for Focus Plans is Terry Orlick’s Coaches Training Manual to Psyching for Sport – out of print but still available used on the internet.

Application for Squash Coaches

1. Provide individualized, squash-specific visualization workouts for your players.
2. Help your players develop a written Squash Focus Plan.

Psychological Priorities for Squash – On-Court Mental Skills

In general, the principles of sport psychology apply to all sports.  However, in the same way that a squash-specific physical training program (e.g., lunges, twisting core exercises, med ball side throws) will improve your athletes more than a general one (e.g., squats, bench press, biceps curl), a program designed specifically to meet the needs of squash is better than a general one.

Although there are a quite a few books on mental training for tennis, I know of none for squash.  Having designed psychology programs for world champions in both tennis and squash I can say that there are important differences.  Due to the lack of published resources for squash we need to rely on knowledge from three areas to guide our interventions.

Examples of subjective and professional practice experience can be found in squash books published by top players in the 1970’s and 1980’s heyday of squash.

Another example of using professional practice knowledge involves summarizing the opinions of knowledgeable coaches. I asked national squash coaches from around the world attending the 2007 WSF Coaching Conference in Calgary the question:  “What is the most important thing you know about mental training for squash”.  Their answers are contained in this document: wsf-coaches-answer-the-question-1. 

Summer is Here: Plan Your Squash Team’s Season Mental Training

Now that summer is upon us, many squash coaches are turning their attention towards planning their next squash season. Dedicated athletes are already logging 10-15 hours a week doing General Preparatory physical work such as low to medium intensity aerobic workouts and whole body strength-endurance exercises, and hopefully some fun activities like summer basketball, swimming, biking and roller-blading.

Most coaches do not feel as comfortable planning their team’s mental training as they do the physical and technical training aspects of squash. What exactly are the elements that need to be included in an effective program? Here they are in order of importance and priority:

1. Establish a task (versus win) climate for your program.
2. Assist athletes to develop a ‘Squash Focus Plan”.
3. Implement regular match and Focus Plan evaluation procedures.
4. Encourage your athletes to visualize regularly.
5. Address individual athlete issues through a mental skills training program.