It’d be so easy to coach if every young athlete learned in the same way, wouldn’t it? But unfortunately, that isn’t the case. So even though you might be very comfortable communicating and teaching in a certain fashion, a one-size-fits-all approach is only going to benefit a fraction of the players you’re trying to coach. The rest are either going to have sub-optimal learning experiences or the lessons will go completely over their heads.

In the previous two posts in this series, we explored ways to clean up your athletes’ mental hygiene and how to use your situational awareness to spot intuitively when someone is struggling. For this third installment, we’re turning our attention to how we can combine subjective observation and objective measurements to monitor players’ mental health and hopefully spot any red flags so we can address an issue like anxiety or depression before it escalates.

When I began the previous installment of this series, I intended to just write a single post about identifying and trying to help remedy athletes’ mental health problems. But once I started lighting up my keyboard, I suddenly realized I’d blazed past 1,000 words and had only just scratched the surface. So here goes with part two.