Develop a Mental Edge
Most national sport federations have a clear development roadmap: technical skills, physical conditioning, tactical training. What's often missing — and what may be the single greatest untapped competitive advantage — is mental performance.
Dr. Wayne Chappelle knows this space well. After more than two decades developing mental performance systems for U.S. military special operations and working with hundreds of general officers at the Pentagon, he brought those same frameworks to the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder — where the team won a championship with one of the youngest rosters in league history. His foundational belief: no athlete can perform at their ceiling if their mental functioning isn't optimized alongside their physical training. And underneath all of it, he'll tell you plainly, is faith — a relationship with something far greater than yourself.
So how does a national federation — often under-resourced and operating without a dedicated sports psychologist — actually begin?
Character First: The Foundation of a Winning Culture
Before any mental performance tool can take root, the culture has to be built on the right foundation. Dr. Chappelle points to the Thunder's rebuild as a case study every federation leader should study closely.
Coming off what he describes as the greatest loss in NBA history, the organization had limited resources and had to be ruthlessly selective about who they brought in. Their criteria wasn't just talent. It was character.
"We looked at character — not just who played basketball and how well they played basketball, but who that individual was."
The result? A roster largely considered to be misfits and castoffs from other teams — the youngest starting lineup in NBA history — that went on to break records on the way to a championship. The lesson for national federations is clear: when you're building or rebuilding, prioritize the person. Talent can be developed. Character is the platform everything else is built on.
Start With the Conversation
The most accessible entry point costs nothing. The first step is simply bringing mental performance into the regular vocabulary of your coaching staff.
If you talk about it, you value it. If you don't, you're telling your athletes — implicitly — that it doesn't matter.
Coaches already discuss sleep, nutrition, and physical conditioning without hesitation. Mental functioning deserves the same consistency. That means talking regularly about emotional regulation, team cohesion, focus under pressure, and personal accountability — not just in moments of crisis, but as built-in expectations of your program.
The key is framing. Mental performance isn't a remediation tool for struggling athletes. It's a development pathway for everyone. Dr. Chappelle describes a continuum most coaches never teach their players to see:
Struggling — emotional, social, or behavioral problems are actively interfering with performance
Surviving — performing well under ordinary, controlled conditions
Thriving — performing at an extraordinary level under extraordinarily difficult conditions
Most athletes who believe they are thriving are actually just surviving. They look good when conditions are favorable. The real mark of an elite competitor is what happens when conditions are not. And that gap — from surviving to thriving — is exactly where mental performance work lives.
Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself
Dr. Chappelle is direct about what he sees as the most powerful mental performance advantage available to any athlete: faith.
When he first sat down with then-Thunder head coach Billy Donovan, the coach's first question wasn't about psychology or performance science. It was about prayer. Dr. Chappelle's answer has stayed consistent ever since.
"If you ever want to become the best version of yourself, you need to rely upon something that's greater than you. If you don't rely upon something greater than you to help steer you through the storms, you will always fall short."
That answer, he says, got him hired on the spot.
This isn't just a spiritual observation — it has direct performance implications. Athletes who anchor their identity and confidence in something beyond their own ability are more resilient under pressure. They compete with a settled quality that athletes who rely solely on self-belief often can't sustain, especially when things go wrong.
For Dr. Chappelle, a relationship with Christ isn't separate from mental performance — it's central to it. It provides the foundation of purpose, identity, and peace that allows an athlete to compete freely, handle adversity without unraveling, and find meaning that extends well beyond the scoreboard.
Federations that want to develop truly complete athletes would do well to create space for this conversation — not as an imposition, but as an invitation to the kind of inner life that produces lasting competitive resilience.
Build It Into Your Structure — Both Group and Individual
Implementation doesn't require a full-time sports psychologist to start. It requires intentionality about where and when these conversations happen.
In group settings — team meetings, pre-practice huddles, post-practice debriefs — coaches can address communication, trust, supporting teammates, and the courage to speak up when something isn't right. These aren't soft topics. They are the architecture of team cohesion, and cohesion is what wins championships.
Dr. Chappelle is blunt about this: a less talented but tightly unified team will, over time, consistently beat a more talented but divided one. He points to the U.S. Olympic basketball team as a recurring example — a roster loaded with All-Stars that has repeatedly fallen short because the players weren't cohesive. Talent without unity is fragile. Unity multiplies whatever talent you have.
In one-on-one settings, coaches can provide meaningful feedback about how an athlete is showing up emotionally and socially — not just technically. This is also the space to address lifestyle habits: sleep, nutrition, and other behaviors that directly affect performance. Most athletes already know what they should be doing. The coach's role is helping them close the gap between knowing and doing, and building the discipline to act on what they know even when they don't feel like it.
Teach Athletes to Work With Anxiety, Not Against It
One of the most immediately actionable things any federation can introduce is a reframe around pre-competition anxiety. The standard coaching instinct — calm down, don't be nervous — is not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive.
Dr. Chappelle describes performance anxiety on a 0-to-10 scale:
0–4: Too comfortable, too complacent. Processing slows. The athlete treats a high-stakes competition like a routine event. They will underperform.
5–7: The optimal window. The athlete is alert, sharp, focused, and motivated. This is where peak performance lives.
8–10: Overwhelmed. Concentration collapses. Confidence drops. The athlete starts replaying past mistakes or catastrophizing the future. They will choke.
The goal isn't to eliminate anxiety. It's to teach athletes to recognize where they are on that scale and use practical tools to bring themselves into the optimal zone — whether they need to come up or come down. Coaches should stop telling athletes not to be nervous and start teaching them to embrace and manage what they feel.
Introduce Visualization as a Trainable Skill
Visualization is one of the highest-impact and most accessible mental performance tools available. It requires no equipment and no budget. And the research is clear: combining mental rehearsal with physical practice produces measurably better results than physical practice alone.
One practical drill: have athletes perform a high-repetition skill — free throws, penalty kicks, serves — blindfolded. When the physical variables are removed, all that remains is the mental image. It builds automaticity: the kind of deep procedural memory that doesn't break down under game-day pressure.
But visualization isn't just for success scenarios. Dr. Chappelle uses adversity visualization to build resilience — and one story from the Tokyo Olympics shows exactly why it works.
He was working with an Olympic sprinter who had spent four years earning his spot in the gold medal final. In preparation, Dr. Chappelle had him mentally rehearse a long list of things going wrong: uncomfortable sleeping conditions, unfamiliar food, jet lag, rain, a wet track. The goal wasn't to worry about these scenarios — it was to rehearse performing through them with full effort and composure.
Then, moments before the race, the sprinter's shoelace broke.
For most athletes, that moment becomes a self-fulfilling spiral — my equipment is broken, so I can't run my best. The race is lost before it starts. Instead, this athlete thought: I still have half a shoelace. I'll adjust and go. He set a personal record and medaled.
Dr. Chappelle also points to Jim Thorpe — the legendary Native American athlete from Oklahoma — who competed in the Olympic decathlon after his shoes were stolen. He found two mismatched shoes in a trash can: one size 8, one size 11. He put three socks on one foot to fill the larger shoe, laced the other as tight as it would go, and competed. He won first place in 8 of the 15 events, including the running events.
When failure isn't an option, there are no excuses. That mindset is trainable. That's what visualization builds.
How to Message This to Resistant Athletes (and Coaches)
One of the most common concerns federation leaders raise: what happens when athletes — especially senior or star players — push back on mental performance conversations?
Dr. Chappelle's answer is about framing. Most people associate mental health conversations with problems. If your messaging implies I'm bringing this up because something is wrong with you, resistance is a natural response.
The reframe is simple and powerful: mental strength and conditioning is as important as physical strength and conditioning. You wouldn't question the value of a strength coach. A mental performance conversation is the same investment — it's about giving athletes a decisive advantage, not fixing a deficit.
"I want to get you better. I want to strengthen you. I want to empower you."
That framing — moving an athlete from surviving to thriving — is received entirely differently than suggesting they have a problem. Lead with the aspiration, not the diagnosis, and most athletes will lean in.
Develop the Whole Person, Not Just the Athlete
Perhaps the most important — and most overlooked — dimension of mental performance work is identity. When an athlete's entire sense of self is tied to their sport, they become brittle. Injury, a poor season, or the inevitable end of their career stops being a challenge and becomes a crisis.
Dr. Chappelle asks every athlete he works with a disarmingly simple question: If you couldn't play your sport, what would you do? What brings you joy? What do you feel designed for?
The "Mamba mentality" — total, relentless obsession with your sport to the exclusion of everything else — sounds compelling on the surface. Dr. Chappelle acknowledges the truth in it: elite performance requires discipline, sacrifice, and a competitive drive that doesn't switch off. But when athletes misinterpret it as this sport is all that I am, the consequences are real. Burnout. Emptiness after wins. Fragility around injury or benchtime.
He describes an OKC player who was drafted, injured in summer league, and found himself heading to his first NBA game in crutches and sweats — not on the court. The response Dr. Chappelle gave him wasn't sympathy. It was a reframe.
You have the best seat in the house. You're getting paid to be here. There are 10,000 other men who would take your place in a heartbeat. Walk down that hallway with pride. And use this time to build who you are beyond basketball.
That's the standard. Not self-pity — gratitude. Not stagnation — development. Athletes who know who they are outside of their sport compete with a freedom and resilience that sport-only identities simply can't sustain.
This, too, connects back to faith. When an athlete's ultimate identity is rooted in something greater — in a relationship with Christ, in a sense of purpose that transcends performance — the pressures of sport become manageable rather than defining. You are more than your last game. That truth, internalized, changes how an athlete competes.
The Standard: Extraordinary Under Extraordinary Conditions
Dr. Chappelle returns often to a single phrase that captures the entire mission of mental performance work:
You are only extraordinary if you perform extraordinarily well under extraordinarily difficult conditions. If you perform extraordinarily well under ordinary conditions, you're just ordinary.
That is the bar. And it's the bar every national federation should be helping their athletes reach — not just physically, not just technically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
The tools exist. The framework is proven, from the battlefield to the basketball court to the Olympic track. And it starts with a conversation.
Learn More From Dr. Wayne Chappelle
Dr. Chappelle works with elite athletes, executives, military leaders, and high performers across industries. To explore his work, resources, and how his approach could serve your federation or program, visit him at psyoptimal.com.
