The regular season of youth baseball is coming to an end, and except for some divisions in certain leagues, which are still hotly contested, you know whether or not your team is headed for the playoffs. If you’re one of the talented or lucky teams heading to the postseason, how well you perform may depend on how you handle stress.

Briefly, and in simple terms, stress is that feeling of anxiety that you experience before an important event or test, such as a championship game or a college entrance exam. It’s that sick feeling in your stomach that makes you feel like you’re going to throw up or that you can’t stop moving your foot up and down.

The inability to manage stress can render an athlete totally unable to compete, literally making the player so sick that they can’t perform. However, on the flip side of this situation, an athlete accustomed to stress and has developed the ability to manage it, can channel this anxious energy into something positive, allowing them to explode onto the field of play with energy and motivation in abundance. .

So how do we control or learn to channel the anxious energy that stress creates? Perhaps we should first examine what creates stress. In my experiences I found fear, Fear of failure creates most types of stress. For example, during pregame warmups against a team that’s clearly in the wrong division and your team has beaten four times by a cumulative score of 52-1, you’re loose, fun, and eager to get the game started.

Yet during the same pregame warmups against a known and powerful opponent, or worse, an unknown opponent, you are restless, slightly sick to your stomach, and constantly watching the other team trying to gauge their abilities.

In the first scenario, there is a calm created by the complete belief and confidence in not only winning the game, but more importantly knowing that you will do well. Previous encounters with pitchers on this team have resulted in nothing but success and there’s no reason to believe today will be any different.

The second scenario paints a completely different picture. The game is very important, a tournament elimination game, which your team must win or go home. This added weight of winning is everything, it puts the normally calm nerves on edge and irritable.

Fear, fear of the unknown and what it can directly mean for you, makes your nerves go into a frenzy. Will I be able to hit this pitcher? Will I let a ball pass between my legs? Can I steal without getting kicked out? These and a hundred other questions go through your mind because of your fear of failure. Of course you don’t want to let the team down, but what happens directly to you, success or failure, is what brings stress to an unhealthy level.

Let’s examine a method to not only beat stress, but also turn it into an ally.

The fear of failure is created when the mind wonders if the body did everything it could to prepare for this test. For example, if he had planned to go to the batting cages on two separate days before this game, but stayed with his girlfriend in the pool, his mind knows that and he knows that he is not as ready as he could be. be. Because of this, there is increased anxiety about possible failure.

However, if you had gone to the batting cages twice a day for the two days leading up to the game and were shooting shots with the fastest pitching machine available, your mind knows you’re ready. The nervous energy you experience can now be channeled into a positive adrenaline pool that may very well give you that burst of energy that allows you to catch the momentum of the line, instead of missing it by an inch.

Proper preparation is an important key to managing stress. Remember, you can’t hide from yourself and you can’t lie to yourself.