The Mental Game Is Out. Here’s Why I Wrote It.

The Mental Game is a hockey mental performance book for players and parents. I’ve wanted to write this book for years. Something always got in the way: a family in the middle of a tryout cycle, a kid trying to figure out a commitment decision, the hundred other things that come with this job. I kept pushing it down the list. But the reason I kept pushing it down the list is the same reason it needed to get written.

Here’s what I’ve seen over and over, with every family I’ve worked with and with my own two kids: the players who keep climbing and the ones who stall out, it’s almost never about skill. I’ve watched talented kids lose ground because nobody ever taught them what to do after a bad tryout, a benching, a slump. And I’ve watched kids with less natural ability outlast them, because they knew how to handle it when things went wrong, and in this game, things go wrong constantly.

I had a kid once, most talented defenseman on the ice, easy. Didn’t always show up to play. Once a game he’d have that one moment that makes everybody in the stands go “wow,” and then everyone had the same question: why doesn’t he do that all the time? Around the same time, I had a player commit to Air Force. Not the leading scorer, not the biggest kid on the ice. But he did the little things every shift, and he was outstanding in the classroom too. He didn’t need to be the most gifted player in the rink to get where he wanted to go.

That’s the whole book in two examples. Talent gets you noticed. Consistency gets you recruited.

The question I ask every player

Out of every ten shifts a kid takes, how many are actually good shifts? Not goals. Not highlight-reel plays. Did he get the puck out on the wall when he needed to. Did he block a shot. Did he finish his check. A kid doing that on 5 out of 10 shifts, it doesn’t matter how much talent is there. I want to see 8, 9 out of 10. That’s the separator, and it’s the thread that runs through every chapter of this book.

What’s actually in it

The Mental Game walks through six parts: why the mental side matters more than most families think, handling pressure and identity through tryouts and cuts, building real confidence and pre-game routines that hold up under pressure, the long game of injuries and plateaus and coaches, what players actually need from parents, and how to put a simple training plan together that a kid will stick with.

None of it is theory. It’s built from real situations: a player cut from a USA Hockey districts camp who couldn’t figure out why and committed to Princeton two years later, a family that lost a scholarship conversation over an argument in a rink lobby, a kid who chased the fast track to juniors and set his own timeline back two years. If you’ve been around this game long enough, you’ve seen versions of all of it.

Why it matters for parents specifically

A lot of what shows up in the car after a game matters as much as what happens on the ice. I get into what to say, and more often, what not to say, after a bad game, how to tell the difference between a plateau and burnout, and the one thing (effort, not results) that’s actually fair game for a parent to get on a kid about.

I’m not a sports psychologist, and I didn’t write this as a clinical breakdown. I wrote it as someone who’s been in it, with other families and with my own. I’ve got two kids who’ve gone through this, one plays D1 as a goalie, the other’s in juniors right now, still finding his way. Even doing this for a living, I’ve fallen into some of the same parent traps I warn other families about.

Get the Hockey Mental Performance Book

The Mental Game is live on Amazon for $9.99, or free if you’re on Kindle Unlimited. If you want to read it before you buy, the prologue and first two chapters are free: get them and grab the book here. If you want to talk through where your own player’s game stands, HC Sports Management offers a free consultation.