Friday night lights, roaring crowds and the weight of expectations — high school athletes know what it feels like to play under pressure. Whether it’s football, basketball, volleyball or any sport overall the pressure to perform can be overwhelming, especially when a single mistake might shift the outcome of a game. 

For many players, the hours leading up to kickoff or tipoff are filled with excitement, but also with the anxiety of what could go wrong. 

“In my position, being the quarterback, a lot of our success falls on how I perform. So I feel that I need to be perfect so that our team can have the best chance of winning games,” Maxwell Bradely (12) said. 

When the whistle blows and the game begins, mistakes are almost guaranteed to happen. A missed shot, a turnover, or a mental lapse can feel like the end of the world in the moment. Some athletes admit that it’s hard not to dwell on those moments, especially with the eyes of a packed gym or stadium watching.

Sometimes mistakes or if you get too much in your head, they make you really lose yourself in the sport then you get a little bit sick of it and angry towards the sport,” Savannah Bentrup (10) said. 

Still, many players are learning that bouncing back quickly is the key to success. High school sports are just as much about mental toughness as they are about skill. If one mistake turns into frustration, it can snowball into more errors. That’s why staying calm and moving on to the next play is so important.

Coaches play a huge role

in this process. They often remind athletes that nobody plays a perfect game, and the best players are the ones who know how to recover. Some coaches encourage short memories—forget the mistake and get ready for the next opportunity. Others emphasize discipline and focus, teaching athletes that resilience is a skill that can be practiced just like shooting or running drills.

“I try to buddy them up with two or three other individuals that are more laid back so that they can give them the vibe of ‘hey, it’s cool. It’s all right. Let’s just do this again and try to get better.’ Then with those students I try to do more film time so they can see what went wrong and potentially fix it,” Head basketball coach Nicholas Traxler said. “Don’t just focus on the fact that they failed, way too often that happens, the only thing you can really do again is try to highlight the strengths of what they’ve done well because they tend to just focus on the things that they did badly.”

Although there are some athletes that are able to use the anxiety and pressure as motivation in order to keep them from burning out. 

“I start to feel burned out, but having played the sport for the past seven years, I know deep down that I want to keep going, and it gives me motivation to do better,” Bradley said. 

Even with the constant challenge of handling pressure, many athletes wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The nerves, the mistakes and the comebacks all add to the excitement. For players, it’s about more than just winning—it’s about learning how to handle the highs and lows that come with competing.

“[My advice to younger kids is] to have a strong mentality and realize that things happen,” Bentrup said. “There’s always a way to move past them and fix them and grow.”