Kelvis White’s Bob Jones football team is 3-3 headed into this week’s home game against Class 7A, Region 4 opponent Albertville.
One of the Patriots’ losses came by a point in their season-opener and another by a touchdown in overtime to crosstown rival James Clemens, currently undefeated and ranked sixth in the state. Bob Jones has wins by 3, 8 and 4 points – all in come-from-behind thrillers.
You could point to many reasons for the narrow wins and competitive losses. White and senior linebacker Zane Lynch give some credit to offseason work – but not the customary 7-on-7 competitions or sweaty weight-room sessions. The coach and player said visits from Roger Kitchen Jr. of Power Mental Performance in Huntsville taught Patriots lessons on mental toughness that have paid dividends.
White said he learned of Kitchen’s services after he had worked with Wade Waldrop and the James Clemens team before Waldrop left this year for Florence. In early meetings, the Patriots’ coaching staff laid out goals for the team, “just a foundation for this program,” White said. “He helped us develop that based on things we felt we were lacking. We came up with a motto, ‘Rise to the occasion,’ and some pillars for this program that we want to develop. We’re building from the ground up.”
Lynch said the sessions helped bring the team together and honed his and his teammates’ ability to focus.
“Last season, one of our biggest things was our mentality,” he said. “We’ve always had talent here, but whenever we got down a touchdown or two, we went into the tank a little bit. He helped us to focus on things we can control. We always talked about that, but we didn’t think about the magnitude of it.
“We’d think, ‘Oh, the refs are doing this or that, that’s why we’re losing.’ But the refs are part of every game. We have to focus on what we can control. All of our games but one this year have been extremely close games. I think this has helped us rally up and come back.”
Kitchen, whose background is in employee development and training, said his first sports client was himself. “I was a powerlifter in college, then life hits and I get married, have a couple kids,” he said. “In 2016, 2017, I got the itch to get back into lifting.”
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He was working with a company that was contracted with the U.S. Army and NASA at the time and the company brought in a sports psychologist to work with teams at NASA. “I had taken a break of about 24 years from powerlifting, so I was pretty nervous. He helped me through it and once I had competed, I really saw the benefits,” Kitchen said. “I took all I knew and became a mental skills coach. Everything I did with me, I do with these athletes, these teams and coaches and even parents.”
Kitchen said it’s vital for parents to support their children’s athletic endeavors and to understand how important their role is to their success.
“Dave Phillips, the golf professional at Titleist Performance Institute, found through his work that a lot of golfers were quitting,” Kitchen said. “He researched other sports and found that other athletes were quitting the big four sports – football, baseball, basketball and soccer – and one key component of all the research was the car ride home. Parents were being overly critical, trying to coach their kid in the car ride home. That led to the student being burned out, frustrated and not having fun any more.
“The fastest growing high school sport now is lacrosse. Why? Parents see their sons or daughters out there with a wicket, swinging it around, and think it’s great. They don’t know anything about lacrosse,” he said, and therefore don’t have too many tips that can be seen as pressure.
“I’ve been a high school assistant for cross country and track. There were things I did right, but a lot I did wrong. But, I figured it out. I basically came up with a one-hour workshop to help parents support their student-athletes. It’s hard. You want your kid to perform at their best and you want them to do well, but unfortunately the impact can be bad.
“When I put my boys in T-ball, I was shocked at how intense some parents can be,” he said. “One of my son’s had a coach who was so overbearing that at one point the umpire told him, ‘If you keep yelling at your shortstop, I’m going to throw you out – and not just out of the game, out of the park.’ Some parents think they are doing the right thing, but sometimes they can be contributing to the young athlete leaving the sport.”
Roger Kitchen Jr. of Power Mental Performance explains a concept to the St. John Paul II High School boys basketball team. (Submitted)
With the Patriots, White said he felt his team needed help in being more mentally tough. “It’s been huge in our mental development,” he said. “It’s been really good for our kids. You know, teens need help sometimes in controlling their emotions. He’s helped with showing them how to deal with the anxiety of the game. I can tell a difference.”
Lynch said he believes the game is “80 percent mental. We had quite a few guys last season that when things went wrong, they immediately just came apart. They would get mad and start pointing fingers. Now, it’s taken a 180,” he said. “When stuff doesn’t go our way, we’ve rallied and focused on what we need to do.
“We learned a big lesson, especially after the first game of this year with Buckhorn. We had three starting linemen out, but we couldn’t dwell on that. It was a tough loss (18-17), but we got past it,” Lynch said. “Take the Sparkman game. I’m a linebacker and our defense didn’t play a great first half. We were down 21-6 at the half, but the defense came out and played our brand of football and shut them out and gave the offense a chance to bring it home for us.”
The Patriots won that game 25-21.
“I tell my athletes they have to change their perception to change their performance,” Kitchen said. “If you think differently, you perform differently.
“I say there is no magic fairy dust, that if you start doing this that overnight you will get good. You have to practice it. If you want to get better in, say, free-throw shooting, you need to show up 30 minutes before practice and shoot 50 free throws, then after practice, stay 30 minutes and shoot 50 more free throws. Then, it’s measurable and you put time into it. When you do those things, then you’re focused on the process, not the result.”
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Kitchen said that while he works to help athletes play at their best mentally, it’s not all about wins and losses. “It’s a life skill discussion,” he said. “What they put into practice in sports translates into the classroom, it translates to family, to our lives. You learn to control what you can control, maintain focus, manage your emotions and how to respond properly. It’s big for them outside of sports.
A Certified Change Management Professional, Kitchen said he also works with some college teams and has been hired by parents to teach their student-athletes one on one. “I take it seriously to prepare the high-school athlete to be ready mentally and emotionally to go to the next level in college,” he said. “I do the same for the college athletes I work with if they want to go professional. The challenges are bigger, more complex and very visible. So, if they are not ready, they will be exposed because of their lack of preparation.”
Kitchen said having a mental edge is particularly important for those who want to continue their athletic career after high school or college, since fewer then 2 percent of college athletes go pro according to the NCAA and just 1 in 16,000 high-school athletes play a professional sport.
“Another thing is learning to recover from mistakes, to bounce back and be resilient. In basketball, I teach a concept I call ‘next play speed.’ It’s basically to move to the next play in less than three seconds. You break the game down play by play. After the play is done, reset, be ready for the next play.”
Kitchen said sports psychology is now a part of most major Division I programs and Nick Saban has certainly promoted it in Alabama and the Southeastern Conference. “He popularized ‘the process’ phase,” Kitchen said. “He says he doesn’t care about wins or losses, but he wants the player to set individual and team goals and then figure out what the process is to achieve it. The great thing about Coach Saban is he has popularized mental health in sports and he has several mental performance coaches who have worked with his teams.”