Icebox Athlete: Increasing Athletes Mental Toughness

Spencer Wood

 “AWESOME, an 8 pm meeting this Wednesday, my off day”, that was my reaction to the news I had to attend an all student athlete seminar. On Wednesday, February 15th, I attended a mental toughness training session titled, “Icebox Athlete”. The seminar was located at Redbird Arena, and had roughly 400 student athletes. This presentation was on mental toughness, it’s aim was to teach athletes skills on how to increase their mental toughness in all aspects of performance. The skills and techniques we were taught prove to be helpful in the mind of a student athlete .The speaker, who also happens to be the president of the organization, was Spencer Wood. Wood is an internationally renowned speaker and dynamic trainer of athletes and coaches in the areas of cutting-edge Mental Skills & Toughness. Wood’s credibility and experience in the field of sports psychology made this seminar one of the professional levels. 

This seminar served as an overview of Spencer Wood's mental toughness program. In actuality, the Icebox program is a 26 day plan, but this workshop was only 2 hours. Spencer gave us a motivational speech that demonstrated the importance and helpfulness of mental toughness in the sporting world. The main advice given to us was how to handle your focus level in the toughest of situations, for instance, when the game is on the line. In order to demonstrate this, Spencer decided to conduct an activity.

Playing a college sport in front of a large audience can invoke a sense of stage fright, which affects your ability to perform. With students, parents, alumni, coaches and faculty members all watching, the feeling of failure in competition becomes worse in your mind. When the game is on the line, this problem worsens.

Midway through the seminar, Spencer randomly called a female athlete down to the stage, and told her she could not leave the stage until she recited the entire national anthem in front of the 400 people in attendance.  Spencer began to count down from 15. As any human would, this young lady got incredibly nervous. Sitting in the audience, everyone looked around in feeling of her embarrassment. Once the countdown had ended, the speaker informed the audience that this young lady did not have to sing the national anthem. The purpose behind this brief activity was to simulate the anxiety level involved in collegiate sports, and it clearly served its purpose.

At the completion of this seminar, my views on mental toughness in the sporting world had changed. This is something I benefited from, because I now recognize ways on how to increase my focus level in competition.