Will Me On

William gets Silver at the Junior Masters!

Last Weekend (16th 17th May 2009) William was competing in the Junior Masters Tournament. After the last two previous outings where Will had struggled to find form he was looking for a good performance to end his days as a Junior! Training abroad brings its own set of mind games as people 'expect' to see improvements and quickly judge when things don't go so well. Integrating new techniques into your match play doesn't happen instantly though as we all know. Anyhow nothing to lose this time, the last Junior tournament, and just an outside chance of going to Poland with England if Will won everything convincingly. So what happened ??

Well here are the results :-

Daniel Basterfield 3-0 win
Sam Walker 3-0 Win
Lewis Gray 3-0 win
Kim Daybell 3-0 Win
Emran Hussain 3-0 Win
Richard Andrews 3-2 Win
Zak Zilesnick 3-2 Win
Danny Lowe 3-0 Win
Ping Ho 3-0 Win
Chris Doran 3-2 Lose
Matt Ware 3-0 Win
Reece Tan 3-1 Win

Well there it is, 11 wins and one loss. Most of the matches were 3-0 with only two being a final leg decider 3-2. Well it was good but not quite good enough to impress the England Selectors and Chris Doran and Matt Ware were chosen to go to Poland.

Urfi (Gergely Urban) was with William for the weekend and made comprehensive notes at the change of service situations recording the scores at crucial moments within the matches. These are vital clues now for William to study and picture how was the mindset at these trigger points. Understanding the mental attitude and working on the right appoach at the big points will increase Will's consistency and bring about victories when the pressure is on. With a year in the Austrian league and working hard on these psychological aspects with his Sports Psycologist Beryl Whiting, Will is determined to show the England selectors that he has both the talent and the desire to be the best we have !!

Mind Coaching Will to win

I had the absolute pleasure of meeting Will Maybanks for the first time this week and we spent over an hour clearing Will's mind of the issues that hold him back.  Will soon understood the principles of working with the unconscious mind to change the way he thinks.  When we change the mind set then we change the behaviour. 

Together we were able to create a mindset for Will that will allow him to play his best whoever his opponent is and whatever level of game he is playing.  So in the future, when he sees that he is pitched against a formidable opponent, instead of running those negative thought patterns of  'I am not good enough to beat this guy' and sabotaging his game even before picking up his bat, he will sincerely believe that he is good enough to win and will play the match holding that firm belief in his mind. 

By the end of the session Will was pretty amazed at how differently he felt about his forthcoming high level matches.  Instead of being nervous, he couldn't wait to play!  He was hungry for that win!

This is a dynamic change in his thought processes and is a crucial aspect of coaching him towards making him the Olympic star that we, in 'The Team', know he can be.

Will and I plan to work together on a very regular basis, so that anytime a negative thought pops up we can tackle it head on so that Will can easily focus on being the best that he can be.

Well done Will!