The Coach’s Playbook for Focus: Defending Attention in the High-Performance Arena

For nearly a decade at the University of Colorado, I’ve seen how distraction—often subtle, sometimes crushing— as it undermines performance. Not just for athletes, but for us as coaches, as leaders, as managers and drivers of high-performance ecosystems.

In the early years (2017–2020), I was splitting my time between strength and conditioning coaching for Women’s Basketball and Volleyball and building a Sport Science model from scratch.

Those seasons taught me this: protecting attention isn’t a luxury. It’s an operational necessity if you’re serious about sustaining elite performance.

This isn’t a theoretical essay. It’s a field guide built on barbell chalk, AMS dashboards, IMU/GPS tags, and long nights spent programming microcycles. It’s for any coach, sport scientist, or practitioner who wants to regain control of their focus—and their program.

When I first arrived in Boulder in 2017, I was an eager coach and sport scientist, but also, maybe a little naive.

Women’s Basketball was coming off a challenging season, rebuilding both roster depth and their team culture. Women's Basketball was ten toes down trying to establish and build a robust and thriving team culture. Volleyball eventually ended up ranked nationally, achieving a Sweet Sixteen berth, but battling nagging injuries across key positions. And the Athletic Department’s appetite for Sport Science was just beginning to stir.

I wore multiple hats. Mornings began with dynamic warm-ups and teaching squat patterns in the weight room. Afternoons bled into monitoring player loads via wearable technologies, parsing out accelerations and decelerations, and manually entering RPE scores into spreadsheets. Evenings? They were for reflecting on programming gaps while fielding late emails from athletic trainers about return-to-play protocols. Oh, how about raising a 3 year old daughter and 1-year old son? Doing everything, with any great focus, was almost impossible.

The demands felt endless. Notifications buzzing. Slack messages pinging. Meetings stacked back-to-back. I’d sit with an athlete, cueing her to “own the hinge” on a trap bar deadlift while my mind flickered to unread emails and wellness flags on our budding AMS.

Sound familiar? That fractured attention is the death of presence. I was coaching, sure—but was I fully seeing the athlete in front of me? Was I catching the subtle change in bar path, or the fatigue etched in her body language after three matches in five days? That's left up to debate – but I know my answer.

Those first years showed me the cost of distraction. It wasn’t just my cognitive bandwidth. It was lost opportunities for precision—whether adjusting a microdosed plyometric progression for a post-ACL athlete or recalibrating an in-season taper for Volleyball before NCAAs.

Eventually, I understood:

I couldn’t outwork distraction. I had to out-system it.

One athlete crystallized this for me. A libero, 5’8”, relentless motor. During 2018 preseason, she’d enter the gym with headphones in, no phone, no chatter. She had a presence about her—an unbroken thread of attention from warm-up to final set.

“Coach,” she once told me, “when I step through those doors, it’s all volleyball. Nothing else exists.”

It struck me because, neurochemically, she was onto something. In flow, norepinephrine heightens alertness, dopamine drives sustained effort, and serotonin reinforces satisfaction. Brainwaves shift from beta to alpha, fostering creativity and intuitive decision-making—the same patterns I chase during programming sprints at 5 AM.

Contrast that with our modern reality. One text message, one Slack notification, and your prefrontal cortex lights up with distraction. The “flow tunnel” collapses. It’s not a minor reset—it’s a neurochemical tax that leaves you cognitively fatigued before the session even ends.

In those early years, I didn’t just read about this; I lived it. Writing a 16-week off-season plan only to derail it mid-thought by checking Kinexon reports. Trying to analyze vertical stiffness trends and then falling down a Twitter rabbit hole. The cost? Hours lost, creativity dulled, decision quality degraded.

For athletes, the stakes are even higher. Flow states are where skill acquisition locks in. They’re where confidence grows under pressure. But the same dopamine loops that fuel focus also keep them hooked on notifications—paralyzing their ability to “be where their feet are.”

As coaches, if we can’t model focus, how can we expect them to?

Reclaiming focus wasn’t a single decision. It was a process, iterative and messy—just like building a high-performance department.

Rebuilding the Workspace

I stripped my office bare. No phone in sight. AMS dashboards closed unless I was actively using them. Printouts of force plate outputs and counter-movement jump trends on my desk—only what was immediately relevant to the block I was working on.

This wasn’t aesthetic minimalism. It was cognitive minimalism. In the same way we strip auxiliary lifts out of a peaking phase, I was stripping environmental noise.

Time Blocking Like a Periodized Macrocycle

I borrowed from block periodization:

• Morning Blocks (Neurocognitive Load): Deep programming work, RPE trend analysis, athlete readiness reviews.
• Midday Blocks (High Athlete Interaction): Full presence in the weight room and on court—no tech interruptions.
• Afternoon Blocks (Administrative Load): Emails, scheduling, staff development.

Each block had a goal, a rhythm, and clear boundaries. Just as I wouldn’t mix maximal strength work into a power development microcycle, I stopped mixing programming with inbox triage.

Digital Pruning

Notifications? All off. Social media? Deleted during in-season competition phases. I even disabled badge counters on my email apps. This wasn’t about asceticism—it was about creating a structure that aligned with the demands of coaching elite athletes.

The payoff? By 2019, my programming cycles were tighter. Readiness adjustments were faster. I was catching micro trends in AMS data that would’ve been lost in the noise. And my athletes? They felt my presence. They knew I wasn’t half-listening.

By the time we hit the 2022 season, the transformation wasn’t just noticeable—it was palpable. The way the Women’s Basketball team entered the weight room had changed. There was a quiet intensity, a sort of collective agreement that this space wasn’t for scrolling or idle chatter anymore. Phones stayed zipped in backpacks. Conversations centered on matchups, scouting reports, and who had the edge in yesterday’s trap bar velocity leaderboard.

The shift didn’t happen overnight, of course. Early on, I had to lead by example. I remember one morning in 2021, watching a sophomore guard fidgeting with her phone before practice. I walked over—not to scold, but to ask her about her pre-practice routine. She admitted she hadn’t thought much about it. We talked about how mental state feeds physical readiness, and how each distraction is like letting air out of a tire—your ability to generate force diminishes before you even touch the basketball.

We implemented a “two feet in” policy soon after: when you step into the arena, you’re all-in. Coaches, athletes, interns—we were all accountable. Music stayed low unless it served a specific purpose, like driving energy during contrast training. Warm-ups became focused rituals. I saw players using diaphragmatic breathing drills not just for physical readiness, but to center themselves before high-volume, high-intensity trainingsessions.

Volleyball followed a similar path. I still think about the libero who started setting the tone for her team. She’d take a quiet corner to go through her hip activation and visualize serve-receive rotations. Other players noticed. One by one, they mirrored her behavior. Soon, it wasn’t unusual to see three or four athletes moving through their prep routines in near silence, headphones off, minds tuned to the upcoming work.

What’s more, this cultural shift didn’t start and stop in the weight room. It seeped into practice courts and film rooms. Coaches reported fewer moments where players’ attention drifted during walkthroughs. They began engaging in recovery strategies with purpose—asking about sleep hygiene, nutrition periodization, and even showing curiosity about our AMS data reports.

Among the staff, the ripple was just as clear. Our Performance Meetings became leaner, sharper. In 2017, these meetings often felt like a scattershot of updates—each practitioner jockeying to get their data heard. By 2022, they were true collaboration sessions. We’d review workload metrics, force plate asymmetries, and even psychological readiness markers, with everyone present and contributing. No one was half-listening while replying to emails.

This collective attention didn’t just feel good—it produced results. Our women’s teams saw marked reductions in soft-tissue injuries during congested competition schedules. Return-to-play timelines became more precise, informed by our evolving Sport Science model. By 2023, I was confident we had matured from the infancy of our high-performance system to a robust, athlete-centered ecosystem.

And here’s what hit me hardest: culture is fragile. It requires daily tending. One lapse—a phone out during a lift, a distracted coach glancing at a watch during a meeting—threatens to undo weeks of hard-won trust.

When you guard attention like a scarce resource, the buy-in you build compounds. The teams began to own their environment. As a coach, it was humbling. I wasn’t driving the culture anymore; I was watching it sustain itself.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in collegiate athletics, every program is searching for an edge. Everyone has access to platforms, monitoring tech, and performance nutrition. Strength coaches everywhere preach grit, resilience, and discipline. But how many are intentionally building systems to protect their staff’s and athletes’ attention?

That’s what separates programs.

I’ll say it bluntly—if you’re not actively defending focus, you’re forfeiting margins that decide championships.

Think about your own coaching workflow. How many programming errors creep in because your brain was split between writing a 4-week block and fielding administrative texts? How many readiness flags go unnoticed because you’re skimming AMS dashboards during a Zoom call?

For athletes, the stakes are even higher. Focus isn’t a soft skill; it’s a performance multiplier. In the gym, split attention leads to technical breakdowns—poor bar path on a clean pull, inattention during eccentric control drills. On the basketball court, it means missed rotations, slower defensive reads, and errors in transition.

During our NCAA tournament run in 2022, I saw the power of collective focus firsthand. Women’s Basketball entered a brutal stretch—three games in five days, across two time zones. The staff kept their heads clear, resisting the temptation to overanalyze or overload players with feedback. Athletes committed to pre-practice routines, avoided social media rabbit holes, and showed up to film sessions mentally present.

The result? Crisp rotations. Better in-game adjustments. A resilience that carried us through double-overtime against a higher seed.

And let’s not forget the cost of inattention among staff. A poorly timed training block, a misread wellness score—it’s not just a mistake; it’s a potential injury or season derailed.

As coaches, our job isn’t just to build physical capacity. It’s to shape an environment where attention flows naturally—where every rep, every drill, every meeting is an opportunity for athletes to train their focus as much as their bodies.

When you master that, you’re no longer competing on just talent or facilities. You’re competing on clarity, presence, and precision—the true currency of high performance.

I’ve spent nearly two decades in Strength & Conditioning, and if there’s one lesson that has crystallized in my coaching, it’s this: your greatest asset isn’t your training knowledge, your periodization model, or even your Sport Science dashboard. It’s your ability to focus, and to teach others to do the same.

Focus is the coach’s North Star. Without it, even the best-laid plans become noise—workouts lose their punch, meetings lose their purpose, and athletes lose trust.

Think of focus like tendon health. Neglect it, and you won’t notice the damage immediately. But over time, microtears accumulate. Cognitive fatigue sets in. Decision quality suffers. And one day, the system gives way—not because you didn’t care, but because you didn’t protect the tissue of attention.

That’s why, here in 2025, I guard my focus as fiercely as I guard my athletes’ workloads. It’s why I still wake up early to write blocks uninterrupted, still keep my phone out of sight during lifts, still preach presence during the most mundane of drills.

Because I’ve seen what happens when a team operates fully engaged. It’s not magic—it’s the natural outcome of sustained, protected attention.

For coaches stepping into this profession, here’s my challenge: build your own attention protocols like you’d build a macrocycle. Periodize your cognitive load. Eliminate distractions with the same ruthlessness you’d cut a poorly designed auxiliary lift.

Your attention shapes your athletes’. Their attention shapes their performance. And their performance? That shapes programs, legacies, and careers.

Guard it well.