Most parents on the sideline are not trying to add pressure. They are trying to help: to encourage, to motivate, to show they care about how the game goes. But the evidence is clear that parental behaviour, even well-intentioned behaviour, shapes how much pressure a child feels. Parent behaviour also influences how children learn to relate to pressure, sometimes in ways that surprise parents who thought they were being supportive. This blog looks at what the research actually

Most training sessions are designed to build skill. Fewer are designed to build the capacity to execute that skill under pressure, and the two are not the same thing. A player who can strike the ball perfectly in a quiet, consequence-free drill on a Tuesday. Then can look like a different athlete entirely on match day, not because the skill has disappeared, but because they have never practised deploying it while their nervous system is activated. This blog is about what the

Pressure has a way of finding the gap in your game. You can execute a skill perfectly a hundred times in training, and then the one time it matters most, with the score close, the crowd watching, or a selector in the stands, something changes. Your body feels different. Your thoughts speed up or go quiet in the wrong way. This is not a flaw in your character. It is a predictable psychological and physiological response, and it can be trained. This blog is about what pressure