This week’s guest is LSU Softball head coach Beth Torina. She has led the Tigers to Oklahoma City and the Women’s College World Series in three of her first five seasons and has quickly become one of the game’s most respected coaches. In this podcast she shares how TIGERS is an acronym for their championship culture and how they build an elite mindset in their players to give them the best chance for success. She also shares part of her routine for being at her best on game day as a head coach.

You can follow Beth Torina on Twitter @BethTorina and LSU Softball @LSUSoftball.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Cain: Hey how are you doing? Brian Cain your Peak Performance Coach here with the Peak Performance Podcast. We’ve got LSU head softball coach, Beth Torina, fresh off back-to-back Women’s College World Series appearances in 2015 and 2016. Beth, thank you so much for taking time to join us here on the podcast.

Torina: Thanks. I’m happy to be with you guys.

Cain: If you would could you talk to us a little bit about at LSU you guys are the Tigers and in your softball programs “Tigers” is really the acronym that you use for the core principles of your program. Would you talk about Tigers and how you use that with your softball team.

Torina: We had this genius mental conditioning coach that directed us to having this Tigers standard. Is that what you want me to say?

Cain: No I want you to talk about how you use it.

Torina: Tigers – trust, integrity, grit, energy, relentless, selfless. I think the coolest thing about it is that all of our players could tell you that instantly which is something that we were missing before. Now they understand the standards. They can define the standards. I think that’s step one to being able to do anything is having a good understanding of it, knowing it, being able to define it. You can’t live it every day if you don’t have a clear picture of what it is so I think that has been huge for us.

Cain: Excellent. Beth, what is the mental game to you as a head coach in the SEC in one of the top programs in the country.

Torina: Well I think if you look at the season my team just had everybody had written us off somewhere midway through the year. We played five of (to me) the toughest people in our conference, the toughest people in the country right in a row. Two pitching staffs with ERAs right around one. So we had six games, virtually back-to-back weeks, with two pitching staffs with ERAs around one so our kids were just absolutely beat down. I mean going up to the plate and failing or having to compete against that time and time again was a huge toll on our kids’ mentality.

I think a lot of the reason why people had written us off was because of our mentality at that point. I don’t know if we put enough credit into what these kids have to go through to play day in and day out against the best of the best. I think we had to climb out of that hole not as a fundamental team but mentally as a program. I think once we did that and got confidence at, you saw where we ended up.

Cain: How did you do that? What did you do as a head coach to help them get that confidence back and crawl out of that hole and finish as strong as you did?

Torina: Well we went back and looked at some things and I think we got a little bit caught up in worrying too much about what everyone was going to do to us instead of what we were going to do to them. I think we tried to play – we always talk about our strengths first but I think we were so worried about how are we going to beat this pitching staff, how are we going to do that, that we missed the point of “let’s play LSU softball.”

For example in EP we would hit three rounds of what we thought we were going to get from the other pitcher. Well we went back and we said “you know what, let’s make sure that every day we’re hitting around with just fast balls and letting our kids just come out of their shoes.” Let’s make sure that we haven’t forgotten how to put a ball under the fence or how to square something up, what that feels like, because we’re challenging them so much to like “oh let’s make sure we can hit that drop ball on the outside corner this kid is going to hammer us with or the change up.” Instead let’s also remember what it feels like to square something up. I think we kind of got lost and forgot that.

So we added that back in and made sure we were doing things every day that they were confident about, things that were feel-good things. We don’t always have to give them the hardest drill in our repertoire. Sometimes we give them a drill they’re really good at and let them feel good about it. So we made some changes there and I think it really helped.

Cain: Love it. One of the things I’ve seen you do – and I don’t know if you’re even conscious that you do it, I think we’ve talked about it a little bit – is in the third base coaching box during the SEC pyramid they panned on you and there was a lot of good deep breaths each pitch. Is that something that you’re intentionally doing as part of your routine to keep yourself in the moment and in control?

Torina: I thought you were just making fun of me with that.

Cain: No I was awesome. I thought it was awesome. I’m going to start teaching that. You’re going to be the model for all head coaches to follow.

Torina: I can tell you one thing I do as a head coach is I try and stay as consistent as possible. I try to not ever get too high or too low. A lot of people will ask me all the time “you’re never smiling over there, you’re not doing anything.” Well I try not to react to things. If I’m not going to react when we’re up 10 I’m not going to react when we’re down 10. I think our kids just always know what they’re getting from me. That’s something that is really important to me.

I think I see it all the time that a coach is arguing so hard about the pitch before not being a strike or not being strike three that they forgot to focus on the pitch that is coming and now we give up a homerun. We just argued it should have been strike three and we’ve now given up a homerun on the next pitch because we’re so focused on the pitch before.

I really try and just be present. I try and say the same – I tell myself in my heart before every game that I can be full of emotion but act emotionless. That is one of my things that I try and tell myself all the time is that I can act emotion-free. I can be passionate and I can have a lot of emotion but my actions have to be free of emotion and more intelligent instead of knee jerk and reactive.

Cain: Love that. Full of emotion but act emotion-free. That is fantastic. Last question I have and then we’ll open it up to the crew here. Beth, you’ve worked in college softball now a number of years and had a chance to work with and be around a lot of mental game sports psychology coaches. Some of the coaches that are with us here this weekend are trying to decide “do I want to be a baseball or softball coach or do I want to go be a sports psychology coach.” What advice would you give to somebody kind of just getting started in the field of the mental game to help them connect with and serve a coach like yourself who is a head coach in the SEC?

Torina: Well we’ve been around some different people and I think one thing that’s really cool that you do, Brian, is that you really know our kids and you know their names and you take the time to learn about it....

BC104: Beth Torina | LSU Softball | Championship Culture #Pillar2