Letting Go of the Last Ball: Dumping Strategies

Case study: a Victorian Premier Cricket Club (Session 3)

Cricket is a game of pauses - between deliveries and overs, at the fall of a wicket, and in the long walk back to the boundary - the game is full of gaps. Those gaps are where the mental side of cricket is won and lost, because a gap is exactly where an unhelpful thought moves in and makes itself at home.

The replayed dismissal that keeps running. The dropped catch you can't stop feeling. The umpiring decision that went against you. The worry about selection that has nothing whatsoever to do with the ball about to be bowled. None of it helps, and all of it occupies attention the next moment needs.

The recent session I ran with a Victorian Premier Cricket Club was about giving players a way to clear that clutter deliberately, quickly, and in their own way.

Why "just move on" is useless advice

Every sportsperson has been told to move on from a mistake – to put it behind them and focus on the next moment. It's the most common piece of mental coaching in the game, and it's close to worthless because it's an instruction, not a method. Telling a player to forget the last ball is like telling someone not to think of a pink elephant.

A dumping strategy works precisely because it isn't vague. It's a specific, rehearsed action a player can execute in the ten seconds available to them. It gives the mind something to do with the thought, instead of asking it to do the impossible and simply not have it.

By this point in the program, this group already understood that the way we represent an experience internally is through the picture, the sound, the feeling, and this is something that we can change. Dumping strategies use all of our senses to create a process that can help each of us release unhelpful thoughts. Sure, sometimes you have to use your “dump” a few times to get it to stick.

Build a metaphor that gets rid of something

The heart of the session is playful, and deliberately so. I ask each player to design a metaphor for getting rid of something.

Some people love the idea of smashing something to pieces. Others want a trap door that swallows the thought and clangs shut. Some flush it away, or use their own sporting prowess to smack it clean out of the park. And then there's the whole sci-fi toolkit: force fields, laser beams, alternate dimensions. Whatever it is, it has to be something the player can see, hear and feel, because that's what our brains love.

Then we get specific about the thing being dumped. I ask each player to bring to mind an event that genuinely bothers them and it can be anything from the nerves before batting, the tightness when they need to stop the runs, the sting of a dropped catch, or the negative self-talk they're tired of listening to. And we turn that feeling into something concrete: a blue-black ball of nervousness, a white-hot rod of irritation, a soggy grey mess slopping around their stomach.

Once the feeling has a shape, it becomes something you can act on. The cloud of nerves gets smacked over the fence, your arms buzzing from the strength of the hit. The white-hot rod drops through the trap door and you feel the jolt as it snaps shut. The soggy, grey mess turns to concrete and drops to the ground to be left behind forever.

Make it fast, and make it future

Two details make the difference between a fun exercise and a usable skill.

1. The first is speed. The mind works fast, so the strategy has to work fast too. We rehearse the whole sequence with the see it, hear it, feel it moving really quickly, at least five times, until it fires almost instantly.
2. The second is future-pacing. We don't just apply it to a past event; we apply it to situations that haven't happened yet, across three different scenarios, so the tool is already primed for the next time it's needed. When the moment arrives in a game, the player isn't inventing a response as they are able to run one they've already habituated.

I also flagged a key message: dumping strategies wear out. We habituate. So, from time-to-time players will need to refresh the metaphor to keep it sharp just in the same way they'd tweak any other part of their game.

What players took away

Firstly, they had a hell of a lot of fun. I don’t know if I have ever had so much laughter in a session as they enjoyed hearing each other’s strategies and creating something that worked for each of them individually.

By the end of this session, the group had a personal, rehearsed way to move on from a mistake and return to the next ball with clarity. Importantly they recognised that it isn’t about pretending the pressure isn’t there, but by noticing what was taking up space, they could separate the useful from the useless and consciously let the rest go.

The best sign came a few weeks later, from a player who told me she’d dropped a catch, run her dumping sequence between deliveries, and taken the next one cleanly. One moment hadn't been allowed to run their game or keep them ruminating for hours. They were able to get back into the game with a positive mindset in order to be the best teammate they could be.

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If you'd like to talk about building the mental side of your players' game, get in touch.

 

More from this series

This is the third of three case studies from a season with a Victorian Premier Cricket Club, each following one session of the mindset program.

→ Cultivating Composure: How Breathwork Became a Pre-Season Ritual — why we start with the breath, and how one club made it a shared pre-season ritual. https://www.neuralnetworks.com.au/blog/cultivating-composure-how-breathwork-became-a-pre-season-ritual

→ Switching It On: Building a Peak Performance State — how players learn to switch on their best state on purpose, rather than waiting for a good day.  https://www.neuralnetworks.com.au/blog/switching-it-on-building-a-peak-performance-state