Nov 24,2024
There's no doubt that this has been one of the biggest weeks in the career of David McHugh.
The Athlone native is the mental performance coach at National Women's Soccer League side Washington Spirit and this weekend the club are going in search of the holy grail of US women's domestic soccer: The NWSL Championship.
Standing in their way in tonight's decider (the Irish time kick-off falls on Sunday at 1am) will be the Orlando Pride.
This month's play-off run has already been incredibly tense, which makes McHugh's specific remit in the area of mental performance all the more crucial.
A qualified sports psychologist and UEFA-licensed soccer coach who has worked at various age grades in both the men's and women's game in Ireland, McHugh has been involved with Washington Spirit since May 2023 - initially as a consultant and then from this year as part of their full-time performance staff.
In a nutshell, he characterises his role as being to mental performance what strength and conditioning coaching is to players' physical preparation.
"They already do strength and conditioning, so using that language can help them buy into mental performance and if I'm saying it's a 'mind gym', you're going to the gym for your body, well we've got mind gyms here for your mind to be able to look after that side."
Watch the full in-depth interview with Washington Spirit mental performance coach David McHugh above
Part of McHugh's role involves one-on-one sessions, helping players and staff members address mental health and stress-related issues - the aim being to free them from any off-pitch mental strains and thereby having a positive knock-on effect on sporting performance.
But he also emphasises that mental performance coaching should not be disconnected from on-pitch work. Thus he also works with the head coach to integrate mental preparation tools into training sessions to improve areas like concentration and composure through, for example, scenario-based drills.
"You've got working with the units (like) the goalkeepers, midfielders, attackers, defenders," McHugh explained.
"How do we want to behave in certain moments of the game? How do we want to react to certain moments we know will happen?
"You're going to be ahead, you're going to be behind and you're going to be drawing. We know these three moments of the game are going to happen. We don't know what score it will be but we know those moments will happen so we can have a plan for it and we can benchmark our behaviours that we want in those moments."
The Washington Spirit are majority-owned by businesswoman Michele Kang and her mantra as a leader within women's professional sports has been centred around the idea of "training women as women" and emphasising the importance of female-specific health in preparing players. That also applies to how McHugh has approached the mental performance aspect.
The first of those areas he has looked to feed into is the vital importance of healthy team dynamics in the shape of forging a happy and welcoming team environment.
"We did a lot of work at the start of the year on team dynamics, team norms, cultural values that I think we're seeing as the season went on. But that work was done in the first three months and we're seeing the benefits now," McHugh said.
The next is to help players becoming overly fixated on perfectionism.
"Second thing working with female athletes I've seen, there's higher levels of perfectionism," he said.
"In men's sport what we often see is if they win a game, they're happy. But what I've observed is if we (Washington Spirit) win a game that it's not just enough to win a game. We want to perform well too and it's the process that's really important."
When McHugh first became involved with the Spirit, they would go on to miss the 2023 play-offs entirely and had a 36% win percentage.
The win rate rocketed up to 69% during the 2024 regular season, while the subsequent play-offs have seem them coming through two extra-time periods against Bay FC and NY/NJ Gotham - the latter semi-final via a penalty shootout.
On paper that would point to an improvement in mental resilience, although McHugh is keen to stress that results in isolation are not the paramount indicator to the effectiveness of his work and that numerous factors have gone into the progress made in 2024, including the new head coach Jonatan Giráldez, formerly a Champions League-winning manager at Barcelona.
"Results might be a by-product of my work but also everyone else's work - the coaching staff, the recruitment of players, the physical preparation, the work that the players do themselves is the biggest contributing factor - so I don't try to define myself in terms of the results.
"But I do think we've put in processes and systems that have helped the players to perform in extra-time twice and perform all season.
"And then we've also put plans in place in relation to how we can cope with pressure moments, so yeah, sports psychology and mental performance has played a role, but there's a lot of other people as well."
And how is he rowing the mental performance coaching boat in a Championship final week?
"For all of the players and staff, it's keep it as normal as possible, keeping the same processes and systems but then also it's a final, so it's not the same as a normal week," he said.
"I've been speaking with players - some have been in Championship finals, there's players here that haven't, it might happen once, it might happen multiple times in your career - so we also have to enjoy it and embrace it. So let's keep things normal but let's also enjoy this."
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