Why farcical camps to build mental toughness are a blight on modern sport

After ability to actually play the game, I would argue that mental toughness is the second most important aspect to an athlete’s success or failure.

You could even make an argument for inverting the importance of these factors, given the number of hyper-athletic people who have never achieved professional athlete status. Note: I think this would be a bad argument given you do not see a great many utterly non-athletic people who have minds like steel-traps make it as athletes, but you get the point.

The key is mental toughness matters and, critically, it is extremely buzzy in sporting circles today. However, it is virtually impossible to pin down what ‘mental toughness’ actually is.

Sports psychologists most frequently define mental toughness as the ability to maintain and pursue peak performance in the face of adversity or hardship.

This is a good definition because, to my reading, it confines the definition of mental toughness to the field of play. However, it does leave room for ambiguity especially around the concepts of adversity and hardship.

This ambiguity is the gateway into a goldmine for these grifters who attach themselves to professional athletes and sporting clubs. They siphon money for themselves while selling the clubs and athletes a bill of goods.

People often struggle to clearly and succinctly describe what it is (and what it isn’t), which in effect means it could be anything. This in turn means mental toughness can supposedly be developed by any means touted by self-styled ‘gurus’.

All you need to be able to do it is sell it.

This clearly creates the potential for the use of negligent, if not outright harmful, tactics to hone this mysterious trait. Crucially, because the definition of mental toughness itself involves the notion of overcoming adversity, some misguided efforts to promote mental toughness in fact introduce adversity as a means of developing the trait.

This clearly creates the potential for harm to individual athletes, as well as to the club’s culture and its larger legacy. We have very recently, with the 2018 Adelaide Crows camp, seen how this can go badly. It’s Machiavelli for people too stupid to understand Machiavelli, but arrogant enough to sell themselves as experts in it – the ends justify the means.

When details initially started drifting out about the camp in 2018, as a Tigers fan, I truly did find it funny. The idea of professional footballers being blindfolded and forced to listen to the deliberately kitschy Richmond theme song on a loop while being driven around on a bus felt like an objectively funny visual at the time.

Obviously, it has become decisively less funny as more details of the program have emerged (in particular, from recent interviews by Eddie Betts and Josh Jenkins, which largely confirmed previous reporting in The Age). The camp appears to have been largely derived from ‘advanced interrogation’ techniques that the US army used in Abu Ghraib.

Individuals running the camp are alleged to have used a racially insensitive ‘talking stick’ between bouts of shouting insults at players and attacking them with fake weapons while bringing up past traumas told to counsellors in confidence.

The grifters in the Adelaide camp case was ‘Collective Mind’, a company that specialises in the mental toughness grift and has monetised it very effectively. Still today on their website they are peddling a book that helps a person to ‘master your mind’. They are a self-styled leadership training group that helps companies become more ‘productive and resilient’.

It appears that they sell themselves in the same manner as military schools to parents of wayward children – “We’ll toughen your kid up by instilling in them strong values, routine, and just enough psychological torture to either make them timid or violent. Usually a bit of both. Oh, and here’s the bill.”

The Crows walk from the ground (Daniel Kalisz/Getty Images)

As a quick aside, Collective Mind has a segment on their website titled ‘what people say’ just under a list of companies they have ‘helped’ (i.e. sold a bill of goods then borderline tortured). Incredibly, a video of Taylor Walker remains on the website talking about their ‘mindset training’ as they brag about how they ‘lifted’ the Crows to a minor premiership.

I somehow doubt that Tex brought up the racial epithets and other bile that was spewed in the name of building mental toughness.

The question that needs to be asked about mental toughness, though is ‘is it possible to train that specifically?’. In my view, mental toughness is built organically. It is built through the building of fitness, camaraderie between the playing list.

It is decidedly not built by Krav Maga techniques being done to you by a wannabe G.I. Joe. Nor is it built by screaming obscenities and racial epithets at co-workers. Collective Mind plainly have an antiquated view of mental toughness as being stoicism in the face of all and any hardship, even hardship that is fabricated by business owners for their own profit.

Rubbish.

Young men like those who make up AFL football clubs already have enough trouble talking about the various issues that they have in their lives. Beyond that, in the case of the Adelaide football club, the playing group suffered a significant trauma only a few years earlier that would have bonded them through their pain.

The idea that the players should maintain a ‘noble silence’ at the camp while they were being abused by peers and burly men cosplaying as Mossad interrogators is obviously extraordinarily misguided.

The idea that mental toughness can be built by doing sessions on looking more aggressive while running through the team banner, or standing wide legged like a kangaroo that is about to get into a fight, is fanciful and hilarious. To physically attack and emotionally torture players in the name of mental toughness, however, is likely tortious and should result in legal action.

I will note here that there are as yet unsubstantiated whispers about a class action being brought by players involved in the camp.

A good example of building mental toughness in the modern game is that which is done by ‘The Resilience Project’. I am a naturally cynical person when it comes to these self-help techniques (not sure if you can tell), but the idea of mindfulness as being a predictor of performance is an astute one.

Grounding the athlete in the moment that they are in helps the athlete to compartmentalise and to be present just in the process of the game. Focusing on one thing in a given moment makes all of the moments feel smaller, more achievable.

You climb Everest in stages, you don’t just pack a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches and some water with two sachets of hydralite in it and get rolling. Clubs like the Tigers have used techniques espoused by The Resilience Project to great effect and provides an extremely instructive juxtaposition with the Crows.

The Tigers are rebuilding effectively on the fly, the Crows are still tattered and torn by the psychological warfare that Collective Mind waged on the list and club.

(Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

The biggest issue to me is not that these lecherous grifters exist, it is that they have been legitimised by an increasingly corporatised AFL. As we have seen, these grifters can be physically and emotionally violent, truly destructive, and genuinely reprehensible.

And yet, the AFL has invited them in. It would be like if Quint and Brody saw the shark in Jaws circling the boat and invited it on to share in some delicious chum, only to be surprised when the shark started eating all of them.

It is amazing there has only been one widely circulated ‘camp gone wrong’ story.

Mental toughness in sport is real. It’s a prerequisite to be a successful as a professional athlete. Pushing through physical pain matters, drowning out heckling crowds matters, willing away the burning in your legs, ignoring your heart beating at a million miles as the whole world watches you.

All of these things matter. Mental toughness matters. But in my view, it is too nebulous to teach, impossible to pin down and define in any sort of actionable way.

These realities make mental toughness two things: firstly, mental toughness is fertile ground for The Grifter to feed off and make a quick buck from; but secondly, absolutely indispensable.