The average softball game lasts about an hour and a half which is a long time for anyone to pay attention or be expected to give their best effort, never mind young kids. All sports have this same problem so read on to find out how Urban Meyer deals with this issue.

Paying really close attention over a 2 hour period of time is really hard to do, even for coaches never mind for players struggle with their focus with a million things distracting them. Most players think they’ve either got to pay total attention or not pay attention at all. The first choice is virtually impossible and the second is too harmful to performance.

While all sports struggle in some way with the attention span and focus of their players softball is particularly difficult because of the huge amount of down time and the small amount of action. Football might seem like an action-packed sport that would be easy to keep a player’s attention, but that might not be the case.

The University of Florida is the #1 college football team in the country (as of this writing) and their head coach, Urban Meyer, believes that speed wins football games. Since he knows it’s unrealistic to ask his players to go full speed for 60 minutes (the length of a football game) he’s devised a very simple concept to get complete effort out of his players.

Urban Meyer asks each of his players to “give 4 to 6 seconds of relentless effort”. That’s it. He doesn’t ask them to concentrate for the whole game, or pay attention or give me 100%. Those are all commonly uttered phrases by coaches when trying to urge their teams on to victory, and yet they are extremely vague thoughts. Yet 4-6 seconds of relentless effort not only seems possible, but also seems specific. In that simple phrase coach Meyer not only tells his players how long he wants them to give an effort – 4 to 6 seconds – but what type of effort he wants – relentless. A football team will run about 65 plays in a game which can seem a little overwhelming, but not when you only have to give 4-6 seconds of relentless effort at a time*(65 times).

So how do these numbers convert to softball? While we don’t count plays we do count outs and pitches. A 7 inning softball game lasts 21 outs and a pitcher will usually throw approximately 90 pitches. The average softball play lasts about 8 to 10 seconds so why can’t we modify Urban Meyer’s message and require our players to give “8-10 seconds of relentless effort”? Wouldn’t that make it much easier for our players to understand when to concentrate, how long and how hard to play? Of course we want a game-long effort out of our players but we’ve also got to make the effort seem possible. With 2 national championships in the past 3 years it seems to be working for Urban Meyer and the Florida Gators.

For more help with Effort, Concentration, and Practice try the following: