Episode #169: Val Whiting on Recruiting

The Mental Side of Greatness with Val Whiting | Ep. 168 

On this episode of the Significant Coaching Podcast, Matt Rogers is joined by Val Whiting, former Stanford All-American, WNBA player, two-time NCAA National Champion, and mental performance coach for female athletes. 

Val shares her journey from winning championships at Stanford Cardinal women's basketball and playing professionally in the ABL and WNBA to helping athletes strengthen their mindset, confidence, and resilience. She discusses the pressure young female athletes face today, how coaches can create healthier team environments, why identity and self-worth matter, and what true mental toughness really looks like. 

This conversation is filled with perspective for coaches, parents, and athletes who want to help young women compete with confidence while staying mentally strong and emotionally healthy. 

Topics include: 

•  Mental toughness vs. mental health 
•  Confidence and self-worth in female athletes 
•  Handling pressure, comparison, and social media 
•  Creating healthy team culture 
•  The relationship between identity and performance 
•  Advice for coaches, parents, and recruits 

Subscribe for more conversations with coaches, athletic leaders, and experts helping athletes build stronger futures.
 
Visit coachmattrogers.com for books, recruiting help, speaking inquiries, blogs, and resources for coaches, athletes, and parents.

Follow Coach Val on Instagram @iam.coachval or visit her website at mentallystrongher.com

Transcript

0:09

On the latest edition of the Significant Coaching Podcast, the recruiting focus presentation of the coach, Matt Rogers YouTube channel. Available audio only everywhere you get your favorite podcasts. I'm your host Matt Rogers. As we jump into part two with Val Whiting, former Stanford University Women's Basketball, all American and WNBA Star and Present Sports Performance Coach, we stay focused on the mental side of recruiting and the transition from high school to college athletics. Val shares outstanding perspective on confidence, self-advocacy, choosing the right fit, and why athletes need to remember who they are when they step onto a college campus. Full of other talented athletes and students. She also gives great advice for parents and coaches on how to better support young athletes through the pressure, anxiety, and emotional ups and downs that often come with recruiting and performance. As always, you can find more recruiting help books, blogs, launchpad classes, and strategy sessions@coachmattrogers.com. Let's get into it. Here's part two with Coach Val Whiting. Coach Val, thank you so much. If you didn't listen to the first segment, go back and listen to part one of this.'cause Coach Val really shared her soul and we talked about your journey, which is. Fantastic. And who you've become because of that journey is even more fantastic. The lives that you're changing. This segment is typically for recruiting and we talk to college coaches about recruiting, and we have them give advice. I wanna stay on the mental side of recruiting with you. I have a 16-year-old daughter who's gonna go to college in a year and a half and I work with so many high school females and I think most of them would love to have your story. One of the best athletes in the country. You get recruited by fantastic schools. You end up at what many consider the top school in the country and at that time, maybe the top coach in the country. What advice would you give to kids that are 15, 16, 17 years old about that recruiting journey? Are the things that you wish you would've understood? Better questions? Maybe you would've asked? Well, it's totally different now than when I played, meaning when I was in high school getting recruited out a small state in Delaware There was no limit on how much they could call you. They could reach out every day, 87 times a day if they wanted to. It was no open period. There was no closed period. It was just always open. And that, that was more enjoyable than stressful. I didn't know how to say no to coaches, to home visits. I didn't know, I didn't know how to tell coaches that I wasn't interested in their program. I didn't know how to self-advocate for myself. A kid talking to an adult is very intimidating. I can't imagine what athletes are going through now. The biggest question, that I would ask yourself when you're getting recruited by school is, and someone calls this the broken leg question, if you broke your leg and you couldn't play, would you still want to go to that school? That's a great question. Yeah. So that's one of the biggest things. I would say a question I wish I would've asked just in general.'cause I was saying yes to a whole bunch of different schools. I know I didn't wanna be there. If I had a broker like University of Iowa, there's no way I would've, I got recruited by them. I went to a visit Vivian Stringer was the coach. That's the only reason I visited'cause she was there. I visited there, all I saw was corn. I've never seen so much corn in my life, and I went to college about 25 minutes from there, so I know exactly. Yeah, it's, and it's the right question that kids need to understand if you're picking a school because of the coach, if you're picking it because of the name. You're probably asking for trouble and I think that's why so many kids end up in the portal now because nobody's guiding them to think about who they are and what makes'em happy first. Yeah. Why did you end up picking Tara and Stanford? How did that come to be? I had an obsession with California. And and when I first, I got my letter from Stanford, I didn't, I had actually never even heard of Stanford before. I've heard of the Ivy League because I was on the East Coast, but I never heard of Stanford. And I, someone's no, that's a really good school and it's in California and you wanna be pre-med, you wanna go to medical school, so let's take a look at it. And that's pretty much how I got interested in Stanford. Medical school and college basketball is such a juggling act and talk about pressure constant commitment on, on both ends of the of the stick. How did you balance all that? It's almost like I didn't have a choice. It didn't, when you're in the middle of it, you don't really think about it. You just do it. It's almost. The same from being in the mental game, being process focused, and staying in the moment. I will say that I scheduled my classes around practice. My senior year. We had to practice at six 30 in the morning on one of the days because I had to get this lab done in order to graduate. In my degree in, for my pre-med requirements. So they actually, Tara actually, and I'm, my teammates were kind enough to practice at six 30 in the morning for us. Me and my other, I have another teammate on the team, Chris Mc Myrtle. She's a doctor now who was also pre-med. But yeah, it's a lot. And I don't think. There are any easy majors at Stanford, but that was at the time one of the toughest majors that was a biology major slash pre-med to, to have. Yeah.'cause you've got the labs, tons and tons of labs sophomore, junior year I bet. And that it's a lot to juggle. You can't just schedule eight to eight to 12, eight to one and walk out with that degree. Are there things that kids need to be thinking about when they think about going from high school to college? Just the mental side of what they, how they should be preparing for that transition? Yeah. The biggest thing is maintaining stable confidence because you're going from one level where you were the man or the woman to the next level where you're one of. Other 12 people who were the man or the woman on the team. And it may be a gut check when you walk on campus that first day. So not letting anything break your confidence, continuing to maintain knowing who you are, what you've done. An exercise I do of clients is I have them, and this is not, I didn't make this up. This came from Dr. Patrick Cohen. It's called a Confidence Resume. You write down everything that you've done in your sport that's good about everything that's good about your game, everything that you do well as an athlete and maybe I'm quick or maybe I'm physical or I have good footwork how everything that's good about you as a teammate and you write that down and you keep it somewhere and it's a dynamic document, meaning you're always adding to it. And then when you forget about, forget who you are, and you have one those days where you got crossed up ankle's broken and you're like, this is college. Take that document out and look at it and remember what you did in the past.'cause confidence comes from at times what we've done in the past. It's a theory. Called self-efficacy theory. And self-efficacy is the belief that you can perform a certain task, and that belief comes from past mastery and that's why a conference resume is important to have. I always tell college kids too, remember that somebody recruited you for a reason. That's a good one. They saw your worth, they saw your value and they envisioned the path that you were gonna take if you came, played for them. And go, don't forget that. Yeah. Don't forget that. That's how they see you. You just need to remind yourself that's. That's what you're capable of. So I love that the self-efficacy theory is such an important part of being an athlete. And I wish somebody would've handed me that at 15 years old and said, this has to be the centerpiece of who you are, is remembering that you're talented. Remember that you have some gifts, and remember there's gonna be bad days, but that doesn't mean you're a bad player, doesn't mean you're a bad right. Yeah. Players seem to catastrophize like bad game. Oh, I'm the worst player in the world and no coach is gonna want me. Yeah. And so it's, I get it. But they go there. They do. I went there all the time. Way too much. I lived there. Coach Val, I don't wanna take too much of your time up, but let's give some advice to high school and club coaches and even college coaches. Are there some things that coaches need to be aware of and they need to implement into their coaching to help kids like you and I that maybe are dealing with stuff we're not talking about? Yeah. Be aware of your. I know we're in a heated moment, but a lot of coaches use sarcasm when it's really not needed and it, it takes a hit. Kids take a hit on that. And no, maybe they don't have the emotional intelligence to pick up on. You're being sarcastic and you're trying to be funny. Another thing is I've had athletes overhear how coaches talk about them to their assistant coaches. Be mindful of your environment. If the kids are in earshot, what you're saying about your players and what, and they can hear you and that affects them. And then lastly, my biggest pet peeve is this is many only basketball. I guess it could be soccer and volleyball or any of those. Team sports is pulling an athlete after they make a mistake. That creates an environment of fear and timidity. Like how do they play with aggression? If they're, if they take a risk, they're gonna get pulled. How do they learn how to play through adversity? If anytime adversity hits you, you yank them. So that's just one of my pet peeves as a coach. I think I got better at it later in my career where I would pull a kid after a mistake and I would say. Listen, you're gonna go right back in. I want you to sit here for just a minute. I want you to take a breath. You're gonna go right back in. And this is what I want you to think about when you go back in, not, Hey, you blew it. Go sit down. Yeah. And I better at saying, this is why I pulled you out. This is what we're gonna focus on for the next 30 seconds, and then you're gonna go back and I know you're gonna be better at it. How much of that did you get? In high school and college. I know. I didn't get much of that. No. I was just like, you're out. That's right. You run, you're running, you hear a buzzer or you're like, oh, notice does this for me. Val, last thing. I always ask our coaches to give some advice to parents that are going through this recruiting journey and dealing with these young people and these young growing minds and spirits. What's a good piece of advice for parents that are raising these high school athletes? Be a parent only they don't, they have enough coaches. For, and to me, being a parent, a coach would be way more stressful than just being a parent. Quit it on those car ride, home ride car ride home conversations, the ones that happen after a poor performance. They already know they didn't do well. Just say, I love watching. I know the game didn't go well for you today, but I love watching you play and I love how hard you work. And that's, and where do you want to eat next? That's something that they just want to hear. Yeah. Stay in your lane. Yeah. Yeah. It's such great advice and helping them transition from the weight of that game, the mental weight to that game into being able to let it go is so important from a parent's perspective. And we all forget about it sometimes. We all want them to. To be strong and be confident and do well, and sometimes we just have to flush it and get on with life and help'em get on with life. So it's not easy. No, it's hard being a parent, especially when you see your kid not performing like they can inside, you're like boiling. I've been I'm a sports mom. I have two kids that play. You just want to like scream. Get it together and you can't. Yeah. It's so hard. Coach Val, I love you. I'm so thankful to have you in my life and so thankful that you took a couple an hour to spend with us and share your wisdom. And I'll be cheering for you and your family and everything you do. And if if nothing else, give our audience a place where they can come learn more about you. Yeah. If you're on social media, the best place would be Instagram at I Am Coach vow, or you can go to mentally strung her.com. That's my website. And if you've got a post player in your house. Go to YouTube, put Inval Whiting and watch her footwork and her physicality and how she works the high low and how she helps defense and how she slides her feet. It is a masterclass on post play, so thank you. Thank you, coach You just heard the end of part two with Coach Val Whiting, and I'm so thankful for her perspective on the recruiting journey. So many athletes spend too much of their time and energy and all the wrong things, but Val did such a great job reminding us that confidence fit, joy, and knowing who you are should be your focus and top priorities when you're thinking about college. I loved her analogy about the broken leg question. If you could never play again, would you still want to go to that school? That is such a crucial question for athletes and families to ask when making healthy decisions that are right for your future. I encourage you to follow Coach Val at I am Coach Val on Instagram, and you can learn more about our work at Mentally Strong Her. Yes, that's right, strong HER at the end, instead of strong.com. Mentally strong her.com. As always, if you know someone who needs to hear this conversation, please share it with them. Comment below with your thoughts. Subscribe to the channel and make sure to visit coach matt rogers.com for more recruiting, help books, blogs, and strategy sessions. Until next time, stay focused on what you can control. Stay humble and keep chasing significance.