It's happened to all of us. You're playing a team that's much less talented and before you know what's happened, you've lost. You should have won by a ton but instead you lose? Be sure you know the 5 things you can do to help your Players Keep Their Focus!

Underestimating your opponent and losing your focus are things that happen to everyone at some point. Luckily there are some things you can do to prevent it from happening that will help your players calm down their nerves, stay relaxed and keep their focus razor sharp!

As you're watching the Olympics do you find yourself wondering how can these athletes stay so focused? Why don't they get nervous with everyone watching and all that pressure? Well some do.

Some players crumble under the pressure, lose their focus and have an extremely poor performance. But others, rise to the occasion and have the performance of their lives. So what's the difference? What allows some athletes to lose their focus and crumble while others keep their focus and thrive?

We often see teams lose to a much weaker opponent that they should crush. Why is that? Why do stronger teams lose their focus against weaker teams that they should beat, and more importantly, is there anything we can do to help our player keep from losing their focus?

Here are 5 Keys for Helping Your Players Keep Their Focus:

• Focus on you, not them - Focus shouldn't be on the opposition, but instead on our own performance. This helps eliminate those games where we play well against the good teams but don't take the other teams seriously.
• Relax - Focus is impossible to maintain for an entire game so find the best way and time to relax your focus:
• relax your focus after a play and before the next play
• relax your focus after a pitch and before the next pitch
• relax your focus after your at-bat and before your teammate's next at bat
• relax your focus after your team finishes a part of an inning and before the next part of the inning starts
• Find all those little moments throughout the game that allow you to relax our focus so you'll have it laser sharp when need it.
• Calm it down a little- Find something you can do to help you calm down when things get a little tense:
• Look at the scoreboard and think about drinking the type of soft drink that usually sponsors scoreboards.
• Close your eyes and imagine the favorite thing you do to relax
• Look at your favorite teammate that helps encourage you the most and cheer for her as she'll cheer for you back and help pump you up.
• Imagine a toilet flushing to help you eliminate anything bad that just happened so you can actually imagine it going away.
• Smaller In-Game Goals - Find goals for YOUR team for every game, no matter how good or how bad the opponent is. These smaller in-game goals might be:
• Out score your opponent each inning (called winning the inning)
• Out hit your opponent with runners in scoring position
• Out walk your opponent (on offense)
• Out pitch your opponent in lack of walks (on pitching)
• Out error your opponent on defense (less errors than your opponent)
• Compete amongst Yourselves - Also give your team a reason to be competitive among themselves by creating competition between different parts of your team:
• break your hitters up into 4 different teams:
• Team A; 1st, 2nd and 3rd hitters
• Team B; 4th, 5th and 6th hitters
• Team C; 7th, 8th and 9th hitters
• Team D; All non-starters (refer to them as the 10th, 11th, 12th hitters...up to how many players you have instead of the non-starters)
• Have them compete to see which group can end up with the highest average for each of the following:
• Hits/Attempts
• Bunts/Attempts
• Steal/Attempts
• RBI/Opportunities
• Errors/Attempts
• Hard hit balls (don't have to be hits, simply balls that were hit hard - even if hit for an out)