Washington State football now has a mental performance director, Kristofer Kracht, and he’s a true evangelist
New Washington State football coach Jimmy Rogers’ staff, both on-field and behind-the-scenes, is officially in place and a casual perusal of job titles prompts a rewind because one of them isn’t of the standard-issue variety. WSU football now features a director of football mental performance and his name is Kristofer Kracht.
“My job is to help our guys think right on the football field,” Kracht, 47, tells Cougfan.com. “We know from research that our thought life is a main driver of performance. And if we know that literally what we think on the football field drives a higher level of performance, then why wouldn’t we very systematically and intentionally train it?
“Think of it like a muscle car. You get the awesome exterior which is the attributes of a player, but it’s missing the engine, which is the brain. My job is to develop the mental side of things so it matches the physical.”
Prior to coming to WSU, Kracht — whose name is pronounced like the word cracked — spent four years as the mental performance coach for all sports at South Dakota State, and for nine years taught critical thinking and public speaking in SDSU’s school of communication and journalism.
A staff position devoted to the mental challenges in athletics isn’t new to WSU, which has had a mental health counselor for the entire department. But having a role devoted solely to football and the on-field performance side of the equation is something new.
THE PHRASE “MENTAL TOUGHNESS” gets thrown around a lot in the world of sports, and Kracht isn’t a fan. He believes mental fortitude is something that is trained, or left untrained, not something that comes naturally.
“If we wait until the adversity strikes, it’s too late,” Kracht said. “We’ve got to prepare for that adversity in advance of it taking place. So within this program, we’re going to choose to train our mind, not simply leave it up to chance or hope, which is what I think most programs do.”
SO HOW DOES ONE TRAIN THE MIND and how might Kracht’s approach be applied to something painfully real, like the Cougars’ season-ending collapses in both 2023 and 2024? He was straight forward about building up the psychological tool chest.
“We’ll talk about how our ‘thought life’ does drive performance,” Kracht said. “We’ll talk about what our self-talk does to us. We’ll talk about how to regulate our emotions. We’ll talk about what we call our level of intensity. We’ll talk about how you deal with failure.
“How do you reset after plays? You always hear a coach say play the next play. Well, how do you actually do that? What mental skills do you have to literally play the next play? We’ll talk about pre-performance routines, we’ll talk about focus.”
Here he pauses for a moment and then dives back in. “Focus is a trainable skill. It’s a complex skill, just like a jump shot might be a complex skill. We’ve got to train what those skills are. How do we not let the last play sort of drive what we’re doing on the next play? We’ll talk about mental rehearsal — how do we actually use mental rehearsal to our advantage to get more reps? We can only do so many physical reps but we can mentally rehearse reps constantly.”
We’ll have more on this topic in a coming story.
KRACHT’S JOURNEY TO THIS position followed an unconventional path. Growing up in Valley City, N.D., he fell in love with Notre Dame football and the iconic gold helmets. Starting at age 10, Kracht became a rabid fan of the Irish and aimed to get involved in college football in some fashion.
He attended the University of Mary in Bismarck, where he didn’t play football but excelled on the speech team. After graduating, he spent the next 13 years in teaching at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn.
Along the way, he read a book called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. It was a book he heard Pete Carroll talk about while coaching at USC.
“I ordered the book from Amazon and it was fascinating,” Kracht said. “At the time I was a college professor and I was teaching public speaking. I had all these kids with communication apprehension that could give a great speech one-on-one, but not to an audience. So I decided to start applying the tools I picked up from that book and word sort of got out what I was doing. And suddenly, people at the college wanted me to talk to their classes or teams.”
His wife convinced him to go back to school and turn his professional attention to the sports psychology field. So he did just that, completing a master’s degree in applied sports psychology at Adams State in Alamosa, Colo.
Then came the call from John Stiegelmeier, the legendary South Dakota State football coach.
“My wife got a job as an event coordinator at SDSU,” Kracht said. “He was looking for an edge and came to me and said ‘We’ve been to the semi-finals, we can’t get over the hump, maybe you can help.’ He asked for my life story, 45 minutes later he asked when I could start. And that’s how it all began. Coach Rogers retained me when Coach Stieg retired.”
THE ESSENCE OF THE KRACHT PHILOSOPHY FROM HIS WRITINGS: “The human brain has neuroplasticity, meaning the form and function of our brain can change based on our thought patterns. There is a mind body connection. A primary goal of mental strength training is to help performers be at their best, more consistently, and when it matters the most. Thoughts ultimately drive performance. By training the right thoughts, at the right time, we can begin to unlock a more consistent and elevated level of prime performance. There are many talented performers that lack motivation. Conversely, there are many less talented performers with a high level of motivation and consistent habits that tend to outperform their more talented competition. This is most often due to mindset. Mental strength training helps performers reach their physical potential by combining the emotional, psychological, and physical aspects of human performance. Your thought life is a choice and a choice that determines how you show up to be your very best.”
Leave a Reply