Your athlete is quiet at breakfast, says their stomach hurts, and asks whether they really have to go. Somewhere between here and the venue you have to decide how much to make of it.
The short version: nerves before competition are normal, extremely common, and largely a sign that the body is preparing to do something demanding. The goal is not to remove them. It is to stop them turning into dread.
What is actually happening
The racing heart, the churning stomach, the trip to the bathroom for the fourth time, these are the same physical events whether the person is terrified or excited. Adrenaline is up, blood is being redirected to muscle, digestion has been deprioritised. It is a readiness response.
What determines whether that feels awful or useful is the story attached to it. An athlete who thinks "I am nervous, so something is wrong with me" adds a second problem on top of the first. An athlete who thinks "this is my body getting ready" has the same heart rate and a very different afternoon.
You are not trying to make the nerves go away. You are trying to stop your athlete concluding that having them is a bad sign.
What helps on the day
Normalise before you problem-solve
The first move is to make the feeling ordinary. Not dismissive, ordinary. "Yeah, that happens to me before things that matter too" does more than a strategy does, because it removes the fear of the fear.
Keep the morning boring
Predictability is calming. Same breakfast, same route, same amount of conversation as a normal training day. Anything unusual, an early departure, a special meal, extra relatives coming along, tells your athlete this one is different, and different means bigger.
Give them something physical to do
Slow breathing with a long exhale is the fastest reliable tool for bringing heart rate down, and it is much more effective if they have practised it before the day they need it. Our box breathing tool is free and takes about a minute, and it is worth doing together on an ordinary evening so it feels familiar.
Shrink the target
Nerves grow around vague, uncontrollable outcomes. They shrink around specific, controllable actions. If your athlete is spiralling, ask what the first thing they have to do is. Not the result, the first action: win the first ball, get the first serve in, settle into the first two minutes.
What to avoid
- "Just relax." Nobody has ever relaxed on hearing this. It also implies the nerves are a failure of will.
- "There is nothing to be nervous about." There demonstrably is, or they would not be. This teaches them not to tell you next time.
- Hyping them up. Big energy from a parent before competition adds arousal to an athlete who already has plenty.
- Talking about who is watching. Scouts, relatives who have travelled, the importance of the fixture. All of it inflates the moment.
- Letting them skip because they are nervous. Avoidance is the thing that turns manageable nerves into a pattern, because it teaches that the only relief comes from not going.
That last one needs a caveat. Nerves are not the same as genuine distress. If your athlete is regularly in real anguish, dreading competition for days, unable to sleep, or asking to stop something they used to love, that is a different conversation and it is worth involving a professional. Mental performance skills help with normal competitive nerves. They are not treatment for an anxiety disorder, and treating them as though they were is unfair to your athlete.
The week before matters more than the morning
Most of what helps happens well before the day. Athletes who compete regularly, who have practised under some pressure in training, and who have a familiar warm-up routine are meaningfully less rattled on the day than athletes for whom every competition is a novel event.
If your athlete wants to work on this themselves, our guide to performance anxiety explains the mechanism, and building a pre-game routine is the practical follow-up.
The main takeaway
Treat the nerves as normal equipment rather than a malfunction, keep the day as ordinary as you can, and give them one small controllable thing to focus on. Your calm is the most useful thing in the car, and it is contagious in both directions.