Special Episode – Rob Pike from Ryzer Mindset
On today’s episode, I speak with Rob Pike from Ryzer Mindset. We talk about how the mental side of the game needs to be worked on just as much as the physical side. We also discuss their TAP assessment and various courses to help with player’s mental fitness.
Visit https://ryzer.com/Mindset/ and use code DCS10 to save 10% on all things Ryzer Mindset.
Matt: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome to Discover College Soccer. Today I’ve got a special episode gonna interview somebody who is not currently a college soccer coach, but has some, some really cool things that they’re doing to help, uh, players both at the high school college age and even in the pros and, and a, a topic that’s on a lot of people’s minds today, and that’s mindset.
With me today is Rob Pike from Riser Mindset. Welcome,
Rob: Rob. Yeah. Thanks Matt. Glad to be
Matt: here. Yeah, thanks for being here too. Well, you know, I think a lot of folks are probably familiar with riser, uh, because of all this work you guys do around camps and, and helping recruits and, and colleges with, with all that kind of thing.
But maybe something folks don’t know is that you guys also have a, a mindset product, if you will. And, uh, what I’d love to hear is a little bit about your background and really kind of what is riser mindset. Great.
Rob: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate the opportunity. Um, yeah, so, so I grew up playing sports. I was a three sport athlete in high school.
I ended up playing college football. Um, and then career-wise, I, I went to law school, became a lawyer, and, uh, you know, kind of unfortunately, I realized law wasn’t for me. So I got into the business world and, uh, worked my way up a little bit. I was in the tech field. And, um, got to the point where I was doing a lot of hiring and I started experimenting with, uh, personality and psychometric testing, and then was applying it to analytics to try to [00:01:30] predict people that were gonna be successful in their role.
I. And then I thought, wow, this would be really interesting in the sports world. So I did some research and I had some, um, uh, I had a friend of mine from college who was, uh, a GM in, in the N F L at the time. And I said, what do you guys use for psychometric testing of draft prospects? And he introduced me to Dr.
Robert Trout wine, who’s now my business partner. So long story short, um, I applied a lot of my tech learnings and analytics to what Dr. Trott Wine had been doing since the mid eighties in testing N F L prospects, major League baseball prospects, and, you know, all sorts of other sports leagues. And, uh, so, so we put together a really good end-to-end software to help with the whole mental side of sports.
And then we decided, and, and learned from our testing that. This is a great tool for the pros and we can continue to do this, but there’s a real need for this in amateur athletics. There’s not a lot of resources, there’s not a lot of tools to help with the mental game. So we decided to take what we had built and join forces with riser.
’cause they were already working with, you know, a big chunk of the college programs that then do the camps and reach, you know, Millions of kids. So we thought this is the way to get this mindset product in front of all these kids. So that’s what brought us to riser and, and to create riser mindset. And, uh, it, it, it’s, you know, we’re thrilled with where we’re at and, uh, we’re getting great reception from the users, um, at this [00:03:00] point.
Yeah. No, that,
Matt: that, that’s awesome. Well, you know, when I was at I M G, we would always get the N F L draft prospects in for a couple months before the combine. And there was obviously a big focus on the physical things. But, but I think one of the reasons they came to I m G, ’cause I m G’s famous for their mental conditioning and the mental side of things as well, which is, which, you know, I’ve always found is very, very important.
And I think one of the things I, I’ve seen. Recently is a lot more talk even by parents and recognizing how important mindset is and what they’re seeing in their kids. I mean, have you guys seen, you know, any, any, any trends or, or anything really, uh, overt that in your research and things that you’re finding about how mind mindset’s affecting not just the pros, but obviously we’re focused a lot on the high school age player and the college player?
Rob: Yeah, no, I’m, I, I’m glad you brought that up. So the great thing about, um, working with Dr. Trout wine is he developed an instrument called the Tap the Trout Wine Athletic Profile. So that’s an objective measurement tool and assessment, basically like, you know, a personality test for sports and, and it measures things like mental toughness and confidence and decisiveness and growth mindset, things that are really important to success in sports and in life.
And so we’ve had this testing and objective data to observe the trends, and there’s been a few alarming [00:04:30] ones. Um, so if we think about N F L players, right? A lot of people will think, oh, that’s a really tough group and, and you know, whatnot. We’ve noticed mental toughness has gone down 12% in the last decade.
So this is the same test, same questions, going to the same cohort of people, tough people, and it’s going down. And then, you know, more recently we’ve been in amateur sports. So the last five years, so this is even pre covid, we’ve seen trends of like mental toughness going down, confidence has gone down double digits.
And so what we’re seeing, or you know, the hypothesis is our culture is somehow creating. Softer people, right? So it’s not just happening to athletes, it’s happening everywhere. Um, but that, that just means there’s more need for a mental training system and, you know, assessment and, and all that. Have you seen.
Matt: Any other, I guess, differences and it’s more of a personal question, I’m guessing, just because my, you know, I coach, uh, my daughter, right? And yeah. And with the teenage coaching teenage girls, I think is, uh, A thing unto itself. And, and, and you know, I’ve helped with boys teams as well, and it’s just a massive difference.
Right. And, and especially with, with mindset. They can be both great technical players and, and, and know the game and have soccer iq, but the, the mental side tends to be [00:06:00] such, such a vast difference. So any other, I guess, Trends or different things that you spot, whether they be gender related or age related or I mean anything part of the country they live in or anything else that’s been kind of interesting ab about what you
Rob: guys have seen?
Yeah, yeah, so, so one trend that actually really surprised me and almost even shocked me is once we really started gathering data on the female side, um, I would say probably the last seven years we’ve got a lot of good data and then particularly the last three or four years, you know, um, really beefing it up at like the high school level.
Um, just to give you an idea, in soccer we’ve got 44,000 taps on soccer players. Right. And that’s pretty much equally split between male and female. Um, mostly high school and college ’cause that’s where the bulk of the players are. But we do a lot of work in, in pro soccer as well. Um, but so I.
Traditionally when Dr. Trout wine was mostly just in male sports, you know, football and baseball and things like that, we would see, you know, ’cause we’d test high school kids for the major league draft. So you’re, you’re testing high school kids way back, you know, going 20 years. And then we’d test a lot of college kids ’cause they were also prospects for the major league baseball draft.
Um, and then the pros. So, so, so we would see a nice increase, you know, so there, there’s, their scores would generally rise as they. A higher [00:07:30] level and, and matured and aged now, um, I’ve been recently doing some workshops and retreats with, um, college female athlete coaches right on the female side and doing a lot of work there.
There’s a lot of demand and interest in, in. Obviously all, all sports teams, but uh, uh, uh, female college sports teams are really kind of getting into it these days. So I’m, I’m spending a lot of my time with them and I noticed an alarming trend, um, or pattern, and that is the high school girls are testing higher than the college girls and.
I don’t really have a reason why. Um, that’s what I’m trying to get at, and the college coaches are into it and trying to help too, and get as many resources as they can. But my, my best guess is the rigors of college athletics are really hard. Right. And they’re maybe not prepared for it, or not used to it.
Um, and, and generally, I have some theories too that, that. Our culture, we kind of raise our kids and we do a lot for them these days, right? We’re trying to make, give them a great life and better than what we had, and we end up doing a lot of things for them. And so our kids are living in a comfortable situation most of the time, and they don’t have a lot of experience with uncomfortable situations.
So then they get to college and. Wait, your mom and dad aren’t there to do all this stuff for you. You gotta do it all on your own. You gotta figure out your schedule. You gotta eat, you [00:09:00] gotta sleep, you gotta deal with coaches and a lot of new pressures and all that. And a lot of our kids just aren’t prepared for it.
But I think it’s hitting the females harder than the males.
Matt: No, I, I, I could definitely see that. Um, you know, I’m, I’m on some of the, Soccer parent Facebook groups and, and people will reach out to me separately with questions and, and things. And, and one of the ones I keep seeing is, and again, I I, I don’t mean to focus this purely on females, but again, I’ve got two daughters.
I do have a son too, but he’s, he’s a little young for, for this kind of stuff. But, uh, but it seems that, but this question is neither male nor female. But in terms of. Confidence and, and the effect it has on performance. And, and, you know, I’ll see questions like, oh, my son or daughter, you know, tremendous in practice, gets to the games and, and will, it’s like a flower, right?
Or, um, I’ve just seen his or her confidence dropping and therefore performance is dropping, which means she, she gets moved to the bench. Which means she has less confidence because now she’s not starting, so she gets worse and, you know, and, and, and you get that spiral effect and, and those kinds of things.
So, you know, I guess two parts to this question. One is, you know, how, how does maybe [00:10:30] tap help determine or, or spot those types of things? And then secondly, you know, what, what can parents or coaches do, uh, to really help when they’re, when they see players in that situation?
Rob: Yeah, great topic. So, so here’s what I, why I fell in love with the tap, uh, is it’s an assessment.
It’s very accurate, but it’s less than a hundred questions, so you can get through it in about 25 minutes, and it’s measuring all the things important to success in athletics. So, and the way it organizes it, the way we’ve set up our reporting is, so you can see how you’ve done on each of the, we we have 13, uh, what we call performance traits.
So those are the traits most important to your performing on the field or on the court or on the rink. You know, all, you know, everywhere in sports and. There are things like confidence and grit and, you know, adaptability. Um, so things that are just really important and, uh, what we’ll do is because we’ve tested so many athletes, we can compare you to your peers at your age level.
So you can see where you stack up, where am I, what are my strengths? What am what am I maybe below average on? What do I need to work on? Um, so you get to see your scores, um, but then we organize them into like a development plan. So it might be this particular athlete is kind of below their peers in, let’s just say confidence, composure and coachability.
[00:12:00] So those might be the three areas we identify that could help this athlete the most. Um, so then what we’ve been working on, um, the last couple years is creating, um, online targeted training for these athletes. So, A, a, a full course on each topic, each trait. So if, if confidence is, is the area that you need to work on, we’ve got an online course that will help with confidence.
Um, it includes quizzes and worksheets and all of that. And, and what we found is we, we did a lot of research before this, um, and, uh, We did interventions on athletes with low scores on the tap and tried to help them out. And what we found is, and this was just with generic content, not with targeted content that, that we’ve developed more recently, is their scores went up.
So after they, after they did some training on the topics that they needed help in, their scores generally went up and went, uh, What we’ve also done with the tap is we’ve done performance metrics and analytics to see if it actually affects performance. So the great thing about the sport of baseball is we were testing these, these players, right in high school.
There’s a lot of high school prospects that are evaluated for a draft in major League baseball, and some get drafted, some don’t. Some go to college, then we test them again. ’cause usually three or four years later they’re up for the draft again. Um, [00:13:30] so we have tracking data and what we’re able to find is there are certain traits in different sports that correlate with performance success.
Um, so, so confidence is one of those, um, that. We’ve, we’ve tracked as. You know, correlated to success. Uh, another one is motivational drive, right? Um, but you know, there’s a lot of ’em, but, but some are more correlated to success than others. But confidence, I would say is probably the number one trait that I would have teenage athletes work on.
Everyone can use more confidence and even, like we, we’ve been interviewing a lot of college athletes for these training courses, so we’re gonna, um, Insert snippets of them talking about using specific tactics. Um, some that are ours and some that, you know, they’ve learned from their college programs, et cetera.
Um, they talk about great benefits of the mental game. None of them had exposure to mental stuff beforehand. So that’s why we’re trying to intervene and get this to these athletes at a younger age and that can really, uh, you know, elevate their performance.
Matt: Definitely sounds like it. I know, uh, I think there’s a lot of, a lot of folks who could, who could benefit from that.
Now you mentioned, um, you know, a, a after the tap there’s kind of a development plan, so. I guess within the platform there are those different, different mindset training exercises, [00:15:00] uh, activities, whatever you wanna call it. Like Yeah. Have, what would that
Rob: look like? We have free training. Yeah. Yeah. So we, we have both, some, some free training and, and content that they can access, you know, that’s generally available on the internet.
And then we have our own custom, like premium training that we’ve developed. So the free content. And we even have, you know, kinda some. We have a class called Control of Controllables that applies to everyone, and it’s not really a trait that you can measure. So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a free course. We offer to give people a flavor of what we’re doing.
Um, but our online courses, the premium ones are there. There’s multiple videos per course. And it’s kind of like instructional. You do it on your own time, you can do it on your phone, you can do it anywhere you want. Um, after each video, there’s a little quiz to help you retain the key learnings. There’s worksheets that go along with it, and a lot of the courses include, um, techniques and the worksheet.
You have to fill it out. You customize it, you make it yourself. You go try it. Sometimes we ask you to do it with a parent or do it with a coach to have someone keep an eye on you, make sure you’re making good progress. Um, but we, we’ve used a lot of the best practices from online learning, and a lot of those were, were discovered during covid.
So, and, and we partnered with a company that specializes in online, uh, training courses. So, We think we nailed the curriculum and, uh, the feedback we’ve been getting from, um, our early users [00:16:30] has been really phenomenal. And, and, you know, we targeted kind of the, the teen athlete, you know, and we’ve gotten great feedback from 12 year olds that have taken the courses to.
Um, division one athletes in college, you know, sophomore year, where wow, I really found some of those techniques in the confidence course helped me perform this upcoming season, you know, so that was kind of some of our testers that did it in, uh, you know, winter, spring this year. So Spring sports found some benefit from our courses.
Matt: Oh, that’s tremendous. I know my, if, if, if you ask my kids, uh, if they had a dollar for every time they heard me say, control what you can control, I think they’d, they’d have their, uh, colleges paid for already.
Rob: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a, yeah. So what big phrase in our household? Yeah. We, we’ve, we take those kind of.
People our age, right? We, we, we know kind of some of this stuff and we just, we give them the little soundbites. So what we do is we try to take those soundbites and bring ’em to life. So, you know, we say control the controllables, but then we teach them how to figure out what’s a controllable, what’s not a controllable, what should I focus on, and what’s the most important controllable that’s gonna contribute to my success?
Right. So, so it, it’s like we, we, we take it all to the next level so they can become practical and useful and, you know, the, the whole goal [00:18:00] is to increase performance and increase wellbeing.
Matt: No, yeah. Prioritization is key. And, and I know my, my, my oldest has gone through the, the tap and it was, it was interesting to, to talk it through with her and, and kind of see, and, and of course you.
It’s funny how they, they look back at the results. At least my daughter did, looked back at the results and went, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, that makes sense. Or, you know, it was kind of solidifying what maybe was in the back of their mind and bringing it to the front saying, okay, yeah, I need to, I need to do better there.
Or, or I recognize the issue or that is it controllable and I need to, to maybe put it higher on the priority list to, to improve my performance as well as just. Mental wellbeing. Right? Yeah. Just, just overall general, uh, state of mind, I guess.
Rob: Yeah. Yeah, we’re seeing a lot of, uh, you know, reported even, you know, the N C A does surveys and, uh, we’re, we’re hearing a lot of anxiety, you know, more than ever.
Um, and, you know, the rigors of college athletes, there’s, uh, or you know, it’s a business. It’s a lot more money in college now at all levels. Uh, roster spots are harder to get than ever scholarships. Um, You’ve got competition from the transfer portal, now you’ve got international students and there are more kids that are getting talented every day and you know, they’re all competing for those roster spots.
And it’s, uh, um, highly competitive. And, and one, [00:19:30] one little nugget that I just thought of that I wanted to share is, So the great thing about being with Riser is they have access to all these coaches that use the system and uh, so we did a survey of them recently just like, Hey, how important is mental to you?
And, and you, you know, would you look for it in recruiting if you had an opportunity? And nine of 10 college coaches we surveyed said they would prefer to recruit an athlete that demonstrated they were actively working on their mental game. So, so one of the cool things we’re trying to do at Riser is, hey, if a, if, if an athlete, if a high school athlete is working on their mental game, we can let the riser system know that they are working on it.
So then college coaches that either these, these athletes are going to their camps or they’re just looking ’em up in our system. ’cause we allow them to, you know, Kind of, you know, look up certain athletes that have used riser and, and what they’re doing. And, uh, you can let college coaches know, Hey, I’m working on my mental game.
And, you know, my strengths are like mental toughness and, and confidence. And, um, we even have certifications for those. So if, if you complete a course, you get a badge on your riser profile, and, and we put it in the form of what we call a recruiting
resume.
Matt: No, that, that’s tremendous. And, um, just so folks know, and I, and I, I don’t do this often or do this lightly, um, but, you know, having, again, having my daughter have gone through the, the tap and, and really [00:21:00] seeing what Riser ISS doing, um, Rob and I are excited to, to announce that Discover College Soccer is partnering, partnering with, uh, the riser mindset.
Group and is gonna be offering a special discount code for our listeners, viewers, friends of Discover College Soccer, if they would like to take advantage of, of the tap. And we’re gonna put all that information in the show notes and I’m, I’m sure you’ll see it on our website, in our social media platforms and that kind of thing.
So Rob, really wanna thank you for, for your partnership and, and think what you guys are doing is, is tremendous.
Rob: Thanks, Matt. So happy to be here. And, and we really want to get this in front of as many athletes as, as we can because, you know, it, it will benefit them in all steps of their athletic journey.
Um, whether it’s just, you know, if, if your goal is to make a high school team you wanna play in college, whatever your goal is, we want to help you, um, do the best you can.
Matt: Awesome. Well, Rob, really appreciate the time. Again, everybody take a look at the show notes or the, or the Discover College Soccer website.
We’ll have more information there and, uh, really appreciate your time, Rob, look forward to, to seeing you in person here soon, hopefully.
Rob: That’s right. All right, awesome. Thanks Matt. I.
