Why I stopped building what I planned to build, and started building what my players actually needed.
I’m packing a suitcase this week. One of my students is playing in the U.S. Junior Amateur, and I’ll be there walking the ropes, doing the quietest and most important part of my job: being a steady face on days that feel enormous.
But before I zip the bag, I need to tell you what happened this month, because it changed the direction of my entire business: MPGA+.
The text messages…
Over the past few weeks, my phone filled up with messages from some of the most talented junior golfers I have ever coached, and from their parents. Different families, different states, different swings. But the messages all shared a similar theme. I’m paraphrasing and blending them here to protect my players, but you’ll recognize the voice:
“This week was terrible. I put so much pressure on myself and I honestly don’t even know why. Everyone around me could see it, and it came out in my performance.”
“People keep telling me how much talent I have. I still don’t believe it, no matter how much I want to.”
And from a parent:
“I don’t know what to do or say anymore. Watching from the sideline is the worst feeling in the world.”
These are not struggling players. These are the sought-after kids. Rankings, recruiting letters, trophies. From the outside, they’re living the dream. From the inside, some of them are carrying anxiety that has started to show up as tight swings, blown leads, tears in the car, and in the hardest cases, panic that follows them off the course entirely.
If you’re a parent of a competitive junior, you may know exactly the feeling that mom described. There’s a saying I think about often: we are only as happy as our least-happy child. Standing on a sideline, clapping and smiling while your kid quietly comes apart, is a specific kind of helpless. You’d trade places in a second. But you can’t.
Where is it coming from?
Here’s what two decades in sport psychology has taught me about the root of it, and it’s not what most families think.
It is not the competition. Almost every one of these kids will tell you, in their own words, that competing is a privilege. They want the big stage.
It’s the weight stacked on top of the competition. Somewhere along the way, the score stopped being a number and started being a verdict. On their talent. On the family’s investment. On their future. When a 15-year-old stands over a four-footer and their brain whispers that this putt measures their worth, the body responds exactly the way it was built to: alarm. Heart rate up. Breath shallow. Hands that won’t stay quiet. That alarm system was designed to protect them from danger, and it cannot tell the difference between a lion and a leaderboard.
And here’s the part that surprises parents most: praise doesn’t fix it. Every one of these kids has been told how talented they are, over and over, by people who mean it. It doesn’t land, because other people’s words are not their evidence. Confidence built on compliments collapses under pressure. However, confidence built on a player’s own collected proof holds. The thing is… nobody taught them how to collect it.
So the anxiety grows in the gap between two things: an alarm system nobody explained, and a self-belief that was never trained, only asserted.
The pivot
I’ll be honest about the business side, because many of you reading this are builders too.
This is not the product I planned to launch this season. MPGA had a roadmap. Then my most elite players, the ones already doing everything right, started sending me those messages, and I faced the choice every builder eventually faces: protect the plan, or serve the actual need standing in front of you.
Here’s what I’ve learned about pivoting: a pivot is not abandoning your vision. A pivot is what you do when reality hands you better information about how to reach it. I want every junior athlete to have a trained mind, not just a trained swing, first in golf… then eventually in every sport. This is the vision and that vision is strong enough to pull me forward. The pivot, however, just changed the door I’m walking through. If your vision only pushes you, you’ll quit when it gets hard. If it pulls you, a hard month becomes a redirection instead of a dead end.
So I stopped, and I built the thing my players were asking for without asking.
Why CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or… Training).
When I went looking for the strongest foundation to build on, the answer wasn’t close. Cognitive behavioral training, CBT, is the most researched approach to anxiety in existence. Decades of clinical trials, hundreds of studies, and it consistently comes out as the first-line recommendation for anxiety, including in teenagers. The core insight is simple enough for a 13-year-old and deep enough for a tour pro:
Your thoughts drive your feelings, your feelings drive your actions, and the result feeds the next thought. You can’t always stop the first anxious thought from showing up. You can absolutely train what happens next.
The problem for me has always been about the packaging, not the science. CBT lives in clinics and textbooks, and a 15-year-old who tightens up on the first tee is never going to read a textbook. So I spent these past few months translating it: into golf language, into short videos, into worksheets a teenager will actually fill out, into reps you do on the course, not in a chair.
What I built
It’s called The Pressure Playbook: a 12-week mental performance program for junior golfers who feel pressure, built on CBT, delivered inside our MPGA+ community.
What’s inside The Pressure Playbook:
One skill, one video, one worksheet, and one check-in a week.
Catching the automatic negative thoughts before they swing the club.
Turning nervous into ready.
Building self-belief from the player’s own evidence.
Putting fears on trial with real data.
Routines for the three hours and forty-five minutes of a round when you aren’t swinging.
Parents get their own lane, with a clear role and updates, while the player’s private work stays private. And every player starts by rating themselves on six pressure situations, then re-rates the same six at the end. The before-and-after is theirs, in their own numbers, in their own handwriting. That’s the whole philosophy: proof over pep talks.
One thing it is not: therapy. This is mental performance training, like working on a swing. When a player is carrying something bigger than golf, my job includes helping that family find the right licensed support, and that guardrail is built into the program on purpose.
For the parents reading this
Three things you can do this week, before any program:
Trade the scoreboard question for a process question. On the car ride home, “what did you love out there today?” instead of “what did you shoot?” It sounds small, but it reorders what your kid believes you value.
Praise what they control. Effort, attitude, bounce-backs, guts on a scary shot. Praising talent and their results builds pressure. Praising process, however, builds durability and growth.
And say the sentence they need to hear from you specifically: “Nothing about your score changes anything about us.” They know you love them. They’re less sure the scoreboard agrees.
The founding cohort
Three of my elite players are going through The Pressure Playbook right now as its first pilot. This fall, I’m opening a small founding group behind them, and I’d rather fill it from this newsletter family than anywhere else.
Who it’s for: competitive junior golfers, roughly 12 to 18, who feel the gap between how they play in practice and how they play when it counts. First-tee nerves, short-putt dread, blown leads, tournament-day stomachaches, the kid who’s “fine” until the moment it matters.
If that’s your golfer, apply here.
It takes three minutes, and I read every single application myself. Founding families get direct access to me through the full 12 weeks and beyond through our MPGA+ platform.
Now I’ve got a suitcase to finish packing and a player to go cheer for, the loudest quiet clap on the property from inside the ropes will be coming from me on their bag. If you see a kid on a first tee this week with a tight chest and a big dream, be gentle. There’s more going on in there than the yardage book shows.
Your Mental Coach,
Dr. Mat
P.S. If you know a golf family carrying this quietly, forward them this letter. It might be the first time they realize they’re not the only ones.