how does your mental preparation work?

BarcelonaCory Higgins is 33 years old and has two Euroleague trophies under his belt. The Barça escort took advantage of a conference at the Sports Tomorrow Congress, an event that was held this year as part of the Mobile World Congress, to explain one of the keys to his performance: “Being a professional player is a challenge and often it’s not easy. In the dark moments you have to know how to handle it. Mental preparation is the number 1 reason for my success. When you have more experience, you know how to deal with it. It can be trained and you have to do it. “Pressure is a personal thing and mental preparation can tell you which thoughts are helpful and which are not. If you don’t have the necessary tools, you can see problems as bigger than they are.”

Higgins meditates regularly. “Although failure is scary, the more you experience it, the more comfortable it makes you feel managing the consequences. When you accept things, they end up solving themselves”, admits the Barça player, who competes against Zalgiris this Thursday (7 p.m., DAZN).

“When I was young I was stricter with the pre-match routine. Now I’m not so strict. If I know I’ve done everything I can to prepare, I’m calm. During the match it’s a bit the same. The key is to recover concentration after each action, living in the present moment. When you lose it’s the darkest moment, but you have to be able to accept the situation,” he analysed.

“My father taught me to work ethically. When I was young, he taught me situations that I experienced years later and that was an advantage,” he explains. The best advice given to him by Michael Jordan, with whom he has a personal relationship because he is his godfather, he admits was the following: “Be yourself and control only what is in your hands. The big learning was the confidence I had.”

“Everyone has their rituals and routines. I used to have more of them. I listened to the same music or went out on the track in the same way, but over the years I relaxed these habits,” he confesses. Higgins is an excellent player in tight ends, when the rest of his teammates and rivals play conditioned by the fear of failure. “The key is to control everything you can control. This involves effort, motivation and attention to detail. When you’re competitive, you want to live with the pressure: to play as many big games as possible. Personally, I enjoy it a lot. I think that a competition like the Euroleague is about that”, he insists.

One year of the operation

The Barça player always repeats the same routine when he has to take a free kick. Ball on the hip, look at the basket, three bounces of the ball and some words that he repeats like a mantra. Deep breath, last look at the basket and shot. Following this routine, Cory Higgins has managed to score more than 86% of the free throws he has taken in the Euroleague. The statistic perfectly sums up the meticulous regularity of a player as excellent as he is introverted.

Higgins was operated on on February 14 last year, when he could no longer take the pain caused by chronic plantar fasciitis in his left foot. Although the layoff period was only three months, the escort was not able to recover the best version in the decisive matches. At 33 years old, the challenge of regaining the speed of his first step was capital.