Every coaching package I build is aimed at installing a scheme. This new series isn’t about that. It’s about what happens between your player’s ears — and it’s the one part of the game most curriculums skip entirely.
Today I’m launching the NRF Mental Game Library: short, direct e-books written for you if you’re a high school football player, a coach leading them, or a parent watching from the stands. No motivational posters, no generic sports psychology. Every book is built from real stories — mine, and the players I’ve coached — because that’s the only kind of advice that actually sticks with a 16-year-old.
The first two books are live for you
The Short Memory is about the skill that separates the players who last from the ones who don’t: putting a bad play down fast enough that it doesn’t cost you the next one. Ten chapters, built around real moments from my own playing and coaching career — including a lesson I learned the hard way in my very first game as a kick returner.
Mental Toughness for the Football Player is the flagship book in the series. It’s about what toughness actually looks like — not the absence of pain, but what you do while it’s still there. This one gets personal: a knee condition I played through for years, a practice field of dirt and rock, and boot camp without speaking a word of English.
Why a book series, and why now
I’ve coached defensive backs, receivers, running backs, and special teams over the years, and I’ve watched the same pattern play out constantly: a talented player loses his confidence after one bad rep and never gets it back that game. A tough kid gets hurt, doesn’t know the difference between pain and injury, and either quits too early or plays through something he shouldn’t. Nobody sits kids like that down and actually teaches this stuff directly to them — it just gets absorbed, if it gets absorbed at all, from whatever a coach happens to say the right thing at the right moment.
These books are my attempt to write that conversation down, once, so you can pick it up and actually use it — with a reflection question and a real challenge at the end of every chapter, not just something to read and forget.
Both books are available now at nextrepfootball.com/books. More titles are already planned — Adversity & Resilience is next.
— Coach Fern