A chilly Melbourne night in Brighton was my first chance to look at the Tackle Your Feelings program. The session was held at the small but beautiful Baptist church of Brighton, and the room quickly filled as the Brighton dads & coaches walked in after work.

As heads hang after the sirens, players are likely to feel a range of emotions. As a coach, how do you make sense of the players’ experiences and what can you do to help them?

Mindfulness is all the rage lately. Coaches, athletes, trainers, and psychologists talk about the use of mindfulness in footy. But what is mindfulness? What is its connection with footy? This blog will take a dive into mindfulness and its connection with sport performance.

Tackle Your Feelings visited Alice Springs to present the program to community football coaches from the local area.

More than 30 community coaches from the Townsville region had the opportunity to hear firsthand from Gold Coast Suns coach Stuart Dew about the value he places on building the skills to understand, recognise and manage mental health issues in his players. Dew invited these volunteers into the Suns inner sanctum for a special briefing...

Just like aspects of our game, from time-to-time, our sleep needs a bit of work. And just as we need to review and practice our skills in footy to play well, it’s worth doing the same with our sleep to look after our mental health. So, here are three things we can consider to get...

We can spend (on average), up to one third of our life asleep. This is probably just a little more than we spend coaching or playing footy! Perhaps you’ve heard that sleep is important for physical recovery after a game or training, as well as for mental readiness before a game, but is sleep important to mental health as well? If it is, how important is it?

I’m sure, like me, you’ve had many challenging conversations in your lifetime. Some that have gone well and others that have gone as badly as kicking a behind… from the top of the goal square. As a coach, your job is to help develop players to become the best they can be. The process of...

ALTHOUGH Neville Jetta has been sidelined for much of the season, he continues to do wonderful things off the field. Melbourne’s vice-captain is having a positive impact in the grassroots AFL community, using his ambassadorial role for the Tackle Your Feelings campaign to promote positive change in mental health.

ON A SOAKED Cranbourne evening, a group of local Australian Rules football coaches were all eyes and ears as Melbourne’s Neville Jetta relayed an important message about mental health. Sitting in the upstairs function room at Casey Fields overlooking the ground he spent many hours on early in his AFL career, the Demons defender was...