UC San Diego Athletics Levels Up With Access to Mindfulness Training

“Mindfulness is a non-judgmental awareness of what is going on from your thoughts, to emotions, to behaviors or physical sensations in the body,” said Corrie Falcon, UC San Diego’s Coach Success and Performance Mind Coordinator. 

“Mindfulness training is the practice of meditation. It all begins with focusing on our breathing and observing what is going on in the present moment. The more we can pay attention to what’s going on in our head, the more freedom we have on how we choose to respond and be in the moment.”

Falcon – a National Swim Team member, U.S. Swimming National Champion, All-American, NCAA Championship runner-up, and team captain at USC – has taken the lead on bringing mental skills resources to the campus of La Jolla through the establishment of Triton Mind. 

The purpose of Triton Mind is to assist each scholar-athlete with becoming more resilient so that they can achieve their academic and athletic potential, while also learning how to become leaders in all aspects of their lives. 

The entire UC San Diego athletic department is on board with the new theory, with much support coming from athletic performance, nutrition, and athletic training.

Alongside Falcon is first year UC San Diego Mental Skills Coach and Certified Mental Performance Consultant, Brian Alexander.

Alexander was a USA Men’s Water Polo Olympic alternate twice and an eight-year member of the senior national team. The Orange County native and UC Santa Barbara graduate retired from the USA National Team in 2012. However, his time with the program didn’t end there. In 2016, after receiving his master’s in sports psychology, he was named the official Athlete Mental Skills Coach for the USA Water Polo Olympic Development Program. 

Both Falcon and Alexander had extremely successful careers in the water, although each of them faced obstacles that influenced their pursuit in the mental performance field, specifically in the world of athletics. 

“I think if you ask anyone in this field why they originally got into it, they will tell you they needed it themselves,” Alexander shared. “I learned how valuable it was.

“A sports psychologist from the U.S. Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs worked with us on the national team. After some time, I bought into his philosophy and his mindfulness-based approach to mental training. I started to ask him a bunch of questions, learned about the sports psychology field and figured out I could make it into a career. He is still one of my main mentors to this day.”

Similar to Alexander, Falcon was a standout in her sport, but knew something was missing from her collegiate experience that might have helped her perform even better. 

Following her athletic career, in 2001, Falcon founded a yoga practice that transformed her. 

“I had never had this level of mind-body connection in my life. I have never been this aware, felt this present or been able to calm down like this before.”

At the time, in addition to her new appreciation for yoga, Falcon was coaching swimming overseas. Eventually she found her way to UC San Diego in 2007, later becoming the head coach for the Tritons in 2011 and received UC San Diego's Excellence in Coaching Award in 2014.  

“I was always interested in the people side of sports,” Falcon shared. “I approached my athletes from a different standpoint than a typical coach. I didn’t tell them what to do all the time. I asked them questions, held them accountable and had them think for themselves, using skillsets I had learned from the other adventures I was on.

“I started to become less interested in the times, technique and the drills and more interested in the motivation, the confidence and self-belief,” Falcon stated. 

Since then, Falcon has taken a deep dive into mindfulness training. Four years ago, Falcon enrolled in a course called mPEAK (mindful performance enhancement, awareness and knowledge) – a program built around the latest brain research regarding peak performance, resilience, focus and ‘flow’ and has taken off with those concepts. 

In 2017, a couple years after she stopped coaching, Falcon founded Mind Gym, a weekly workshop where UC San Diego scholar-athletes can access instruction on how to exercise their minds to the same capacity that they train their bodies. 

During Mind Gym, which is currently held via Zoom every Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Falcon guides scholar-athletes through 30 minutes of meditation and self-reflection. Topic discussions include gratitude, confidence, goal setting, breath focus, and more. 

“I am using a lot of the training from mPEAK to help our athletes in leadership, confidence, and managing emotions,” Falcon mentioned.

Research has shown that athletes can benefit from these practices in many ways: reduced burn out, reduced injury and reduced performance nerves, as well as increased optimism and general well-being. Noticing thoughts and being able to work with them rather than allowing them to take over an entire experience is also an added advantage. 

Although the idea of mindfulness training has been around for thousands of years, incorporating the concepts into sports is a newer performance technique that many universities and professionals are adopting. 

“One of our values at UC San Diego is innovation,” said Falcon. “We stand for not being afraid to try something new and being willing to stretch the boundaries and invest in new technologies. It is a reflection of our university and values as a whole.

“We also value our wellbeing of our athletes,” Falcon continued. “UC San Diego is a laboratory for student development. Wins and losses aside, we want to develop people over their four years here.”

UC San Diego has been a leader in national and global rankings for quite some time, and with its recent move to Division I, mental skills resources are becoming not only more necessary, but also more available. 

“In Division I, there are higher expectations,” Alexander expressed. “UC San Diego is putting more emphasis and support behind scholar-athletes on campus to help them be better performers. With that said, regardless of the label, DI, DII, or DIII, one thing that all of us in high performance understand is that we are competitors. But we also need to understand how to balance and find that path to mastery in the things that we love to do.

“I think our main focus with Triton Mind is how do we become the best at what we want to become the best at? How do we use our ‘why’ and passion to push through all the hard stuff, and good stuff too, and how do we find the calm in the chaos of pressure in key moments of games and hostile environments? We have a mission of building resilient scholar-athletes and better community members as well.”

Redshirt junior Bobbi Aguirre of the UC San Diego softball team and senior Delani Fish of Triton track and field were recognized as regular participants at Mind Gym. 

“Right now, all circumstances considered, access to this resource is helping in all areas for me – school, softball, and just life in general,” Aguirre shared. “It is really benefitting me on the field since that’s where I experience the most immediate stress. We have learned breathing techniques and self-talk techniques that are applicable during those tense situations in a game.

“I even noticed myself practicing these skills in our first Division I series against Grand Canyon,” the designated player said. “It’s helped me be more positive and bounce back quicker.”

Fish has also noticed a big shift in how she handles the inevitable stress of a scholar-athlete.

“I find myself using these practicing throughout my everyday life probably more than during competition,” the track jumper said. 

“The sessions put me in a situation where I can be comfortable being uncomfortable. Instead of criticizing myself and focusing on the negatives, I have learned to critique myself and recognize how to change for the better.”

Falcon hopes for all athletes to simply be curious about this up-and-coming method of training that continues to grow across other distinguished campuses. 

“Everyone is looking for an advantage,” Falcon claimed. “Athletes are really great at investing in the tangibles, including what they eat, drink, and how much sleep they get. We all acknowledge that those are important.

“Training your mind gives you confidence to handle setbacks, nerves, self-doubt and the inner critic. When you start practicing how to handle these obstacles, just like any other skill, you are ready to fend them off when they appear in competition.”

“I hope the scholar-athletes are able to find positives and enjoy the experience of mindfulness training. It all transfers over to being present, seeing the good in every day, and overall quality of life, which ultimately leads to self-supportiveness and better performance.”

Follow @tritonmind on Instagram for tools on how to achieve your goals. Learn more about mindfulness training by listening to UC San Diego's Tritoncast featuring Falcon, here.  

About UC San Diego Athletics
After two decades as one of the most successful programs in NCAA Division II, the UC San Diego intercollegiate athletics program has begun a new era as a member of the Big West Conference in NCAA Division I. The 23-sport Tritons earned 30 team and nearly 150 individual national championships during its time in Divisions II and III and helped guide 1,400 scholar-athletes to All-America honors. A total of 83 Tritons have earned Academic All-America honors, while 37 have garnered prestigious NCAA Post Graduate Scholarships. UC San Diego scholar-athletes exemplify the academic ideals of one of the world's preeminent institutions, graduating at an average rate of 91 percent, one of the highest rates among institutions at all divisions. For more information on the Tritons, visit UCSDtritons.com or follow UC San Diego Athletics on social media @UCSDtritons.

Return To Sport… Safely
n order for UC San Diego scholar-athletes to be permitted to return to training and competition safely and within federal, state, local and university guidelines, the athletic department implemented a number of measures designed to complement and enhance the university’s highly-successful Return To Learn program.  Notable actions include being physically distanced when practical, including during out-of-season training sessions; wearing masks, except when undergoing physically strenuous exercise; and maintaining proper hygiene.  Athletes, coaches and staff are testing at a higher frequency than the campus population, teams adhere to CDC, NCAA and Big West Conference guidelines and department officials participate in regular meetings with conference and university-affiliated physicians and the UC San Diego emergency operations staff.