Mental Performance Coaching for Athletes — Maria Guryeva
Performance Coaching · By referral & application

Your body is trained.
Now train the last 10%.

Mental performance coaching for competitive athletes, student athletes, and the people who perform when everyone is watching. The gap between good and great was never physical.

Start with a free conversation
Licensed Sports Performance Coach™· Sports journalist, Sochi 2014 Olympics· Former national-level competitor
Featured in  Forbes · Marie Claire · Cosmopolitan · InStyle · Inc.
Maria Guryeva — performance coach
Is this you?

You've done the physical work. Something else decides the result.

  • You train better than you compete — practice brilliance keeps not showing up on the day.
  • One mistake mid-performance and the whole game unravels.
  • You've hit a plateau that more hours aren't breaking.
  • Pre-start nerves run you, instead of running for you.
  • You're a student athlete — and your sport could be worth an elite university place, if someone knew how to convert it.
  • You're a parent watching talent that deserves a bigger stage.

Coaches and clubs: team formats are below.

The honest test

Competition is decided in three skills. Score yourself.

  • When a thought starts sabotaging you mid-performance — can you catch it and flip it, in the moment?
  • Can you use your self-talk deliberately, to bring yourself to peak exactly when it counts?
  • Can you put your mind and body into a calm, focused state within a few minutes — and hold it?

Three yeses — you don't need me. Any no — that's not a personality trait. That's a trainable skill, and training it is precisely what we do.

The work

What we train

The same disciplines the manual of elite sport is built on — trained deliberately, drilled until they're yours under pressure:

  • State on demand — anchoring and state-management protocols, so your best state has a switch, not a mood
  • Pre-performance routines — the 90-second entry sequence elite performers run before the start, built for your sport and drilled to automatic
  • Mental rehearsal — first-person visualization protocols that give your body a memory of the performance before it happens
  • Flow access — engineering the challenge-skill balance so your deepest focus becomes reachable on purpose
  • Pressure & recovery — what to do with nerves, mistakes mid-game, and the voice that shows up at the worst moment
  • Belief & confidence architecture — rebuilding the inner statements that decide how much of your training shows up
  • Goal & season architecture — compelling goals, measured milestones, and review rhythms that survive a losing week
The scholarship edge

Your sport can open the doors of elite universities.

This is the intersection almost nobody else works: I have helped competitive athletes win places at Ivy League and top U.S. schools on athletic scholarships. Seventeen years of admissions results — students from 160+ countries, more than $1 billion in scholarships and grants won — combined with licensed sports performance coaching. For student athletes and their families, we build both games at once: the performance that gets you seen, and the admissions story that gets you in.

Ask about the student-athlete track
Maria Guryeva at Columbia University
For clubs, academies & teams

Team formats

Workshops and team sessions on the mental game: shared purpose and roles, pre-performance routines at team level, pressure protocols, and the culture conversations that turn a group into a team. Built for clubs, academies, and programs that treat the inner game as seriously as the physical one.

How it works

Three steps.

  1. A conversation. Tell me the sport, the level, and what keeps not showing up on the day.
  2. A plan. Individual work, the student-athlete track, or a team format — scoped to the season you're actually in.
  3. The work. Trained like everything else you train: deliberately, with reps, until it holds under pressure.
Book a free first conversation

The first conversation is free and carries no obligation — we simply look at where you are. Or write directly: hello@mariaguryeva.com

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