Where women who’ve made it build the women who are coming.
For 25 years, youth sports got better at almost everything — faster athletes, stronger bodies, year-round skill work. The one thing no one built is the system that trains the mind. Awareness taught a generation to name what’s wrong; nobody built the weight room that trains what’s strong. Awareness plays defense. Strength plays offense — and defense alone is losing.
The Close the Gap symposium is how we play offense in public — bringing Indiana University women’s basketball, Hoosier families, and high schools across the state into one room to train the mental side of the game, for free.
Stronger athletes. Healthier human beings. That’s why we show up.
School. Competition. Social media. Expectations from everyone — including herself.
U.S. female high school students, CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 2023. Mental fitness supports development; it does not replace clinical care. In a crisis, call or text 988.
Until about age 8, girls and boys report the same confidence. Then puberty, perfection pressure and fear of failure start pulling girls down — right as sport gets more competitive.
Source: The Confidence Code for Girls / Ypulse national survey of 1,394 8–18-year-olds, 2018.
Athletics is the safest place a young woman will ever rehearse the hardest moments of her life — and she shows up for it voluntarily, every afternoon. It’s also the biggest lever in the building: put mental strength at the center of athletics and it spreads through the whole high school.
It has to be practiced. Trained. Repped.
And built into a system.
She rehearses her frameworks inside the real moments of her sport. Mental rehearsal activates many of the same brain networks as doing the real thing. Pilots fly simulators. Elite athletes rehearse the moment before they live it.
| SITUATION | UNTRAINED | TRAINED |
|---|---|---|
| Mistake under pressure | Overthinks, hesitates | Resets and refocuses |
| Pre-game nerves | Tries to calm down | Already primed |
| The clutch moment | Second-guesses | Acts on instinct |
| After the game | Avoids, spirals | Reflects, learns, resets |
Under pressure, the fast automatic brain takes over (Kahneman). Training moves the right response into instinct. Mental practice meta-analysis: d ≈ 0.53 (Driskell et al., 1994).
For a century we’ve played defense — wait until something breaks, then treat it. That defense matters. But it’s only half the field.
One symposium. Four deliverables. Every one of them is explicit, and every one of them is on the schedule for January 2027.
A free 3-hour virtual summit for middle and high school female athletes, their parents and their whole families. IU women’s basketball players sit on the panel and speak to the mental side of the game. Families leave with a working understanding of mental fitness — the offensive side of mental health — and the tools to start training it the next day.
Identity and strength-building tools turned on for every high school girls basketball player in the state for the entire month of January — roughly 15,000 athletes kicking off 2027 the right way. Coaches get a team code; players join in ten minutes.
An entire high school — boys and girls, every team, every coach — that could not buy mental strength tools on its own gets a full year of the weight room for the mind: daily mental fitness, live Office Hours coaching, sport-specific rehearsals, assessments and scoring, captain and coach tools.
The players who show up, speak and sign are compensated through NIL contributions — a direct investment in the women doing the teaching. That’s the whole idea: female athletes helping female athletes, and getting paid for it.
Each cohort is $10,000. Every pledge funds all four things above — the summit, the statewide January tools, NIL support for the IU athletes, and 12 months of the weight room for the mind for one Title I Indiana high school. When a cohort fills, the school is announced and the next cohort opens. We’re going to keep coming back to IU alumni until five cohorts are funded and five schools are on the platform.
Every pledge is dedicated to a female athlete — your daughter, your sister, a teammate, a Hoosier you looked up to. Her name goes in the cohort’s announcement.
Two minutes. Secure checkout follows on the next screen.
Dedicate your pledge to a female athlete. Her name is announced next to yours when the cohort fills.
Your pledge details are saved first, then secure checkout opens. 100% of your pledge lands on this cohort.
100% of every alumni pledge is credited to the current cohort and funds all four deliverables. When it reaches $10,000, the Title I school is announced here, and the next cohort opens.
Every pledge gets a shareable cohort badge for LinkedIn and Facebook. $500 and $1,000 pledges are named in the school’s announcement.
After you pledge, we hand you a ready-to-send message. Forward it to five Hoosier women who’d want to put their name on this.
A Title I or high-poverty Indiana high school chosen with IU women’s basketball from our scholarship shortlist — a school that could not buy mental strength tools on its own. It’s announced the day the cohort fills.
Both — and more. Every alumni pledge funds all four things above: the virtual Mental Fitness Summit, free January tools for every girls basketball athlete in Indiana, 12 months of Mental Edge Academy for a Title I Indiana high school, and NIL contributions to the IU women’s basketball athletes on the panel.
A mission-driven organization whose programs and services have been used in 46 states, providing access to mental fitness training for more than 50,000 athletes. The weight room for the mind is already proven at scale; your pledge switches it on for a school that needs it.
50% of your contribution is directly tied to the Title I high school and is deductible. Please confirm the treatment with your tax specialist.
One facility. Every piece of equipment the mental game demands — and a scoreboard to prove it. This is what a Title I school gets for 12 months.