🧠 The BBFA Nine: How Champions Think, Train, and Stay in the Fight

✍️ By Steven L. Bradley
Founder, BBFA | Builder of Belief | Dad, Coach, Truth Teller

🧠 Before the First Principle: Why We Built the Nine

Golf will test everything you believe about yourself. It’ll charm you with a range session, then gut-punch you with a snap hook on the first tee. It’ll give you silence so deep it feels holy—and chaos so loud you forget how to breathe. It’s not just a game. It’s a diagnostic tool. A mirror. A pressure cooker with grass stains.

At Bradley’s Ball Flight Academy, we’re not in the business of swing fixes and fairy dust. We don’t sell quick tips or mental hacks. We build competitors. And that begins by building belief.

The BBFA Nine isn’t some cute acronym. It’s a framework forged in failure, refined in pressure, and weaponized through repetition. These aren’t traits of elite players—they’re the traits that make players elite.

Because here’s the truth: when the swing starts to wobble, when the bounce goes sideways, when your lead evaporates and the quiet starts getting loud—your brain swings first. And the mind that cracks under pressure? It’ll take the whole round with it without a fallback plan.

These nine principles are the core psychological tools we engrain in every BBFA athlete. Whether you're 12 or 52, scratch or scrapping for bogey, they travel. They stick. And they save you when it matters.

🏋️‍♂️ Why We Train the Mind at BBFA

Most academies start with mechanics. We begin with mindset.

Because the cleanest takeaway in the world means nothing if your brain's three holes ahead and your heart’s racing like a jackrabbit, golf is the only sport where your opponent is time, terrain, and yourself—and most players never train for the last one. But at BBFA, it’s the first thing we train.

Our drills reinforce conviction. Our routines are built on composure. Our instruction—yes, even the technical stuff—flows through the filter of psychological stability. Because when your mind’s clear, your swing gets simpler. When your beliefs are strong, your body gets braver.

🔥 Why Now?

You don’t rise to the level of your swing—you fall to your training level. That training has to include the voice inside your head, the pictures in your mind, and the decisions you make after the miss. And in today’s world, where attention spans are short and pressure is everywhere, mental game training isn’t a luxury.

It’s survival.

So we wrote this piece for the serious player: the gritty junior who knows they’re different, the comeback parent trying to reclaim their edge, the tournament grinder with the talent but not the traction, and yeah, even the scratch player who feels something is still missing.

The BBFA Nine is your anchor. It’s the reset button when things unravel. The compass when the fog rolls in. Tape it in your bag. Fold it in your journal. Commit it to muscle memory, just like your preshot routine.

Because when golf starts asking hard questions, this is how you answer.

Let’s begin.

🧱 1. Play to Play Great

🔥 2. Love the Fight

📋 3. Process Over Scorecard

🧊 4. Accept. Adjust. Advance.

🕰 5. Stay Present or Stay Home

💡 6. Aim Your Confidence

🎯 7. See It First. Swing Second.

🧠 8. Trust What You’ve Got

🤝 9. Be Your Own Teammate

🧱 1. Play to Play Great

There’s a moment in every round—somewhere between the warmup swing and the gut-check second shot on 17—when you’ve got to decide what kind of golfer you are.

Are you playing not to mess up? Or are you playing to win?

Too many players hit shots just trying to avoid trouble. They steer it. They guard leads. They shrink into the kind of swing that screams, “Please don’t screw this up.” That’s not strategy—that’s survival. And survival doesn’t score.

At BBFA, we train conviction. You either believe in the shot you’re hitting or shouldn’t be pulling the club. We teach our players to play smart—but with swagger. Swing free. Swing bold. And when the moment is right? Take dead aim.

“Good is the enemy of great.”
— BBFA

Dr. Bob Rotella backs this mindset up with surgical precision:

“Golfers who are playing to play great love a great drive more than they fear the rough. They like making putts more than they care about three-putting. They love chipping it in more than they loathe not getting up and down.”
— Bob Rotella, Inside the Golfer’s Mind

That’s the mental shift. You can’t fake it. You either play to play great—or you slowly shrink into the kind of player who never finds out what they’re capable of.

🔥 2. Love the Fight

Golf will not coddle you.

If you think it will, you’re in the wrong game. Because at some point—probably earlier than you'd like—it will get weird. You’ll stripe it down the fairway and catch a divot in the middle of the green. You’ll hit the best approach of your life and watch it spin off a false front. Your buddy’s duck-hook will hit a rake and kick in for birdie.

Good. Now we’re playing.

At BBFA, we don’t just train technique. We train temperament. And that starts with reframing adversity as opportunity. A weird lie is a mental edge. A bad break is a chance to prove you’re not built like everybody else.

“It’s no fun shooting a lousy score.”
— Tom Watson

“If you don’t love golf when it’s messy, you don’t love golf.”
— BBFA

Rotella calls this loving the challenge of the day, no matter what it throws at you:

“If you spend your time fighting the fact that golf is a game of mistakes... you're really saying you don’t like golf. You want it to be some other game—billiards, maybe.”
— Bob Rotella

At BBFA, we don’t want billiards. We want chaos. Because that’s where champions are made.

📋 3. Process Over Scorecard

The greatest lie in golf?

“I just need to par in from here.”

Wrong. You don’t need to do anything except show up—fully—for the next shot. And then the next. And then the next.

Score happens later. Process happens now.

Every elite golfer you admire plays the game in routine, target, and motion segments. They don’t think about 18 when they’re on the 12th tee. They don’t add up their score mid-round. They don’t spiral after a bogey. They stay present. They stay precise.

“Your job isn’t to score—it’s to show up for every shot like it’s the only one.”
— BBFA

Jack Nicklaus famously said:

“I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head.”

Rotella expands on that with his Process Goals approach—mini mental checklists that center your energy on the controllable:

• Trust the swing.

• See the target.

• Stick to the routine.

• Stay in the moment.

Can you do that 70 times in a round? The scorecard will take care of itself. But if you’re thinking about numbers while you’re still swinging? You’re not in control of the round—the round controls you.

🧊 4. Accept. Adjust. Advance.

The bad swing is coming. So is the awful bounce. So are the three-putts you didn’t see coming.

What is the difference between a tournament winner and a walking DNF? One keeps the club moving. The other keeps reliving the mistake.

At BBFA, we don’t sugarcoat this: resilience isn’t optional. It’s baked into the game. The course will test your memory—and your ability to forget.

“Strong minds don’t cling. They clear.”
— BBFA

Rotella says it this way:

“Acceptance isn’t weakness—it’s control.”

And he’s dead on. Acceptance isn’t the same as apathy. It’s precision. It’s emotional intelligence under fire. It's knowing the quickest route to the next good shot is through the last bad one—not around it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t feel disappointment. It just means you don’t carry it like a gym bag full of bricks. At BBFA, we train players to feel the miss, learn what they need, then hit “delete” before the next tee box.

The mind that resets the fastest finishes strongest.

🕰 5. Stay Present or Stay Home

If your thoughts are anywhere but right here, the swing’s already gone.

Thinking about what you shot on 5? That was four holes ago. Trying to “just par in”? That’s three holes from now. Wondering how you stand against the field? You’ve just handed your rhythm to a ghost.

“Be where your feet are. Especially if they’re in a bunker.”
— BBFA

Rotella drills it in:

“If you step onto the tee thinking, ‘This is a birdie hole,’ you’re already thinking two or three shots ahead of the present.”

At BBFA, we call that mental time travel, and it’s the fastest way to derail your round. Because once your mind leaves the shot, your body does too.

Real players keep the dial on now. They don’t entertain scoreboard fantasies. They don’t catastrophize. They aim. They breathe. They swing.

That’s the entire tournament. One shot at a time—until they run out of holes.

💡 6. Aim Your Confidence

Confidence is not about personality. It’s not arrogance. It’s not swagger. It’s not a strut.

Confidence is where your thoughts live when the game starts talking back.

At BBFA, we teach this hard: Confident players think about what they want to happen; unconfident ones think about what they don’t. It’s that simple.

“Confidence is thinking about what you want to happen. Doubt is thinking about what you don’t.”
— BBFA

Rotella backs it up with muscle:

“Given two players of equal skills, the more confident one will win nearly all the time. I don’t know exactly why... I only know that our bodies react to the degree of confidence we’ve nurtured in our conscious and subconscious minds.”

You can’t fake confidence—but you can choose your pictures. The brain is a screen. Show it the flag, not the water. Show it the fairway, not the out-of-bounds stakes. Show it your target. Then move toward it.

Because if you aim your attention well? Your swing follows. And it swings free.

🎯 7. See It First. Swing Second.

You don’t swing freely toward something you can’t see. And you don’t land close to flags you never visualized.

At BBFA, we preach visualization not as pre-shot fluff but as the realest prep there is. If the image isn’t clear in your head, the shot will wobble in your hands.

“First, I see the ball where I want it to finish... then I see the path, the shape, the behavior on landing.”
— Jack Nicklaus

“You don’t swing freely toward something you can’t see.”
— BBFA

Rotella puts it like this:

“When players are properly into the target, it’s as if there were a laser beam linking the mind and the spot where they want the ball to go. Hazards disappear. Instincts engage. You become a heat-seeking missile.”

You want fewer mishits? Fewer bailouts? Fewer “what the hell was that” swings?

Start with clarity. Before your body ever moves, let your brain light up the entire path—from clubface to flagstick. See it, feel it, and trust it.

Then, and only then, swing it.

🧠 8. Trust What You’ve Got

Every swing you make on the course is either fueled by trust—or tainted by doubt.

And here’s the truth: even the best players in the world hit flawed shots. But what they don’t do is tinker mid-round. They don’t overanalyze. They don’t abandon ship at the first sign of a misfire.

“Swing committed. Think later.”
— BBFA

Rotella drills it home:

“The correct response to a bad shot is to forget about it. On the next shot, execute your preshot routine. Swing unconsciously. Trust it. If you feel the need to fix your mechanics, wait till after the round and go to the range.”

At BBFA, we call this trusting the version of yourself that showed up today. Maybe your swing isn’t perfect. Maybe your tempo’s a click off. That’s fine. Everyone fights something.

But here’s the deal: doubt is poison. And once you sip it, the whole round tastes like it.

Trust what you’ve got. Let it rip. Tinker tomorrow.

🤝 9. Be Your Own Teammate

You’re with you for all 18 holes. You might as well like the company.

Your inner voice is either your anchor or your launchpad. And too many golfers spend their rounds getting barked at by the voice in their own head.

At BBFA, we teach athletes to talk to themselves like someone they want to win. Because if you’re scolding yourself every time you don’t stripe it? You’re eroding the very belief you need to compete.

Rotella breaks this down beautifully:

“Butterflies don’t mean you’re weak. They mean you care. The key is teaching them to fly in formation.”

That starts with self-regulation—not toxic positivity but calm correction. A clear tone, steady breath, and strong posture are the kinds of voices that would help a teammate settle and focus.

You are that teammate. Could you talk like that?

“I think I fail just a bit less than everyone else.”
— Jack Nicklaus

Exactly, Jack. And even when you don’t? You don’t bail. You don’t spiral. You stay in it—with yourself. Until the last putt drops.

🏁 Final Word: Golf Is Mental. So Train the Mind.

You don’t bluff your way through pressure. You don’t “fake it till you make it” through a stretch of doubles.

The brain either holds—or it folds.

At BBFA, we train swing mechanics. But more than that, we train mental mechanics. The brain swings first, and it better be trained like it wants to win.

The BBFA Nine isn’t fluff. It’s firepower.

Each principle is a mindset that travels—on the range, on the course, in the clubhouse, and in life. Champions aren’t just better athletes. They’re better thinkers, better feelers, and better at being present when the pressure spikes and everything else blurs.

Print this post. Highlight it. Tape it to the mirror or the inside of your range bag. Because if you master these nine?

You don’t just play better—you play unshakable.

🧠 Coming Soon from BBFA:

• The BBFA Nine Locker Room Poster (ParagonPrint Digital)

• Mini "Mental Game Scorecard" Download

• BBFA x Rotella "Read & React" Series on YouTube

• BBFA Little Red Video Drops: Mental Segment Edition