The Mental Side of Basketball: How Jack McVeigh elevated his game through accountability, awareness and action

It wasn't just about buying in and fitting in, but also about standing out. Here's how McVeigh found balance and now success with the JackJumpers.

Credit: JBC Studios

It can be easy to underestimate what it takes to become a successful professional athlete. Tune into a game on TV or in person, many of these athletes make what they do look so easy, that you’d be forgiven for overlooking what goes on behind the scenes to get to that point.

Jack McVeigh is a great example. The sixth-year pro, now in his third season with the Tasmania JackJumpers, has become one of the best local forwards in the league. He’s a fan favourite across the Apple Isle and many describe him as the heart and soul of the JackJumpers team.

But it wasn’t always this way for McVeigh. In fact, it was only six short years ago, when McVeigh thought he had ‘failed’ as a basketball player. He was in his third year at the University of Nebraska and he’d gone from playing over 20 minutes per game and starting nearly half of the season the year prior, to barely playing at all.

Whatever McVeigh was doing off the court, was not translating to on-court success and something had to change. This was when he first began to take a deeper interest in the mental side of things.

“I was unhappy off the court [and] I wasn’t performing on the court,” McVeigh told The Pick and Roll.

“I just wasn’t performing and so I had to look at what can I do better, how can I improve, why am I kind of training well and then going into games and stinking it up? So, that was when I was really like, well I need to change something and learn, and have a new approach.”

McVeigh took that on board and began to focus as much on the mental side of basketball as he did on the physical. He spent time studying things like mindfulness, gratitude, discipline and how to create daily habits.

This research led him to ultimately focus on three key concepts: Accountability, Awareness and Action. Basically, how to hold himself accountable for his own development and not rely on others to drive that, building awareness about what he should be doing to improve and finally, actually putting those things into practice.

Those three concepts and his approach to building his mental strength have, by McVeigh’s own admissions, made a huge difference to his professional trajectory.

“Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of factors going into being a great basketball player and I kind of put it down to three,” he explained.

“There are three big glasses that need to be filled to be a good basketball player. The first one is skill, which comes into the basketball skill and the game. The second one is your body, which is the weight room, how you move, being healthy, being athletic. And then the third one is your mind, and I think a lot of people leave that one unfilled and don’t look at it as an area in which they can improve.”

McVeigh talked about how professional basketball in Australia is such a competitive field, so that when you’re competing with the best players in the NBL, the top echelon of players in the world, you have to take any advantage you can get to maintain success.

“When you’re using your mental focus, the way you approach the game, the way you approach training and you’re improving that as well, then it’s just going to be another thing that helps you become a good basketball player,” he added.

Of course, if you rewind to when McVeigh first returned to Australia from Nebraska to begin his professional career, he wasn’t nearly as self-assured as he is today.

McVeigh, who had signed with the Adelaide 36ers and Joey Wright, came back to Australia with a little bit of notoriety and buzz. He had a podcast called ‘The Jack Mctrey Podcast’ which started while he was still at Nebraska. He also came to the NBL with a reputation for someone who played with a lot of energy, which was publicised and hyped a little at the time.

But despite that, McVeigh wasn’t coming in thinking he was going to instantly find success in the NBL.