Meet the man who is helping Marquette to mentally train for sky-high expectations

The Marquette men’s basketball team isn’t shying away from the stratospheric expectations for this season.

There’s a calm, business-like approach with the Golden Eagles’ players, even when talking about preseason top-five rankings or Final Four hopes or being a team that can bring home the school’s first national title since 1977.  

“I think that’s something that we’ve grown with each year,” MU center Oso Ighodaro said. “Our first year we were just happy to make the tournament. Last year we won both Big East championships.

“It wasn’t that we were satisfied with that, but I don’t know that we had the national championship expectations that we have this year. I think we’ve proven to ourselves that we can do it and we’re that caliber of a team so that gives us the confidence to go into the season with that mentality.”

The most common question that Golden Eagles players and coaches have been asked leading up to the opening game on Monday night against Northern Illinois at Fiserv Forum is how they are going to deal with going from being the hunters to being the hunted.

Again, the Golden Eagles are taking everything in stride.

“Just because we may be picked high this year doesn’t guarantee us any wins, any stops, any buckets on the court,” Ighodaro said. “That’s something we have to go out and do ourselves.”

Outsiders might be skeptical of MU’s even-keeled approach, but the team has been preparing their minds for the last two years. Just like how the Golden Eagles work on their pick-and-roll reads and intricate dances of screening and cutting, they also spend time coming to terms with anxieties, pressures and stress.

The man who helps the Golden Eagles with these weighty issues won’t be found on the team’s website. But Russ Rausch, the mind behind Vision Pursue, plays a key role as a consultant who helps with the team’s performance mindset.

“He’s been phenomenal,” MU head coach Shaka Smart said. “Really, really good at helping our guys and our staff in so many ways on the mental-skills side.”

Who is Russ Rausch and what is Vision Pursue?

Rausch doesn’t have any formal training in neuroscience or psychology. He was once in the trading and technology businesses in Chicago.

“I was really just noticing, man, I feel a lot of stress,” Rausch said. “A lot of anxiety. Not sleeping too good.

“I’m a small-town kid from Kansas, first one to go to college in my family, and here I am in Chicago and I’m making pretty good money. I’m quote-unquote at least somewhat successful. I’m not enjoying my life at all.”

Rausch started doing deep dives after watching videos on neurotransmitters – the chemical messengers in the body – and the work of Jill Bolte Taylor, a doctor who writes about how her brain functioned after a stroke.

“That changed the way I looked at the whole world,” Rausch said. “These feelings I’m having. This anxiety, this resentment, all these different feelings I’m having, these are just chemicals that my brain is unilaterally deciding to toss around in a certain way.”

How does this mental approach help athletes like Oso Ighodaro?

At the beginning of his journey into studying the human brain, Rausch talked to a few Chicago White Sox players who told him about their mental struggles.

“That was shocking to me,” Rausch said. “Because to me, like, being a pro athlete would be like the ultimate cool thing.”

Out of that realization came his business. Rausch works with several pro and college teams. He’s tight with Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla and works extensively with the Miami Heat, a franchise famous for its culture.

MU assistant coach Nevada Smith was in the Heat organization as a G League coach and he worked with Rausch. After joining Smart’s staff, Smith set up a meeting. The Golden Eagles had a different mental-skills coach in Smart’s first season at MU, but didn’t get complete buy-in from the players so Rausch started working with the team.

Rausch knows how to reach young athletes.

“It’s like anything else, they just want to see some benefit,” Rausch said. “If they’re going to put some time into it, they want to see some benefit. So you have to prove some benefit pretty early on.”

MU point guard Tyler Kolek might be brash on the court, but he’s developed his introspective side over the last few seasons.

“I feel like it really took my mental part of the game to the next level,” Kolek said. “That’s so important nowadays. Everybody talks about the mental training, mental skills, meditation. Everybody from the professionals, Kobe, LeBron, all those guys all the way down.

 “It just goes back to not just sports but life. Being mentally OK. Your mental health being in a good place. So I think I really took a jump with that. Not just basketball-wise but personally. Being secure. Feeling good in my skin and feeling OK.”

Kolek said he does daily meditations and is working his second time through a 60-day program that Rausch designed.

According to Rausch, mood and motivation are helped immensely by breathwork and getting the body attuned to circadian rhythms between day and night.

“We just work on handling emotion,” Ighodaro said. “Handling things that are going on in our life and also daily habits that can help us be at our best.

“So little things like in the morning, getting morning light is what we call it. Getting cold exposure throughout the day, which is either getting a cold shower, getting a cold tub, things that just refresh you and make sure you’re at your best. Any little edge that we can find over other teams, other opponents we’ll take.”

Tyler Kolek and his Marquette teammates dealing with expectations

Smart and Rausch are kindred spirits. Smart’s tenets of being “lost in the fight” and “controlling the controllables” are similar to Rausch’s philosophies.

“One of the great things about working with Shaka is that Shaka could do what I do for a living,” Rausch said. “He’s very advanced on mental stuff. So he already does a lot of good stuff, so my stuff marries very well with his stuff that he does.”

Rausch meets with the MU team about every other week. He’s seen the Golden Eagles go from underdogs to national title contenders.

“You do shift as the narrative shifts and the pressure shifts,” Rausch said. “You do talk about that. But my stuff is really about how do you build a framework for whatever is coming at you. Because there is always something coming at you.

“So like last year, they’re disrespected. Nobody believes in them. That’s a narrative. And then all of a sudden, they’re looked at as contenders and a top-10 team and all that kind of stuff. But what I’m trying to do is build up their mental capacity to handle whatever is coming at them. Losses, wins, social media, family pressures, performance pressures.”

Over the past three seasons, Kolek has gone from an under-the-radar guard at George Mason to All-American at MU and the target of opposing fans’ ire. Rausch’s approach has helped him navigate that.

“There’s nothing too small that’s under my control,” Kolek said. “Going on my phone, let me not spend 10 minutes or an hour on TikTok. Let me spend an hour on trying to get my mental right. Trying to improve myself.”

Now with the one of the most anticipated seasons in MU history at hand, the Golden Eagles will be calmly going about their business.

“A good way to explain is like this, Todd Smith is trained to get them physically ready for what comes at them,” said Rausch, referring to MU’s assistant athletic director for applied sports science and performance. “It isn’t like, we’re a contender so let’s change our weightlifting now.

“That’s kind of how I look at the mental.”