A Super Bowl Ad With Psychology Behind It
On Sunday, millions of viewers watched the NFL’s 60-second Super Bowl LX commercial, Champion, featuring a young boy in his bedroom delivering a motivational speech to his action figures and stuffed animals, echoing word for word the speech his coach had given him on the field. “I am a champion,” the boy says, as the scene cuts between his room and his coach’s huddle.
The NFL made a deliberate choice to leave celebrities and star athletes on the sidelines for this spot, choosing instead to celebrate the real people who change kids’ lives on practice fields and in gyms across the country. The decision was well timed. Sport coaches serve an important role as mentors, and for many young people, especially boys, a coach is the most consistent nonparental adult in their lives. In a nationally representative analysis of Add Health data, Kraft, Bolves, and Hurd (2023) found that 71% of students who nominated a coach as their natural mentor were male, and Christensen et al. (2019) showed that having a coach mentor was significantly associated with a higher likelihood of both high school and college completion, even after controlling for sports participation and baseline academic achievement.
More than a century ago, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1902) described the “looking-glass self”, the idea that we build our sense of who we are by imagining how significant people see us and then internalizing those perceived evaluations. When a mentor or coach communicates genuine belief in a young person, that positive appraisal can reshape the young person’s identity, shifting not only how they see themselves today but who they imagine they might become. Markus and Nurius (1986) called those mental images “possible selves.” A coach who looks at a child and says “you are a champion” is conveying a possible self to that child. Ben-Eliyahu et al. (2021) tested this idea in a national sample of 1,860 adolescents and found that when youth perceived that a caring adult truly “gets” them, this perceived positive regard was associated with greater purpose, effort, grades, and civic engagement.
New research on the sources of encouragement sharpens this point further. Asaba, Santos, Jara-Ettinger, and Leonard (2025) found across three studies that adolescents were most motivated by encouragement from people who knew both their abilities and the specific domain they were working in, rather than by generic praise from unfamiliar authority figures. This suggests that role models who are both attuned to a young person’s strengths and fluent in the activities they care about, such as a coach who has watched them improve week after week, may be especially well positioned to sustain their effort and engagement.
The ad also illustrates a process Vygotsky (1934/1986) described nearly a century ago. What begins as social speech, the dialogue between a child and a more capable adult, gradually becomes private speech, the child talking aloud to rehearse what they have heard, and eventually inner speech, the silent self-talk we use for planning and self-regulation. As Vygotsky (1978) argued, every function in a child’s development appears twice, first on the social plane between people and then on the psychological plane within the child. The boy has internalized his coach’s belief in him and is now externalizing that internalized voice through play, rehearsing it, consolidating it, making it his own. He is not just a player anymore.
References
Asaba, M., Santos, M., Jara-Ettinger, J., and Leonard, J. A. (2025). Adolescents report being most motivated by encouragement from people who know their abilities and the domain. Developmental Psychology, 61(9), 1793-1807. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001920
Ben-Eliyahu, A., Yoviene Sykes, L. A., and Rhodes, J. E. (2021). Someone who “gets” me: Adolescents’ perceptions of positive regard from natural mentors. Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 29(3), 305-327.
Christensen, K. M., Raposa, E. B., Hagler, M. A., Erickson, L. D., and Rhodes, J. E. (2019). Role of athletic coach mentors in promoting youth academic success: Evidence from the Add Health national longitudinal study. Applied Developmental Science, 25(3), 217-227.
Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. Scribner’s.
Kraft, M. A., Bolves, A. J., and Hurd, N. M. (2023). How informal mentoring by teachers, counselors, and coaches supports students’ long-run academic success. Economics of Education Review, 95, 102414.
Markus, H., and Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954-969.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
