Former Coupeville Coach Launches The Elite Competitor, Helping Keep Girls in Sports

Breanne Smedley transitioned from coaching Coupeville High School volleyball in the 2014 and 2015 seasons to co-founding The Elite Competitor in 2018, a mental-performance business that has since had its athlete program used by more than 6,000 families. The program offers training for athletes, parents and coaches and explicitly targets young female athletes, a group Smedley says she is working to keep in sport.

Smedley frames the need with a statistic: “Girls are quitting sports at two times the rate of boys by the age of 14, is what the stats tell us,” she said. “And for reasons that are preventable, too.” That diagnosis shapes The Elite Competitor’s curriculum and outreach, according to the Whidbey News-Times material reporting on the business.

The Elite Competitor’s services include an athlete program and a more recently launched coaching program, with the coaching program, launched a year ago, used by about 500 coaches. The organization emphasizes practical, teachable techniques. One of Smedley’s more popular mental performance tools is called a “snapback routine,” which uses a reset word and breathing to help athletes refrain from fixating on mistakes, a technique the business applies across youth and high-school coaching contexts.

Smedley traces her own interest in sports psychology to her playing days under a coach surnamed Williams, whom she described as coaching “holistically.” Reflecting on her early coaching, Smedley said, “I realized, ‘Okay, none of these girls have these skills, either,’” and “They’re struggling with the same thing. So I gotta figure out how I can teach this to them, too.” Her tenure at Coupeville High School preceded The Elite Competitor, so Smedley did not have a chance to teach her mental performance tools to Coupeville athletes while she was the school’s coach.

Regional ties remain visible in recent materials: a photo included with reporting identifies Smedley, second from right, as having helped the Columbia River Rapids win their fourth-straight state title in 2024. The combination of local coaching experience, a statewide championship photo, and the organization’s stated reach — more than 6,000 families served and about 500 coaches using the new coaching program — underpins Smedley’s argument that targeted mental-performance training can be scaled to address why girls drop out of sports.

As The Elite Competitor continues to work with families, parents and coaches, its growth metrics provide a concrete measure of demand: thousands of families engaged since 2018 and a coaching program scaled to hundreds of coaches in a short period, a development Smedley presents as part of a broader effort to reduce preventable reasons girls quit athletics.