Mental toughness is a phrase bandied about rather liberally. I have had many athletes come to me with a reputation of poor mental concentration.
In almost every case I found it was not a mental problem, but a practice problem. If you are not logging your hours on the court, you will not be performing at the level you are capable of. If you are receiving poor coaching and practice poor footwork, you will also suffer. At crunch time, the automatic response the athlete needs demands rehearsal. Therefore it is not a mental thing, it is a practice thing.
Take a lesson from police or military training. Those folks practice maneuvers over and over so when it happens there is no thinking about it, but an immediate response without thinking. It is automatic.
I recently saw a lower ranked pro post that nobody should ever praise a player because all of the pros work hard on their game. Really? I do know that the pros work in varying degrees on their games but not everyone works real hard.
If you are not winning, you are not executing. If you are not executing you are not practicing correctly or enough!
So when athletes come to me with a request to help them improve, I want to make sure it is not a practice issue!
Rehearse to go from worst to first!