Every coach says it at some point and every player is groomed to say it.

The most commonly used phrase in all of sport, “We’ll just take it one game at a time.”

But how, through the course of a season, does a team not get caught up in an impressive victory or a confidence deteriorating loss, and not take it, “one game at a time?”

When the football team loses two straight games in which they had leads stretching into the fourth quarter, it would seemingly be difficult to just forget about that and move on.

But that is exactly what they must do because if they dwell on the past and mistakes that may have been made, they will get caught up in some of the negativity instead of focusing on improving for the future.

Women’s soccer this weekend tried to forget about a 3-1 loss immediately after the game ended.

Their head coach, Steve Ballard, asked them to brush their hands off and with it the memory of the loss.

Instead of dwelling on a 3-1 loss, Ballard hoped his team would take the lessons they needed from that game but not focus on the fact that they didn’t execute in the way they should have.

“We can’t just hold onto a loss like this,” senior forward Audra Frericks said. “If you hold onto this loss things would just go downhill from there.”

“We can learn from the loss but then we have to let it go and come back more ready to play for the next game.”

The psyche of an athlete cannot be too tender regarding certain aspects of one game in particular. They have to move on quickly, take a lesson learned, but not dwell on the negatives.

In a season that can turn around quickly, the athlete doesn’t have time to over think anything. Instead they have to rely on their instincts and make sure that trust themselves so that they can play in a free and easy manner.

That is when many of the coaches can truly tell what type of player and what kind of team they are dealing with.

For the football team and the women’s soccer team, many tests in their season still lay ahead.

Even though both of these teams lost this weekend’s game, they know that a week filled with practice and time for improvement is what will transform that loss into positive preparation for the next game.

One step at a time or one game at a time may just be overused cliches, but at the same time they are the truth for many teams.