Tonight, we skate with ’em. Tonight, we stay with ’em. And we shut them down, because we can!

– Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks, “Miracle”

OK, first things first: Dr. Todd Kays isn’t Herb Brooks. In fact, there’s a bunch of people he isn’t.

“One thing I frequently state is this is not magic and I am not Harry Potter,” he says.

So, no Herb Brooks, no Harry Potter, but this, maybe: When Brooks got up in front of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team before it beat the Russians, there was some magic involved. All that positive visualization, all that “their time is done, this is your time” business … well, that was Brooks channeling Kays without even knowing it, perhaps, the way a lot of coaches and athletes channel him without even knowing it.

Kays’ job is to get them to know it. And then stick it in front of an amplifier.

It’s what the Ohio State sports psychologist has been doing for coaches and athletes all over the country for roughly 17 years, and what he’ll be doing again today in a seminar at Concordia High School on building mental toughness. The seminar is sponsored by the Concordia baseball team, and anyone who wants to show up can.

And, yes, a lot of what Kays says will sound at least vaguely familiar.

“There are some strategies coaches have used, as well as student athletes, in a very raw form,” Kays says. “What I’m going to do Saturday is help them certainly learn new approaches but also define and connect and make more efficient and effective the current knowledge and strategy base.

“For instance, coaches will tell their athletes all the time ‘Just relax, you can do this.’ Athletes will tell themselves, ‘I know I can do this.’ But how many times have they not done this?

“That’s where I step in and give them some tools they can practice over days and weeks and months that will be realized in performance, so that they will not be negatively affected by pressure. That is part of my mission.”

And if it’s not a particularly new idea – the entire culture of the locker-room speech is in some sense based on all this – it’s one Kays crystallizes more effectively than most. That’s why his clients have included Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel, pro golfers and, yes, Olympic hockey players. And it’s why he’s the go-to guy for the national media on the topic of mental toughness on the playing field.

Heady stuff for a man whose grandfather played professional baseball and who was only looking for a way to combine his twin passions of sports and psychology when he discovered there was, in fact, a significant connection.

“I think in the broadest sense what the (seminar) participants are going to get is that the mind is a muscle, and it works like every other muscle,” he says. “And you can train your mind to work in its most effective way through working that muscle.”

And if some athletes are more receptive to that than others, it’s not a definitive trend. Nor is it unlike any other athletic impulse: The athletes and coaches who are more motivated generally tend to be more motivated about this.

“I think one major difference is how important achievement of a certain goal in sports dictates … the level of willingness to train that muscle in between their ears,” Kays says.

Think Herb Brooks wouldn’t have gotten that?