There’s a scene in the 1993 movie “Rookie of the Year” where veteran Chicago Cubs pitcher Chet Steadman explains to a young Henry Rowengartner the difference between pitching with the mindset of winning and pitching out of the fear of losing.

In a confusing, jumbled up speech with good intention, Steadman tells Rowengartner that he needs to pitch from his “have-to.” The gist of the advice is that if he throws with the confidence that he’ll be successful, he’ll be better off and win more games. It was purely mental advice.

Indiana volleyball doesn’t have its own version of Chet Steadman or Henry Rowengartner, but head coach Sherry Dunbar-Kruzan does want her team to follow the intention of Steadman’s advice. If the athletes play with the belief that they’ll win each game, Dunbar Kruzan insists they’ll be more successful in 2016.

“We’re going to have a more definitive confidence this year,” senior outside hitter Allison Hammond said. “Like, ‘We’re going to win this, and this is how we’re going to do it.’”

That plan gets set into motion at 7 p.m. Friday against Northern Kentucky and continues into Saturday’s double-header against Evansville (noon) and Marshall (7 p.m.). All three matches will take place at the University Gym in Bloomington.

“I think so many people think they just get to win because they’ve always won,” Dunbar-Kruzan said. “They’ve always done all this stuff. You don’t just get to do that. You have to earn it. You have to have a plan in place and you have to talk about it all the time.”

The Big Ten’s coaches ranked Indiana No. 13 out of 14 conference teams in the annual preseason poll. Defending champion Nebraska was tabbed to win the conference, and only Rutgers was predicted to be worse than IU this season.

Indiana lost a talented group of seniors to graduation over the offseason but brought in a top-30 recruiting class to compensate. The Hoosiers finished 16-16 overall last season, 6-14 in the Big Ten, which put them in a tie for 10th place in the standings with Northwestern.

Despite the lack of confidence from peer coaches, Dunbar-Kruzan said it’s important for her players not to fall victim to it.

“Any time there is a doubt, you have to change that doubt,” Dunbar-Kruzan said. “You have to make the decision that you are going to do this. I think our thing has been ‘I think we can win,’ but then you are leaving that doubt there. So we are trying to get them to just lock into ‘We are going to do this. My attitude is going to be this. This is the choice that I am going to make.’”

Generally speaking, Dunbar-Kruzan estimates that going .500 in the Big Ten with a strong non-conference will assure a spot in the NCAA Tournament. With that in mind, her staff spent months building a 2016 schedule full of a few games IU should win handily, a few that would be considered upsets and even more in between the two extremes before the conference season starts up in November.

The pressure to compiles wins early on before the brutality of the Big Ten schedule adds even more pressure to win the non-conference games ahead. With a change in mentality and self-belief, Dunbar-Kruzan hopes to get the Hoosiers back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010.

“We’ve always worked hard, but we need to change our mindset this year right away,” Hammond said. “If we do, we’ll get more and more confident as we go and hopefully the wins will come from that.”