Advice From Club Volleydads - Part 1
We Have To Talk Out There!
It’s almost winter. That means club volleyball season is almost here for juniors volleyball coaches in the USA. Therefore, much of my content is tailored for club coaches. In the past, these have been some of my most popular posts. Check out this summary post which has links to last year’s Club Winter posts.
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They say there’s a kernel of truth in every good joke. I think that’s probably true. I also believe that there’s a kernel of truth in every helpful piece of advice that is screamed from the sidelines politely offered by the parents of your club volleyball players. I’ve got a few articles planned for this series, but let’s start with the #1 piece of helpful advice that you’re sure to hear at a club volleyball match.
We’ve Got To Talk Out There!
Oh yes. Club parents want to hear some talk out there. But let’s not put this all on the parents. In fact, this might the most common thing that you’ll hear coaches say at the club level as well, although Move Your Feet and Get Your Elbow Up are strong contenders for the title. Parents and coaches are united that players need to talk. So what exactly, do we need to talk about?
Most commonly, We Need To Talk is an indication that we just let a ball drop on defense. There might be other miscommunications such as two players going for the ball at the same time, or confusion on who is going to block an overpass. Less commonly, you might see a miscue on a set leading to exhortations to talk. But the most common play that will elicit the need to talk is when a ball drops in serve receive or defense.
I’ll circle back to this, but let me set the table a little more first.
Our Earliest Experiences
I believe that coaches are shaped by their earliest experiences. I’ll be forever grateful that I started my coaching journey as just a club coach from Delaware. There’s things that you learn in that environment that you can’t learn just jumping right into high-level play. Likewise, parents who are coaching their kids1 are shaped by their early experiences with their kids learning things. And when kids are young, they do need to learn how to talk. To literally use your words when you want something instead of just snatching it or to tell me what’s wrong when they are upset.
And the pace of most activities in life are a lot slower than a volleyball match, especially a volleyball match that is being attempted to be played with any sort of skill and power. In many aspects of life, you do have time to talk about something as you are doing it.
A Sense That…
Humans are social creatures. Even young children are pretty adept at sensing stress or relaxation in others. Most adults (and even children of a certain age) can watch two people conversing from a distance and get a sense of the relationship between those people, even without hearing the words. We can generally catch a vibe of teamwork and cohesion and we can generally catch a vibe of disorder and confusion.
This is where the club parents often have it right, and club coaches, while they don’t need to listen to the specific and often unhelpful advice their parents shout, should take this as a red flag. In general, I find most club coaches way too antagonistic to the parents of their players and treat them as nuisances to be dealt with at best and idiots at worst. My guy, if even people who don’t know volleyball can sense something is off on your court, you might want to address it!
Okay So… Should We Talk About There?
As I said, humans are intuitively very good at catching the vibe and feeling when something is going well or when something is off. However, we are not intuitively so good at choosing between different solutions and devising systems to improve performance in a physical contest with artificially-constructed rules. That takes training. And here’s what your parents, and most coaches, get wrong:
It is about the communication.
It’s not about talking.
They say that 2/3 of communication is nonverbal. Or maybe more. Well, that’s pretty convenient when you’re selling books about body language but it feels like it might be true to me. So let’s go with it. If we accept that it’s true that 2/3 of communication is nonverbal than by saying, We Have To Talk, we are also saying, “focus on the slowest and least powerful method of communicating! And also ignore the critical information that helps us decide what to communicate to our teammates!”
I don’t think your club volleydads mean to say that. Or most coaches. But they are, by accident.
One of the most important aspects of a training program, in any area of life, is that it helps you focus on what is important. Another important aspect, maybe even a more important aspect, is that it helps you NOT focus on what is NOT important. This is essentially Taleb’s Silver Rule translated into coaching form. By making your players more aware of talking, you are making them less aware of (a) context and (b) nonverbal communication. There’s also a third item that we’ll get to at the end.
Context
A lot of We Need To Talk situations are not genuine grey area situations where the play might have been coherently made 2 different ways the 2 players just weren’t on the same page. A lot of We Need To Talk are plays where a player was just out in left field. The setter was clearly not going to get that ball, they didn’t call help, but they shouldn’t have needed to, because somebody should have noticed the ball was nowhere near the setter.
Good teams do not approach plays as blank slates where every action must be communicated though. And even in the grey zones, where the play could go either way, they don’t do this! Multiple players read the play and make a decision while communicating through it. Well-trained teams tend to see the same things and make the same decisions, so they appear to be on the same team, but it’s important to note that good teams see the play and Make A Decision and they also tend to Start With It Stay With It. Good teams have plenty of conflict, they just handle it better.
The above play is something I show at most clinics that I do. It’s the winning point from the funky 2020 National Championship. In this case, the Kentucky lib reads the play and (correctly) decides she should step in and set this ball. She does this IN SPITE OF the fact that her setter teammates is clearly going for the ball AND her setter teammate is clearly some variation of, “mine!”
This is what good teams do!
And as a coach, you should understand that TALKING has nothing to do with this play. Ideally, the setter and lib wouldn’t run into each other. That’s not the point of this clip. The point this clip illustrates is that the CONTEXT of the play is the most important thing here. You can (and should) discuss plays like this in a video review session, or during training, etc. There should be a communication loop and time in training or video review for players to look at each other and say things like, “hey next time I’ll let you take that ball,” or, “hey should I get that one instead?”
Non Verbal + Context
Here’s a very common situation with younger volleyball players:
Ball gets served between Player A and B, but closer to Player A. Player A should probably take it.
Player A doesn’t react very quickly. Player B senses Player A’s hesitation (because nonverbal communication is more powerful and happens faster) and starts to move for the ball.
Player A’s motor kicks into gear 0.2 seconds after Player B starts moving for the ball and Player A starts to make a move for the ball.
Player B now senses Player A going for the ball and starts to pull away. But as she starts to pull away, Player A (who is operating a step slower than Player B) is now registering that Player B was moving and she starts to pull away as well.
The ball drops.
Coaches and parents, in unison: “WE HAVE TO TALK OUT THERE!”
But none of that play had anything to do with talking. The whole problem was caused by:
Player A reading the play slowly.
A time differential gap between how quickly Player A and Player B react to the play.
Correct reading of each other’s nonverbal cues but incorrect decisions based off those reads because concepts like Start With It, Stay With It or Better Two Than None haven’t been absorbed by these players.
The strongest communication is nonverbal. If setters want a teammate to go for the ball, yelling “help!” (or even better, a name) is fine. But the best communication? Just don’t go for the ball. How many times have you seen young players yelling “help!” while also moving toward the ball. I see it all the time. Talk about conflicting messages! You also see players calling “mine” while not making very strong moves to the ball.
Which leads us to…
Whose Talk Matters?
Embedded in the idea of We Have To Talk is the idea that players will listen to each and make the correct decisions based off that talk. Guess what? That doesn’t really happen, at least not to the extent it’s hoped-for by We Have To Talk-ers. Here’s my proof. Have you ever seen 2 players both call for the ball and collide for it?
Yes, yes you have.
Why does that happen? Because there wasn’t a hierarchy of decision making. In this case, both players were equally empowered to call for the ball (because, We Have To Talk) and both players calls were equally valid. But because they were equal, they were both irrelevant. Weirdly, We Have To Talk teams actually work better when you have a couple more aggressive players (who will do the talking) and a few more passive players (who do the listening). But in theory, we’d like a team full of aggressive players.
There’s a variety of ways to organize your communication into talkers and listeners. I discuss a system I like for reception in a previous webinar. I have ways I organize for offense, defense, etc. But if you just think about that concept, you can start making some decisions. Does the setter or the hitters get to call the play? Who gets to decide on audibles? Who has priority on a freeball or a short serve? How do you decide this? There are better or worse ways to organize, but just recognizing the concept that there needs to be priority or hierarchy in your communication channels will put you ahead of 80% of coaches. You’ll be Talking, but more importantly, you’ll be Seeing, Reacting, and Making Decisions.
And I don’t say this disparagingly. Parents have to “coach” their kids on everything as they grow up, from using the toilet to cutting their food to forming good study habits. Eventually The Coach will have to become an outsider, but I don’t think that’s it’s inappropriate for parents of a beginning player to give her advice… ideally not in the middle of a game and ideally starting from a place of, “well what was coach talking to you about at practice?”
That clip of Kentucky is the gift that keeps on giving. I probably use it 10+ times a year.
If I had a dime for every time I've heard "we need to talk!".....Thanks for this. Really good.