An Origin Story

How far is Rio from Delaware exactly?

I get asked about how I ended up coaching where I’ve coached. Well, I got asked that a lot when I was on staff with the 2016 Olympic Team. Now that I’m a roving homeless (excuse me… “nomadic”) volleyball coach, people don’t care quite as much. But I have had the good fortune to work with some of the best players and teams in the world. Volleyball has been a vehicle for me to explore the world, learn from some amazing people, and even meet my wife. I like the idea of coaching journeys. Everybody’s on a different path and we’re all on different points along that path.

You might get some insight from my journey. If not, don’t worry, I’ll be back to the numbers next week.

Before My Journey

I mentioned this in last week’s post, but my parents have been volleyball coaches for almost 30 years now. So my origin story starts with them. Or maybe even before then. My mom’s father was a pretty amazing guy and quite a coach himself. I don’t know if he ever saw a volleyball game in his life, but he was a Korean War vet and one of the most successful youth football and baseball coaches in Philadelphia. If you think today’s social divides are challenging, imagine coaching football in 1970 in a mixed-race city like Philly. My mom grew up as his scorekeeper and statistician. That was pre-computer, much less DataVolley, so she had it way tougher than me!

Here’s my favorite story about my Pop-Pop. He used to watch every game the Philadelphia Phillies played and keep their statistics in a scorebook. One time a player struck out and the announcer said, “and with that strike out, his batting average drops below 0.300 for the year.” My Pop-Pop wrinkled his brow and said, “no… I still have him just above 0.300.” My mom, being a teenager was quick to say, “Dad, I think the announcers on TV know what they are talking about.” The next inning the announcers said they made a rounding error and that the player was still over 0.300.

The lesson, that I had to re-learn when I met Carl McGown: do not challenge cranky old guys when they talk about statistics.

Getting Started

When I was very young, I think my parents coached every sport but volleyball. My older brother and sister played baseball, softball, basketball, football, ran track, etc. My sister played club volleyball in the 6th-grade in Southern California, but when we moved back to the East Coast, to Delaware, club volleyball was basically unheard of in the area. With no knowledge of the game, but a few 13 and 14 year-olds who wanted to play, my parents bought a John Dunning coaching video on VHS, ordered some uniforms, and tried to figure out how to put a volleyball team together.

Like any youngest sibling, I was dragged along to every practice or game my older siblings played. To my dad’s dismay, I didn’t seem to offer the athletic potential as a sprinter that my dad was coaching my older brother to be. (That year, my parents made a special “Ironman” trophy for me, because I competed in every event for our track club. The fact that I didn’t medal in any of them was conveniently overlooked…) Fortunately, I showed promise in something else: operating the Palm Pilot based statkeeping program for their new volleyball club. Yes, Palm Pilots were a thing for a while.

Getting Hooked

Despite starting with more math ability than hand-eye coordination, I grew into myself a little bit. My parents encouraged me to play lots of sports growing up. I played football (not particularly well), basketball (a bit better), and messed around in the volleyball gym with my older sister and her friends. But growing up in Delaware, without much of a boys’ volleyball presence, I always saw volleyball as a, “girl’s game.” Their club had recently started a boys’ team and, due to some injuries, they were down to just 6 players. My parents made me join the team, because they didn’t want to risk a forfeit if somebody else went out!

But, like many people that start playing, all it took was a few plays to get hooked on the sport. I think I managed to block a ball completely by accident, but hey, it still feels just as good!

First Coaching Experience

Most coaches start as players and transition to coaching. I started off on the bench as a stat keeper and ball shagger for the girls’ teams. Once I started playing competitively, I could start helping out at practice as a practice player, or helper for the younger teams. My first real coaching job came when I was 15 years old. My mom had a promising player on her team who was just a couple years younger than me, but didn’t know how to take the correct approach footwork. “Can you come to practice and walk her through some stuff during the drills?” Of course I could. But now I just needed to actually think how I took my own approach footwork!

Coaching helped my playing a lot. One of the most valuable things that young players can do is coach players who are even younger and less-experienced than themselves. You have to be conscious to demonstrate technique correctly, and you’ll get asked questions that you never considered yourself. Some programs set things up where more experienced players are paired up with younger players to help teach them. This benefits both players. I can’t recommend it enough!

Fast-Forward

My high school playing career eventually led to playing at the collegiate level. I was shocked to find out that Penn State was more interested in some dude named Matt Anderson than me to be their next outside hitter. I guess it worked out okay for them. It turned out that Stevens Institute of Technology was a better match for both my unimpressive height and math-oriented mind. During that time I was coaching more and more. I helped out at the club when I was home on break, I worked camps during the summer, and I started running my own training group on weekends.

I still didn’t think that coaching was a profession. I always viewed it as something you did in your spare time, or something I’d be able to dedicate myself more to when I retired. For most of my high school and college life, my plan was to get on a PhD track in applied math and work in quantitative analysis on Wall Street. Once I made my millions, then I could retire and live the dream as a full-time volleyball coach.

2009

I finished my playing career in the spring of 2009. I was looking at a full slate of grad classes in the fall, but enjoying running summer volleyball camps a whole lot more. In the fall I decided not to stay on campus and stack all my classes into two days of the week so I could live in Delaware, coach club volleyball and drive to the NYC area twice a week to keep up with my classes.

The US economy, and especially the financial sector, was melting down. I became less enthusiastic at working for one of the institutions that seemed to be doing a lot more harm than good than the world around me. Plus I still didn’t know how to tie a tie without watching a Youtube video first.

This was also when I first read 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. The book seems so outdated now (“You can work remotely? Whaaaat??”) but one of the core messages really stuck with me. Ferriss talks about the scene from the original movie Wall Street where the character played by a young Charlie Sheen is asked what he’ll do when he makes his millions. “Get a motorcycle and ride across China,” is the whimsical reply. Well Ferriss points out that you don’t need millions to ride a motorcycle across China. In fact, it might cost less than living a typical suburban lifestyle in the United States.

Well, at that point in my life I had no interest in riding a motorcycle across China, but I was really interested in coaching volleyball. I sat down and tried to answer the question, “How much money do I need to support myself while I coach volleyball full-time?” It turns out, when you’re a single 22 year-old guy, the answer is: not much.

So, I dropped out of grad school and became a full-time, self-employed volleyball coach. I ran camps and clinics, did personal lessons, coached club volleyball, and reffed in my spare time.

Living The Life

I never regretted not pursuing a more traditional career. While my friends were grinding their way in entry-level corporate jobs, I was doing what I loved every day. People were also puzzled that I wasn’t pursuing a college coaching job, but, in those early days, I looked at it as a downgrade. I was running practices for 8 different teams during the week in club seasons, coaching middle school girls in the fall, high school boys in the spring, running my own camps in the summer, playing on the weekends, and traveling to work other camps and learn from other coaches.

The number of athletes I got to work with in my first few years out of college were probably 10x the number of athletes that I would have if I went into college coaching. Completely by accident, I created my own version of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. I stumbled into a scenario where the sheer amount of coaching I was doing was much more than I would have been doing in a more traditional coaching path.

The ultimate example of this were the hitting seminars I developed. While I was still in college, I started running a hitting camp every Sunday in the summer in a small, 1-court, middle school gym. Demand increased and the next year I added a second session. By my third summer out of college I had expanded to five 90-minute sessions, back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back every Sunday. I was teaching the same keys, running the same drills to 5 groups of kids in a row. And within those sessions, I broke the kids into 4 groups and rotated them through 4 different circuits. So effectively I would teach the same key to 20 different groups. Just as players get better with practice, so do coaches. By accident, I designed a program that allowed me an incredible amount of deliberate practice.

“Make Your Own Damn Chart.”

During this time, I met Carl McGown. Our first encounter was via email. I read an article that Carl wrote about playing defense. He presented a statistical chart of defensive plays that seemed not to mesh with what I thought was true. In true 22 year-old fashion, I thought this coach who had won multiple National Championships and been to multiple Olympic Games must be wrong. So, I wrote him and told him so. He responded to me, “If you don’t think my chart is right, make your own damn chart.”

Unlike some other people, I set out to do the work to prove him wrong. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I recorded some college matches on my DVR and sat down to watch them. Well, after about 2 matches, it started to become obvious that Carl was right and I was off-base. I wrote him back an email telling him that too. His response, “Come out to a Gold Medal Squared clinic and I’ll tell you all the other things you’re wrong about.”

Classic Carl.

December 2010 was the first time I attended a Gold Medal Squared clinic and it was a life-altering experience. It wasn’t just the specific material presented, it was that, for the first time in my life, I met somebody who was not only thinking about the game as deeply as I was (which was hard to find in my small juniors volleyball bubble), but had been doing so for decades. It was then that I realized, as you might say, that, “there’s levels to this shit.”

I was the annoying guy at that first clinic, and every other one I could find over the next couple years. I sat in the front, asked tons of questions, and pestered Carl with emails. He was incredibly gracious with his time, but I think eventually he got sick of me and started pawning me off on other people. “You know what Joe, that would be a great question to ask Rob Browning,” became a common response.

Carl also showed me that I needed to spend time in other gyms. In 2011, I flew out to Washington, found students who rented me their couch on Craigslist, and watched their spring practice for a couple weeks. I took the Greyhound bus down to LA and made it out to Malibu to watch Pepperdine’s practice. (Little did I know that 4 years later, that freshman class would be seniors and I’d be their assistant coach.) I soaked up everything I could and took it back to my area. Still, no plans to do anything other than run my programs and be the best coach I could for the players in my area.

In 2012, Carl told me that I should get out to watch the USA Women’s National team as they prepared for the London Olympics. Hugh McCutcheon won a Gold Medal as coach of the Men’s team in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and was trying to do the same thing with the women in 2012. Using my framework of, “Okay, so how much would this actually cost?” I tried to design the ultimate coaching clinic for myself. When you factor in transportation, housing, and admission ticket, it cost me over $1000 to attend the 2011 AVCA Convention, the most popular coaching clinic in the country.

Again, Craigslist was my friend. I found a room to rent in Anaheim for just $100 per week. It was less than 3 miles from the ASC, where the National Team trained, so I could walk to and from the gym. And I had made enough contacts in the club volleyball world to find some camps to work in the evenings to offset some of the cost. It turned out, for that $1000 price tag, I could go to Anaheim for almost 3 months. I made plans to leave my club team with my assistant coach as soon as we qualified for Nationals, travel to California, learn everything I could, and rejoin the team in Dallas for Nationals.

Before leaving, I sent Hugh an email that thanked him for the opportunity to come watch practice and that, just say the word and they would never know I’m there. I’d watch off to the side and learn on my own. But I also said that, if they needed anybody to help shag balls or set up the nets, I’d be happy to help. And I set off for California

It turned out that the, “room,” I rented was a curtained-off section of somebody’s living room with an air mattress. It also turned out that I wasn’t actually getting some special opportunity to watch practice; National Team practices were generally open to the public. The ASC was a public facility, there were little kids playing indoor soccer about 3 courts over from the best volleyball players in the world. Something that, coming from Delaware, blew my mind.

But it also turned out (as I would later learn first-hand), that running training for the National Team is a lot of work. And Hugh passed me along to the junior assistant on the staff, Jamie Morrison. After a few days finding out that I wasn’t a weirdo, he told me to show up early to the gym and help him get the courts set up. So, I started doing that. Helping set up led to helping shag balls, which led to flipping the score on drills that needed that, which led to writing those scores on the whiteboard. The National Team whiteboard had my writing on it!

During this time, I learned about a program called DataVolley. I had used some stat apps in my time as a club coach, but mostly I was using pencil and paper. There was no Hudl in these days, so all my video notes involved loading the video up on Youtube and sending my players texts like, “Hey at 8:37 look at your transition footwork.” Suffice to say that DataVolley was very interesting to me. Those were also the days where somebody could load the program on your computer, insert the security key, take it out, and the program would keep running until you closed it out or your computer turned off. (Security has improved since then!) So Jamie, despite being incredibly busy, was gracious enough to give me a few pointers and a link to an online manual, written in Italian, for the program. That was all I needed.

I helped out in the gym all morning, hung around the USA offices all afternoon being my best combination of helpful and invisible, and then went home in the evenings and practiced the DataVolley program all night. When the team traveled to Brazil for World Grand Prix (now called VNL), there was a group of players that stayed home to train. The staff wanted somebody who could DataVolley the practices and help the coach who was going to run training. I volunteered and began my first officially-unofficial role with the USA National Team.

(The fact that I had only just heard of DataVolley and needed to immediately run upstairs after practice, download the video, and fix all my code in the hour while everybody was eating lunch was a detail I didn’t feel that I needed to share with anybody else at that time.)

The next year would be a whirlwind. I met Tom Black during this substitute-teacher training block, moved to California for the fall (again, Craigslist came in handy) to be his volunteer assistant, and would end up being hired in the summer of 2013 full-time with the National Team. But this story is already long enough and those details will have to wait for another time.