Bang For The Buck Part 3

Plus Webinar Link For Tonight

Winter is here. That means club volleyball season is 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.

Winter Wrap-Up

If you’re not a club coach, don’t worry! Although this article series is tailored for club coaches, the topics apply more broadly, to coaches at any level. I think you’ll still find some insights in here.

Webinar Info: My January webinar is TONIGHT at 8pm New York Time. The topic is “First Tournament Prep.” For many coaches, the MLK Weekend is either the first tournament or first major tournament. I’ll talk strategies you can use to prepare for, and succeed within, your first big tournament of the club season. This webinar is only for Premium Subscribers, so make the jump today! The link to the webinar is at the bottom of this article, below the paywall.

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The primary challenge of club volleyball is that you don’t get enough practice time. Professional teams get too much practice time; you have to consciously limit reps to not wear down your players. University/school teams get plenty of practice time in a day, but not enough days before the season starts. But juniors club volleyball is a unique challenge in that the season is plenty long enough, but a given practice is often painfully short for what you want to get done. Therefore, we’re highly interested in maximizing the efficiency of a given practice.

In November, the Don’t Plan To Fail article series focused on practice planning, starting with a macro-level season plan and working down to an individual practice template. This article series will focus on practice execution- how to take a given practice template and get the most out of it. In order to do that, we need to:

1. Maximize Reps

2. Maximize Feedback

3. Maximize Engagement

I’ll add the links to additional articles in this series as I publish them:

Part 1 - Maximizing Reps
Part 2 - Maximizing Feedback

Maximizing Engagement

You’ve got the geometry of your drills set up, so the Volleymath is working in your favor to maximize reps. You planned out where you’re giving feedback and who is coaching what in which drill. Your feedback is maximized and optimize. Now here’s the bad news: none of that matters unless your players are engaged in the process.

But the good news: players usually do care, as long as you don’t screw it up. So I’m going to use the Inversion strategy from one of my favorite books and consider the things we can do to screw it up and cause un-engagement. If we could just avoid that stuff, our players will usually rise to the challenge of what we’re trying to teach them.

And, in the spirit of the wonderful Volleyball Coach’s Book of Lists, I’m titling this list: “10 Things Coaches Can Do To Kill Athlete Engagement.”

(1) Talk Too Much
If you’re using 2-20-120, you’re cutting down on explanation time already. Your kids are generally pretty pent up after a day in school, doing homework, in the car, etc. It’s important to explain things and make sure everybody knows what they are doing. So don’t mistake this advice for just rolling the ball out and playing. But overtalking disengages athletes because they get bored. Weirdly, if you tell athletes 1 thing, they remember 1 thing. And as athletes get more advanced, if you tell them 2-3 things, they remember 2-3 things. But if you tell them 4 or 5 things, now they remember nothing. Know the learning capacity of your athletes and go up to the edge, but not over.

(2) Use Unfamiliar Drills
Athletes are either learning the drill or they’re learning the skill. It doesn’t matter how much you want them to focus on their attack footwork; if they are worried about where to go and how to rotate in and out of a drill and how the drill is scored… they are going to disengage from learning.

(3) Neglect The Context
A while ago I did a webinar with DBK and she mentioned that she liked to get systems in place early and get her team able to play 6v6 quickly in the pre-season. I used to be a fan of a longer, drawn-out “camp” where I hit all the big fundamental skills keys before we got to playing 6v6. I found that some athletes disengaged and I would have to reteach some of those keys, because they didn’t understand how those mechanics fit into the team systems.

(4) Don’t Challenge Your Athletes
When athletes aren’t challenged, they disengage. Sometimes players appear to have “poor fundamentals” in practice, but in reality, they just don’t care about the drill you’re doing.

(5) Crush Your Athletes
On the flip side, every athlete has a breaking point where they would rather give up than continue to fail. Some athletes have a huge “learning window.” They will take even drills that are “too easy” and stay engaged and try to be perfect. And they will fail again and again in a difficult task and keep on coming. Most of your athletes… aren’t that. So you have to challenge them, but they also have to have a positive expectation that they can eventually succeed in what you’re asking them to do.

(6) Be Phony
As the great Marv Dunphy would say, “you can fool a fool, you can con a con, but you can’t kid a kid.” Kids know when they aren’t succeeding and pumping them up with false confidence will make them disengage because you don’t seem genuine.

(7) Disconnect Process From Outcome
In my Reason Your Brains Out episode with Jamie Morrison, I said something like, “coaches should focus less on process and more on outcome.” I said it like that to be a little provocative, but I think a lot of coaches who are into trying to Coach The Right Way have this strawman they like to attack of a stereotypical coach who only cares about results and rants and raves and says they don’t care about how the results get done just get me results! But in reality, I find that coach exists way less than the coach who seems to care more about players using “correct technique” than the result that said technique is producing for players.

I do think it’s acceptable, at times, for players to take a short-term setback in results if they are making a significant change. For example, significantly changing the tempo of your offense or switching from a standing serve to a jump float will cause major short-term inconsistency as players adapt to the new technique. But be real about that with a player. Don’t say, “hey, that was great!” when a player shanks the ball just because they did the technique you’re asking them to do. You’re going to lose credibility. Just give them a couple claps and a, “okay, okay keep working at it.” Or even better: say nothing.

(8) Major In The Minor
This goes along with Fake Fundamentals. But a lot of coaches love to get fixated on the small details that don’t drive performance. The ratio of “times I get asked about split stepping” to “coaches that have told me that training a split step was an important factor in their successful season” is like 100 to 0.

Now here’s the problem, your players often WILL engage on minor details. Because guess what, focusing on some new minor detail is mentally easier than doing the hard slog of making incremental improvements on the things you already know are important. It’s hard for players to accept that the path to improvement is Simple But Difficult. So if you Major In The Minor stuff as a coach, you will drive engagement but it will be unproductive engagement.

(9) Give Your Athletes Lots Of Busywork
This is related to (8). How many drills are you doing? Why are you doing each of them? There’s only so much cognitive capacity your athletes have. By doing a bunch of different drills, all with different goals, your athletes may engage, but their engagement is unlikely to be maximized, because you give them more opportunities to fixate on less important things. “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”

(10) Be The Only Voice In The Gym
This is an area I can struggle with. I have a strong personality as a coach and I can push players along the path pretty well. However, at a certain point, you put a cap on your team’s development. You can’t go from 0% athlete voice in the gym (which is where many of you will start on Day 1) to 100% overnight, and trying to do so can also shut athletes down. But something I consciously write into my plans now are the things I want my athletes to recognize and say to each other. Positive peer pressure is one of the best ways to maximize engagement.

So there you go; 10 ways to dis-engage your players. Just… do the opposite. (Webinar link below)