CYBO Extra Part 1

Specifying Non-Specifying Information

Considering we’ve spent a bunch of time this past month discussing Rob Gray’s book How We Learn To Move, the recent episodes of Coach Your Brains Out have been conveniently timed. In Part 2 of their interview, they even included a couple questions from me. Awesome! I highly recommend listening to the full 2-part episode, but here’s: my question, Rob’s response, and my takeaways from his response.

My Question

Volleyball serve reception is the skill most similar to hitting a baseball; it’s really vision-reliant. Small changes in the initial conditions of the contact, like force/angle/spin can really change the depth of the serve by several feet. The challenge for passers is depth perception. Reading the left/right is a little easier than reading the depth. Rather than asking you how to improve the vision, which is a question you get all the time, I’d like to approach it from the other way around. What sort of coaching cues can screw up the vision of passers? Either long-term (what can I do consistently in my training that will mess passers up over time) or in the short-term, is there cueing that is worse for passers?

Rob’s Response

That’s a really good question (Joe: “Yay”), I think this is really where it gets inside the non-specifying/specifying information. What can mess up someone is either through a practice design, the conditions you’re practicing under, and/or the coaching cues, is learning to perceive the ball flight through some simple information. For example, the height of the ball. “If the ball is this high above the net, the ball will always go short of me. If the ball is that high above the net it’s always gonna go long.”

That’s kind of like the example I gave earlier of the kid crossing the street. (Joe: Earlier in the podcast, Rob gives the example of a kid who has only crossed a neighborhood street misjudging crossing a busy highway because she isn’t judging how fast the cars go on this different street.) They are just judging by the distance.

As soon as people can start mixing up serves, putting spin on them, whatever else, ya know, that cue is not gonna work anymore. It’s not gonna be effective. So it’s very easy, ya know, the baseball analogy is the pitching machine that always throws the same speed. You can learn to hit using cues that are not gonna work once things start to vary.

So I think that’s the biggest worry for me, having someone learn to return the serve where the serve’s always coming from the same angle, same speed, same type of server, you’re going to get this learning that’s not going to transfer well. And the same if coach is kind of pointing out these strategies too, it can be harmful.

My Takeaways

I had two takeaways, one that I know exactly what to do with, and one that I’m less sure about.

Takeaway 1: Practice Variability
This is the easy one. Okay, don’t have the servers just input the same serves over and over again? Okay cool, I can do that. In examining my own practice setup, I did see where I could tune up a few things, but this is already in my wheelhouse.

Keep doing:
Goldilocks The Input (if servers are changing servers, that means passers are seeing variability)
Contrast Passing (change between short and deep serves or flat and loopy serves)
Pass off serves not bowls, snaps, etc. Probably obvious.

Reconsider:
Make sure I do some 4-Way Passing crosscourt, not just line.
Make sure coaches aren’t giving false cues.

I’ll expand more on this in the next section, but this was a big takeaway for me. For example, if we consistently do drills where the coach adds a replacement (like for a missed serve) or a next-ball (like in a multiple ball wash), you want to make sure the coach isn’t adding false information. For example, to directly take from Rob’s answer, say the coach sometimes adds short serves. But the coach only inputs that short serve with a high arc. The player will start to see: “high arc = short serve.”

But that’s false (or at least incomplete) info. Sometimes high arc = deep, lofting serve. And sometimes a short serve can be hit without a high trajectory. So a takeaway for me is in this scenario is: “hit that short serve without the high trajectory sometimes, and sometimes hit a deep serve with high trajectory.”

Takeaway 2: Avoid False (or incomplete) Cues