Get Out Of The Groove
The last week of the Athletes Unlimited season is coming to an end. It’s been a fun one! Yesterday was the last practice of the season. With matches tonight, Friday, and Saturday, we just have some morning and pre-game serve-passes left to prepare for the last 3 matches. The NCAA beach season is also entering the closing stretch.
As a coach, the feeling of the end of the season is a little like the feeling my daughter had toward the end of her bath last night. I gave her one of the tubes of pink bath soap to use. When the tube is fresh and full, she’s just squirting it out wantonly- not a care in the world. Within a few minutes, the tube is mostly squeezed clean and I’m trying to help her wring another few drops of pink wonderousness out of the tube.
At the beginning of the season, we might not feel how precious practice time is. But when you’re up against your last 90 minutes of team activity, there can be a feeling of, “if I only had another few practices to work on this…"
The Groove
Volleyball players people love to be in the groove. You get a schedule, you repeat the same stuff over and over again, and you can be on autopilot for significant portions of the day. You do a lot of things without really thinking about them.
When I was at BYU, I had the good fortune to sit in on some talks from Craig Manning. He used the term “hypnotic rhythms” to describe the way you go about doing these things the way you do them because that’s how we did them so that’s how we’ll do them. You get in a groove.
The thing is, a groove is not how high performance is built. And at some point, the distinction between a groove and a rut gets blurry.
Serving, passing, and setting are the three volleyball skills that manifest this concept. Servers like to go serve a cart of balls. Passers like to get in a rhythm. Setters like to dial in their location. But what this often means is that, “if I repetitiously perform the same action in practice, my success rate in that practice goes up and I feel good about myself.”
I think the beginning and the end of seasons are the prime culprit for this to creep in. You want to have some success in the beginning of the season. If we use practice success as a gauge of progress, then grooving in some reps will make it seem like we’re progressing at a particular skill. Then we get frustrated when the success rate is lower in a match. At the end of the season, we don’t want to overload playes. They are often physically and mentally fatigued. We don’t want to add to the burden. Let’s just groove in some reps and get their confidence up going into the last few matches.
But, as Ceci Craft would say, that’s junk food confidence.
If you haven’t yet read Rob Gray’s How We Learn To Move, you should just stop reading this post and pick it up. Or at least read this article:
There’s a few big takeaways, but one of them is probably, “any time you feel like you’re getting into a groove, stop it and do something else.” Of course, randomized practice has been going on well before Rob Gray started talking about it, but he outlines the significance in a way that’s pretty powerful.
Routines
High performers, in any walk of life, have repetitious behavior- things they do the same way every time. The military calls them standard operating procedures. Business coaches call them keystone habits. Moms call them bedtime routines. It’s important to fix certain things in place to free up your attention to focus on other things.
For athletes, those routines should be everything that leads up to the whistle of a serve. Have morning routines. Have pre-game routines. Have a consistent warmup, etc. But you want your training to be anything but routine.
And of course, this doesn’t mean that everything done on the volleyball court should be fully chaotic, but think about the drills that tend to be routine:
Do your servers go back and serve a cart of balls without any variance?
Is your setter tutoring you tossing or passing the ball from the same spot every time?
Does your assistant coach apologize when they accidentally hit a funky serve and ace the passers in your pre-game warmup?
If so, your players might be a little addicted to the groove.
In the recent setting Q&A, Alisha Childress and Carli Lloyd both talked about how lots of middles get so many reps training off “standard tempo passes” (not too high, not too low) in controlled drills that they never develop vision. When the passes in the match are lower or higher than normal, their timing gets thrown off.
There’s ways to add gentle variance to any situation in your practice. Try the Goldilocks Method. Be conscious of where you’re inputting balls from and to. And for god’s sake have your players practice serving from zones 1 and 5. It won’t hurt them!
But above all, I think it’s just talking with your players about this from a mindset perspective. They don’t want to be the type of player who, “needs to get in a groove.” They want to be a player who has a robust skillset. Visualize your game like a map. If you only know one route across town, you’re SOL when you hit traffic.
As a coach you can constantly introduce little sources of variance to fill in the pieces of their maps. Planning this into things like individual tutors, warmups, and serve/pass practices can benefit you a lot in the long-term. Because eventually that pink soap bottle of practice time is going to run out!