If I Had $1000

What to do with a little extra pocket change

In the comment thread of this post:

Esteemed Reader and Premium Subscriber Ben Rand basically asks:

If you had $1000 to spend on your club volleyball team, what would you spend it on?

Love it, alright, here’s a few thoughts:

An Assistant Coach (probably more than $1000)

I don’t know what you club budget is and if you get an assistant coach or not, but even the best coaches need help. There’s probably no single boost to coaching a team than the boost you get from going from 1 coach to 2. For most club teams, going from 2 coaches to 3 isn’t going to make a huge difference because you’re likely only practicing on one court anyway.

A potential exception to that is if you only have 9 or 10 players on the team. This is great for play-time at tournaments, but it can make practices a bit limited. Say you only have 9 players and 1 kid is going to be out of practice because she has to study for a final. Now you’re down to 8. Forget 6v6 or even 6v4, now we’re at… 6v2? Rough. Another challenge is if you run a 6-2 and one of those setters also hits. You want her to get some reps getting set by the other setter, and now who sets on the other side of the net?

In this case, sometimes getting an older practice player can be nice. Maybe you coach a 14s team and you have 10 kids on the team. Can you get one of the 17s to come in once a week and pay them some gas money and have them just play on the B-side with and against your team? Pick a kid who has some skills and a good personality and they can add a lot to your practice. Maybe they are a setter, so now you have a good setter on the B-side and your two setter/hitters can stay on the same side of the net and practice those roles. Maybe they are a just a pretty normal 17s middle who has a feeling of how to hit a quick, and just having the setters on your 14s team get in there and set not just your 14s hitters (who might also be new to running quick-tempo) but also this older player who can say stuff like, “keep me a little faster,” makes a difference.

And if you’re a 17s/18s team, snagging somebody just out of college (who maybe even played at your club, or knows your assistant coach, etc) who has a job and can’t do all the travel on weekends, but maybe enjoys getting in once or twice a week and playing against your kids can help boost your practice.

NCAA Women’s teams do this all the time. Snag the 6’5” guy off the men’s club team who is physical (but can also play with control) and he’s going to help simulate Rival Team Big Outside the day before your match.

GMS Training For An Assistant ($350)

Sorry if this feels like a blatant plug, but if you’ve been reading SmarterVolley for any length of time, you know I love GMS and the impact it’s made on me as a coach. It’s not just that the quality of the content is good (it is!), but there’s something about going to a multi-day coaching clinic that really gets coaches fired up. You go there, you learn a bunch of stuff on Day 1, you go out to dinner after and talk about the stuff, argue about what you disagreed with, etc… you come in for Day 2, you’re learning new stuff and asking questions about what you didn’t understand, on Day 3 you’re starting to feel like you’re getting a handle on things… you drive home together and you’re fired up and feeling like, “okay, how soon can we get in the gym and start trying this stuff?”

So it’s great if you can send an assistant and even better if the 2 of you can go together.

I also think there’s great value for coaches in seeing, “oh, there’s a whole bunch of other coaches who also don’t know everything and are also trying to learn stuff and getting a little insecure about things and trying to figure things out.” You realize that you don’t need to know everything in order to still help the kids out. And in particular, I also like that GMS clinics incorporate a lot of play. “Oh yeah, okay this piece of transition footwork isn’t coming super-naturally to me, and it’s probably going to be that way for some of my players too…”

A Way To Watch Video (<$200)

This section got nearly 1000 words, so I’m making it it’s own post. Suffice to say, the first thing dollars should go to is staffing for practice and quality of your staff. Next thing the money should flow to is video, but it needn’t be too expensive.

I think Hudl is a fine product, but I don’t think it’s necessary and it’s real expensive. I personally just watched the raw video when I coached juniors. Getting a parent to film isn’t too hard. Uploading to Youtube will suffice (you can get through a match quickly by pressing the right arrow to skip 5s during the dead space) but being able to download to my laptop is ideal. That way I can watch in a media player (I use VLC, which is free) and skip forward/backward easier and go frame-by-frame, etc.

For practice video, I just use my phone. At the juniors level, I don’t necessarily need a full-court 6v6 video like you have for matches.¹ But just pulling your phone out to video some approaches and show a player will work great.

If you want to spend a bit more, having an iPad mounted on a tripod for video delay is a nice tool. You can go even farther than that and have a full-on tv replay setup, but the issue there also becomes storage and protection and not getting your replay tv popped by a ball or getting run into mid-practice in a crowded club gym setup.

Okay after staffing and video, here’s my next most valuable purchases…