In-Match Coaching Part 2

Learn More, Win More

Let’s talk In-Match Coaching! A couple years ago I wrote a post about In-Match Coaching. Check it out if you haven’t already. I’m going to reference the same basic tenets of In-Match/Intra-Tournament coaching and expand on a few of them. Also, if you haven’t seen the Tournament Prep Webinar, there’s a lot of good info in there as well. Okay, let’s dive in.

Your Team Must Learn In-Match

I believe this to be true for any level of volleyball. Competition is the best opportunity to learn. But I believe this to be doubly-true for club volleyball. My team had 10 practices in the month of January. We get Saturday practices on non-tournament weekends, which isn’t uncommon but not every team gets that. We also practice for 2.5 hours (4:00 - 6:30) which is more court time than most teams get. So we got 25 hours of practice in January. 10 practices x 2 hours = 20 hours. 8 practices (if you don’t get weekends) x 2 hours = 16 hours. And a team that gets only 90-minute practice slots (or has to share court and doesn’t get it the whole time, etc) would be 12 hours.

(I’m only counting time on court, let’s put classroom sessions and lifting to the side.)

So let’s say 95% of club teams practiced between 12 and 24 hours in the month of January. How about competition?

We played 2 tournaments with 16 matches total- 9 in our MLK weekend tournament and 7 in a 2-day the next weekend.

Let’s call a match an hour of court time. That’s 16 hours of competition time.

If club teams are practicing between 12 and 24 hours and competing for 16 hours, that means they are at a practice:competition ratio of about 1:1. If your team isn’t learning in-match, they are losing a lot of opportunities to grow and get better.

I can’t stress this enough: club teams that want to get better throughout the season must prioritize learning in-match as well as in practice. Competition is not where you show what you’ve learned. It’s also a learning opportunity.

You Must Teach In-Match

If you want your team to learn in-match, it follows that you must teach in-match as well. Here’s where’s your mindset and framing as a coach really matters. I do see a lot of instruction during club matches, but I don’t know if I see a lot of teaching. Maybe the distinction is subtle, but I think it matters. To show what I mean, let’s talk about the two most common coach-player interactions you’ll see at a club volleyball tournament:

1. Player shanks a pass. Player looks over at coach on sideline. Coach does some sort of pantomime of a passing motion.

2. Player hits a ball out. Player looks over at coach on sideline. Coach does some sort of pantomime involving a wrist snap or arm swing.

I don’t think these interactions are always unproductive and I think most coaches are well-meaning when they do this stuff, but I see these interactions more as instruction/correction than teaching.

First of all, you can’t fix the last play. True, the player might get served or set again, and might have to execute a similar skill. But one play is never exactly like the last. If she got served on her left, she might get served on her right. If she got served deep, she might get served short. Etc. Correcting the last mistake steers your players toward looking at the last point, not getting ready for the next point.

Last-error-focus doesn’t give players a clear framework to learn. It’s one thing if you’ve been focusing on passing deep balls at practice and you’re reminding players of the solutions they’ve worked on for the last 2 weeks. But hodgepodge isn’t going to get processed and built upon throughout the weekend.

And this is where I see the big difference between teaching and instructing/correcting. If you come into the weekend looking to teach, then you’ll often be able to help a player take a nice step forward in a particular piece of the game between first match and last match. If you play 8 matches this weekend, that’s about the equivalent of 2 weeks of practice. Do you think you can teach a player something in 4 practices? Then you should be able to teach them something at a tournament!

What Can You Teach?

Now here’s the thing: certain things work well to learn at practice. Certain things work well to learn during tournaments. First, let’s compare the two environments and how they might affect learning.

Practice
Lower intensity
Less psychological cost of mistakes
Less strict play sequences (can repeat a ball, etc)
Situations can be constructed and planned ahead of time

Competition
Higher intensity
Higher psychological cost of mistakes. Higher emotional resonance of success.
Strict play sequence.
Situations will be random and uncertain

Some coaches look at the Competition list there and conclude that we can’t introduce new things. And, to an extent, you’re right. But what competition does is it introduces new things for us! And because competition is emotionally-charged, there can be an urgency to problem solve that can aid learning, compared to practice.

Here’s an example: you’ve taught your blockers the basics of blocking. They understand, on an intellectual level, the need to line up on the ball and press over. They kind of get the need to not reach, etc. But do they really KNOW it? Well when you go to a tournament and face a player with a strong line shot, they will be presented with a very strong incentive to see the ball and get to the point of contact. Will they be able to make that change? Maybe, maybe not. But this is a great learning environment to upgrade eyework and get lined up on the ball.

There will be other repetitious situations that occur throughout a weekend. A few years ago I filled in for a 2-day tournament with a 16s team. I wasn’t coaching them full-time, but I had some clinics for this club and I knew, generally, where they were at. On Day 1, they lost to a team in pool play. One factor in that loss was doing a lot of blocking when they shouldn’t have been blocking. This team had a couple of pretty nice middles who barely got set because they were blocking junk and couldn’t get into transition. And they got tooled on a bunch of junk sets and backrow attacks that they could have stayed down and let their teammates hit out. We talked about it during the match but they weren’t quite able to adjust. The next day however, they actually played the same team again in a playoff match and they won- they stayed down on the pipes and dug them or let the other team hit out. Their middles had a bunch more kills by identifying opportunities not to block and get into their transition. It was a really rewarding win for this team and also a nice step forward in their understanding of the game.

Other Things To Teach

Here’s a grab-bag of other things that you’ll likely be able to teach throughout a multi-day weekend. Some of this stuff can be difficult to teach if you’ve never discussed this at all with your players, but here’s 10 things that the emotions of competition can highlight and aid in improving.