Lineups Part 3 Sidebar

No, you don't "pay for practice"

My wife and daughter have left me in the frigid mid-50s temps of a coastal North Carolina winter to visit grandparents in sunny southern Florida. In addition to instantly reverting to feral bachelor-style eating habits (seriously, why would I both to scoop the rice and beans out of a pot and into a bowl when I could just eat it straight out of the pot I cooked it in? That’s just efficiency), I decided it would be a good idea to argue with strangers on the internet look around for content that would make good Substack posts.

This one’s a little long, but I think there’s some some good stuff in here. Mostly specific to club coaches, but there’s some general philosophy of playing time and roles as well.

In between running all the Volleystation sheets to build out the dataset for the upcoming Triangle content arc, I came across this thread in r/volleyball. Read the whole thread if you want, but allow me to summarize:

1. Somebody posts a screenshot of a slightly unhinged parent message complaining about play time.

2. “Haha club parents are ridiculous.”

3. “You don’t pay for play, you pay for practice.”

There’s plenty of examples of unhinged parents in other areas of life and I don’t find club parents any more or less poorly-behaved than the general population at large. If you pay all that money to have your kid come play for me, you drive them to and from tournaments, and you cheer when they do well, we’re cool. If you’re a little too invested in your kid’s success and you start scouting our crossover match opponents on the other court well… I once quit a PhD track to sleep on an air mattress and record serving speeds for the National Team. Stones and glass houses and all that, eh?

So let’s move on to #3 there.

You don’t pay for play, you pay for practice.

Ah, the beloved motto of many in the club volleyball world. The magic phrase that, if chanted enough, will get every parent to dutifully accept whatever role you decide for their kid, will turn every kid riding the bench into eager beavers who will train hard and then enthusiastically cheer their teammates on while their butt gets splinters.

I think you can see where I stand on this sentence.

It’s true that there’s plenty of entitlement among the club players and club parents. It’s a fact of life that if you deal with a large enough sample size of people, you’ll run into some turds. But since this newsletter is aimed at how to be a better coach, not a better parent, I’d like to turn the lens inward and look at the entitlement that exists among club coaches and directors. I’m sure there’s other areas of life where you ask a parent to hand over $5000 and then stfu while a 26 year-old with 2 years of experience in this field makes questionable decisions that affect your kid… but they aren’t coming to mind right now.

Okay, I’m painting with a harsh brush there, so let’s take a step back and discuss the topic critically, from both sides.

First of all, the phrase, “you don’t pay for play, you pay for practice,” is untrue from a basic accounting perspective. I asked someone who I consider to be the best club director in the country¹ for a budget breakdown on their club. Tournament costs (entry fees, coach travel, etc) make up nearly 1/3 of the cost of running a team. Their gym costs are lower than some, so maybe some teams are closer to 1/4. Either way, every parent on the team is paying for somebody to play.

Beyond that, there’s questions about team goals, philosophy, fairness, and player development. Let’s unpack some of that.

Team Goals

One purpose of this Lineups series of articles is to encourage coaches to think about who is going to be on the court at a given time and why. That needs to be informed by your team goals. What are your team goals. There’s no classier argument strategy than having a large platform from which you can take shots at anonymous posters on the internet, so allow me to excerpt some comments from the Reddit thread.

If the club is playing competitively, they will put their best roster up. If you are not part of the starters, then you will only play in matches that are not close - until you improve.

A top volleyball club is looking for bids to nationals and needs wins to do that. They are going to do what's best for each team they field to win when it counts - that's how they grow their brand. If that means sitting your son or daughter until garbage time, then that's what's going to happen. That's the business of club volleyball.

I let the 2nd string play the full set and obviously they got demolished, hoping the result demonstrated to parents why we make the choices we make. Sad to say that momentum led to a 3rd set loss bumping the team's standing down.

In the clubs around us, you sign a contract and in that contract as well as meetings before season starts it is well explained that play time is not grantees we are here to win!

To paraphrase:

Club volleyball is competitive. We’re here to win!

Okay. So pull up your AES ranking from last year. Is it a 2-digit number or a 3-digit number?

And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being the 300th best 15s team in the country or even the 3000th. There are teams who will play for National medals this year coached by mediocre coaches who just happened to assemble enough players who had been previously well-coached/parented/genetically gifted to be good enough to win a ton of matches, regardless of who coached them. And teams that will be phenomenally coached and the result will be that they’ll improve from getting 30th in the club division of a local tournament to getting 12th.

But what I mean is this: inherent in the cherry-picked comments above is this idea that, “we’re going to win a lot, and those wins are going to be meaningful, so it’s an acceptable sacrifice to push short-term for wins at the expense of playing time.”

To which I say: are you outside of the top-50? Then: no, no it’s not.

I think the "Winning v Development” dichotomy is often overblown in club volleyball. Generally speaking, I think winning teams develop players better than losing teams.² If players are able to be highly successful at U15, that’s a better predictor of success at U16 than a team full of players who can’t execute well enough to win at U15. But I think the exception here is playing time.

If you’re in club volleyball, you’re in the business of player development and positive experiences, even if you are competing for Open bids. And again, if your club ranking is in the 3 (or 4) digits, then you DEFINITELY can’t say that you’re all about winning.

Philosophy

Where you stand on playing time is linked to your philosophy as a coach. I like to win as much as anybody. Because I like to win, I believe that teams must constantly be learning. This is especially true when coaching club, because (a) the season is long and (b) the players are inexperienced and still changing so much. If your best results are in your first tournament of the season, that’s a bad sign.

So as I see it, I really need to help players develop. Even if my motives are purely selfish and based around winning… I still need to be development-focused. Other teams are going to improve over the course of the year, so if I don’t get my players better we will be surpassed.

And I mean development as measured by results on the scoreboard. I think there’s a segment of the coaching population that preaches about development and sticks their noses up in the air and acts superior because they are, “focused on development,” in some alternatively-defined way. That’s not me. If you’re teaching kids the game properly, they will win more. The kink in this hose is playing time.

To me, the only area where Winning and Development really conflict are over playing time. If you only play your best players and only in their best roles, you really will win more in the short-term. Here’s some potential issues with that:

Lineups rarely survive a season intact. I still remember the press conference from the 2018 tournament after BYU lost to Stanford in the Final 4. When asked if the match would have gone differently if BYU had Makenna Miller, their All-American outside who was injured late in the season, Heather Olmstead said something like, “Everybody has injuries, Stanford was the better team tonight.” What an incredible response. And it’s incredible because it’s true; all teams have stuff to deal with. Doubly so in club. There’s always going to be a tennis state tournament match, or ACT testing day, or Grandma’s 100th birthday party. It’s rare that a club team can roll the same lineup start to finish. If you’re going to eventually need that bench kid for an important match, why not make sure they are prepared throughout the season?

Everybody can be a good teammate in the short-term, but can they be a good teammate in the long-term? Sure, there were no problems the first tournament when that kid only played a couple points here and there. What bout the second tournament? The fifth? What about when you’re playing in your last tournament of the season and now you have a toxic bench because she’s unhappy and has pulled a couple other kids into it?

You are not as good of a predictor of future talent as you think. Development is uneven and goes in fits and starts. Even height, the most reliable and easily-observable predictor of volleyball effectiveness isn’t entirely predictable for club kids! As a freshman in high school, my wife was a scrappy-but-unremarkable 5’6” kid with baggy kneepads. She would eventually fill out to 5’10”, be awarded state POY her senior year, and go on to be an All-ACC setter in college. Fortunately, she didn’t have years in club where she was sitting the bench. Yes, she was an unusually late bloomer and an unusually dedicated kid, but every club has kids with the potential to surprise people.

From a multi-year perspective, clubs never have 100% retention. If you run a 5-1 and almost never play your 2nd setter, you better hope your best setter’s dad doesn’t get a job transfer to a different city. You better hope a new coach doesn’t come to her high school program and “encourage” them to play at his new club. You better hope she doesn’t get so good that now playing D1 is on her radar and she’s going to drive 2 hours to play for the powerhouse club. All of the sudden, you’re going to really want that other kid to be good. And you’ll be hoping she doesn’t leave your club after a year of sitting the bench.

Fairness

Is it fair for kids who aren’t as good to get playing time? This is a common sentiment. You pay for practice, but playing time is earned, right? This is where I think high school and club ball are different. High school is a bit of a blank slate that everybody enters as freshman. It’s not to say that talent doesn’t exist and anybody can come in as a freshman and eventually start on the varsity by senior year. Some kids will come in as freshman and be so far behind other kids (who are also probably working hard, and playing a lot of volleyball, etc) that they don’t have a realistic path to varsity playing time. But there’s certainly a lot better of a chance for it.

You also don’t pay to play high school volleyball, the season is much shorter, and doesn’t involve nearly the same time outside of school hours or weekend travel.

But in club volleyball, you take somebody on your team, the parents pay thousands of dollars, and a kid has 8-12 practices before the first tournament. That’s the time they had to “earn” a spot in the lineup? And here’s the thing, a typical club player spends more than 1/3 of their total gym time in competition. You might spend about 16 hours in practice per month while playing 2 tournaments of 6 matches each. If you count the matches as 1 hour, then you’re getting 12 hours of competition out of 28 total hours, which is 43%. If you got 2 weekend practices, add an extra 4 hours and you’re at 12/32 = 38%.

The point is this: match competition is, by definition, the most gamelike development opportunity a kid has. It’s not even gamelike. It’s just… game. Practice is a great learning opportunity and the game is even better! So now take the kid that was out of the starting lineup and say now they play significantly less time than another kid. They were a little behind to begin with, but now the kid in front of them is getting all the play time and they are getting almost none. Now they are going to fall even farther behind. It’s a snowball cycle that sort of justifies itself… “see, this is why you’re not getting more playing time.”

At the same, I don’t believe equal playing time is fair for most teams either. It’s also not ideal for growth and development for a competitive team. There’s actually a lot of club teams where I do think equal (or close to it) playing time is the best solution, because everybody on the team is at a low enough skill level where (a) any success is pretty random anyway and (b) you have totally no ability to predict how they will develop.

But let’s assume if you’re reading this you’re coaching a competitive team. You’re not going to do 100% equal playing time all the time. That’s okay. I think there’s a few sweet spots between 0 and 100.

Player And Team Development

So where do I think all of this should sort out, in real-world application?