May Media Wrap

The Moat, Pancakes > Flippers,

I’m going to try out a new monthly article in this newsletter where I share some of what I’ve watched, read, or listened to in the volleyball media landscape. These might serve as recommendations for stuff you haven’t seen before or quick takes on a topic they discuss.

First of all, I was a guest on Dan Meske’s Out-of-Rotation podcast. Dan’s a great guy and I loved talking with him. He’s big on the gram, which I’m not on, so I hadn’t seen much of his content until I started checking it out to prepare to come on his pod. He’s got a good way of presenting stuff and a great mind for the game. He’s also a SmarterVolley subscriber. Come on cheapskates free subscribers, you too could be coaching a top-5 program if only you would shell out for SmarterVolley Premium!

He started getting a little into my origin story for coaching and how I went from coaching local club volleyball to being part of the National Team staff. Eventually I bored him by taking too long getting to the point of things. As my wife would say… I’m very thorough with the details when I tell stories. I think that’s a compliment? I’ll take it as a compliment.

Anyways, listen to the episode, we talk about stuff that’s more interesting than my coaching career. His other episodes are great too!

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I enjoyed Loren Anderson’s 10 Constraints To Spark Adaptation. This is a handy primer for coaches to reference. One term he used in there that I like was The Moat, meaning he does some drills where the frontcourt is out of bounds. That’s been a staple of mine for middle school boys, who, for some reason really tend to pass and set tight. I always called it Front-Court Is Lava but I like the idea of The Moat. Oddly enough, it’s also a good defensive drill for elite level men. The key here is that the attacker can’t even land in the front-court. Played on an open net (or with a setter up there to block) your defenders get a lot of chances to dig challenging-but-not-impossible balls. Working on defense in high-level men’s volleyball is tough because the attacking is so dominant, but I liked that one as part of the beginning of practice. We did it a bunch when I coached in Germany.

I also like a 4v4 Zone 6 “Moat” ie: you can’t hit the ball to zone 6.

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I listen to all the episodes of The Volleypod with Tod Mattox and Davis Ransom. They had 5 this month, but I didn’t get to #5 as it was just released.

3 Good Drills
On this one, Davis said something like, “It’s a good drill if it accomplishes what you wanted.” I couldn’t agree more. I used to be more judgy when I saw a coach doing weird stuff. Then I realized I sometimes do weird stuff. But hey, my weird stuff is for a reason!

Tod’s follow-up was, “If it’s not game representative, keep it short.”

Yep, totally agree.

Mastering The Defensive Toolbox
Two disagreements from this one!

First, I don’t like passing free balls in tempo. I don’t think passing a free ball lower/faster puts any additional pressure on blockers that are any good. For me, a high pass allows the offense to go faster.

Second, they like the flipper aka ice cream cone aka one-arm “wrist flick” (if I’m correctly understanding what they are describing) instead of a pancake. Boo. I think pancakes are way more reliable and controlled. The whole point about a pancake is that it doesn’t bounce that high, so it’s easier to play off of. I just see this way too much, even from good players:

I’d much rather see a calm pancake like this:

Here’s a kid on my club team botching the flipper. I like a 2-arm dive to dig it higher with more control, or just stick down a pancake and let the ball bounce up.

The guys talk about the downside of a pancake putting the decision in the hands of the ref. Sometimes you get a pancake up and the ref calls it down. True. But sometimes it goes the other way!

My girl swears it was all hand and no floor. Looked iffy to me at the time but cleaner on video. But still, I think refs more often than not give it to you, especially in that situation. 9-10 in the 3rd set! But here’s one that was 100% floor and the ref still gave it to us. (Come on ref, the ball literally bounced backward!)

I also like the heads-up play by the lib to immediately shovel the ball over the net. I can’t prove this statistically, but I feel that the quicker you get the ball over the net, the more likely the ref is to allow the play to continue. Plus the other team is usually standing around compaining (correctly, in this case) that the ball is down. I would have just liked to see her put the ball deeper.

I’m team pancake on this one.

Volleypod Leadership Episode

This was a cool concept with guest Ken Murczek. Basically Tod moderated and gave 10 statements on leadership and Ken and Davis gave a true or false response with some explanation and back and forth.

1. Leaders are born, not made. (False)

2. Rather than forcing it, it’s best for coaches to allow team leadership to naturally evolve. (True)

3. In the pre-season, leadership development should be a top priority for the coaching staff. (False)

4. It’s better to have leadership shared among all team members, rather than creating a leadership hierarchy with 1-2 captains. (True)

5. Seniority should have no influence on the choice of team leaders. (False)

6. If you decide to have captains, it's better for coaches to choose them, rather than have players do it. (False)

7. The best leadership configuration for a team is a leadership council, with at least one representative from each class. (False)

8. The leader’s top priority is to hold his or her teammates accountable. (False)

9. Leaders have to be starters to be effective. (False for older teams, but more true for younger teams.)

10. If a team captain felt overwhelmed with the responsiblity and wanted to quit (being a captain) midseason, the head coach should lean toward accepting that decision, rather than trying to persuade him or her to weather the storm. (False)

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CYBO - EcoD in Youth Sports
Coach Your Brains Out is, of course, an all-time favorite of mine. They did a 2-parter this month on EcoD In Youth Sports with a soccer coach named Nick Smallridge. He’s got a Substack that I haven’t dove into yet. Some thoughts from his episode:

He says a line like, “Can help players get better without having to directly instruct them,” that I thought illustrates an interesting philosophy of coaching. I see a sentiment like this a lot among EcoD folks. There’s almost a purity to it. I think I have a different mindset to things which is sometimes why I clash with the EcoD purists. I wish I could just directly instruct everything. If Direct Instruction was the best choice always, life would be so much easier. It’s not, and so we have to consider the complex interaction between organism, task, and environment.

To give a somewhat-trivial example: think about the rules of volleyball. When the ball hits the line, it’s in. You could let your players figure it out on their own. Over time, they would come to realize that when a ball lands on the line, it’s in. But it’s much easier to just explain the rules of the game to them. Most things in sport don’t work like this. There’s some level of things that can be explained. Most has the be experienced and processed through the body. But sometimes I think in EcoD there’s almost a purity sentiment the the coach explaining things taints the whole process.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into things and should give Nick the benefit of the doubt!

To briefly summarize another line of discussion:

Play is the process of enjoying what you’re doing. Deliberate practice you’re focusing more on an outcome of improvement. The best athletes had the most play.

Couldn’t agree more. To add my take to it:

The whole reason deliberate practice is important is to help unlock another level of play! For example, your 6v6 in practice is going to be jacked up unless you sort out where everybody stands in each rotation, how the setter releases, and what each hitter is doing. There’s some amount of everybody being intentional about figuring that out which then allows everybody to then relax and compete and flow in 6v6 play.

Something else came up that was basically, technique is a consequence of… the environment, the demands of the game, etc.

I like that framing as well. At GMS clinics sometimes we say, “it takes what it takes.” While you do see variability in technique among elite performers, you see far less than among beginners. I’ve shared this video before:

My takeaways from this are two.

(1) Each of those 6 passes was slightly different and reflected the ability of elite performers to use all the little degrees of freedom in their legs, torso, and arms to respond to the serve and put the ball on target.

(2) Each of those 6 passes contains a few consistent elements: balanced posture, connection between wrist and hands, tracking to the ball with the hands moving past the line of serve, creating an angle from the shoulders, etc.

Those 6 passers look a lot more like each other than they look like the passers at your local U-15 tournament. The technique they develop is a consequence of the serves they have to pass.

In Part 2, they talk about the need to help players more directly in-match than in-practice, with I agree with. The way I think about it is that team should have me working against them in practice (because I’m creating problems to solve) and have me working for them in-match by giving them information about what the other team is doing, etc.

Nick gives a shout-out to Jeremy Frisch, who I think is a fantastic resource for youth sports/PE.

CYBO - NCAA Tournament Reflections
I’m going to do more on this in the future when I unpack a lot of the tournament statistically. But it was great being a (small) part of LMU’s run to the NCAA Final and I always enjoy hearing John’s take on it. Two things that stood out:

“Glad we won, but glad we get another match together as a team.”

I think this is always the way that great teams feel in single-elimination. The winning is a nice by-product, but man you just want another chance to compete with this group you love so much.

“Stay hunting.”

Love that mindset. You have to find ways to phrase things aggressively, not defensively. Challenge not threat. I didn’t do this well enough for my club team at times this season. This kind of stuff isn’t my strength as a coach. I have a few things I’m sketching out this summer for how to address it better next season.

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Did you enjoy this media wrap-up feature? Are there other channels or content I should be checking out? Drop a comment and let me know.