Notes From Richmond

10 takeaways from a fun weekend

Webinar Update: On June 30 I’ll host another subscribers-only webinar. This time we’ll be talking In-System Offense, to match the theme of this month’s posts. If you didn’t catch the previous one on Reception Systems, check it out. And if you’re not yet a Premium Subscriber, this is a great time to join!

This past weekend, I had the privilege of being a co-clinician at the Gold Medal Squared coaching clinic hosted by RVC in Richmond, VA. The other two clinicians were the past 2 SEC COYs¹: Tom Black of Georgia and Jason Watson of Arkansas.

If you haven’t been out to a Gold Medal Squared clinic yet, I highly recommend it. I’ve been going to them for about 15 years now, first as an attendee and now as a clinician. I learn stuff every time.

Here’s 10 notes I took down over the weekend:

1) Our job is not to win the match, it’s to win the moment.

Pretty cool phrasing by Jason. I don’t think it needs much explanation. There’s a lot of these sorts of cliches bandied about but they are cliche for a reason. The way he said it resonated a lot with me.

2) The Runway analogy.

I have already stolen this analogy from Tom and use it regularly in my coaching, but I enjoyed watching him coach up some coaches on this concept. I love those external cues that get hitters thinking about paths and trajectories rather than down in your feet. Visualizing an attacking runway that the player needs to find (in the various pass-to-attack or transition situations they encounter) and then accelerate down has been helpful for many hitters I’ve coached.

3) If we want focused players…

This isn’t a knock on any of the attendees of the clinic, this is just a compare and contrast of 2 clinicians coaching at a really high level in this sport vs a group of (mostly) less-experienced coaches. But one thing that always strikes me is how much simple great coaches are in their instruction, and how complicated less effective coaches can make things.

Now part of this is that you go to a coaching clinic to ask clarifying questions and to figure out where you are over-complicating things, etc. So again, not knocking any of our attendees. But if you were an attendee… I hope you noticed this too! There’s a natural tendency for the mind to bounce around and fixate on things that aren’t important. Often I think that it’s less about what coaches put into a player’s mind and more about what that coach removes.

4) … we need to be focused coaches.

Continuing in this theme, I am continually reminded at the power of single-item focus. When developing your Coaching Eyework, you actually do want to have tunnel vision. From a systems perspective, my first big breakthrough as a coach was going to my first GMS clinic and understanding the big picture of how high-level volleyball was played. But my next breakthrough was going out to Washington during a spring practice and shadowing their staff, especially Keno, as they coached skills. I realized that even these high-level coaches weren’t trying to see 20 things at once. And then I realized I could actually see a lot of the same things that they were seeing.

The technical aspects of volleyball are often not particularly complex. Again, I’ll ask you to consider the movements that middle-school aged gymnasts, ballerinas, jiu-jitsu players, wrestlers, etc are asked to do. Many movements in those sports are more complicated than going right-left-right-left and jumping into the air to spike a ball. It’s the timing that is the challenge.

But this also means that volleyball coaches can get surprisingly technically proficient in a pretty short period of time, if only they can look at the right things and not get their eyes pulled all over the court.

5) Perception and Action must be coupled.

I’ve written about this before, but movements are influenced by what you see. They don’t exist in a vacuum. At the most basic level of motor patterns (sprinting, jumping, throwing), I believe there’s likely some raw horsepower than can be influenced. But when it comes to applying anything in a game context, you have to recreate that context.

Tom and Jason both spend a lot of time thinking about how to couple Perception and Action in their gyms. I could get better at this. For example, both made independent remarks about how they rarely like their passers to just pass to a target. The visual cue of your pass going to, and being set by, a setter gives the whole movement a different feel than the ball going to a target or being caught by a coach. So maybe 4-Ball Passing actually sucks. Food for thought.

6) It’s never all good.