Odd Week Short Takes
I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to beach volleyball. Since there’s 5 Mondays this May I’ll use this week for some random odds and ends that don’t quite fit into full articles.
Are you a Fox or a Hedgehog as a coach? I think there’s two ways to take this, and I’ll use myself as an example. In this paradigm, I’ve tended to view myself as more of a fox. My experience is much more broad than deep. My time with the USA WNT for a 4-season Olympic quad was the longest tenure that I’ve ever had with one team. When I coached club I had a three-year arc with a relatively stable core of players moving up through the age groups from U15 to U17. Other than that, I’ve never been with any program for even two consecutive seasons!
On the other hand, there’s the aspect of that thought experiment that is about the “one big idea,” and increasingly I find the idea of Learning Through Contrast to be the answer to almost every training problem that I have. So maybe I’m just a nomaid hedgehog. TBD.
I’ll remind all readers yet again that the NCAA Beach Volleyball National Championships is quite possibly the best sporting event in existence. It will only be in Gulf Shores for another couple years, and while hosting the event in California is cool too, there’s something fun about having it at Gulf Shores… it takes over the town in a way that seems unlikely to happen in Southern California. But I’ll stay open minded.
Also, multiple coaches who were there commented that they’ve been enjoying the 1-2-3 touch variation from this article. So maybe you will too!
Something I’ve been saying a lot lately:
Control your body to control the ball. Control your eyes to control your body. Control your mind to control your eyes.
I’m saying that to some of the freakiest athletes on the planet, but I learned this lesson from my daughter. If any of you also have a 2 year-old, you know that their “eyework” is far from ideal. And you can see so clearly the emotions pumping through their body and how it changes their ability to focus.
Even elite athletes deal with this, it’s just less noticeable because the changes are more subtle. If their mind isn’t dialed on the right things, it affects their eyework. When their eyes are off, their movements are off. When their movements are off, they lose power, touch, or both.
The other team is the best teacher. The ultimate in CLA training is to have another team that plays in a way such that you have to adapt to play against them. I saw this with servers and passers here on Canada MNT, and I’ve seen it with servers at lots of levels. You can cue servers to serve it harder, put more pressure on other team, etc, but nothing beats putting passers on the other side that can handle what you’re bringing.
Elite athletes sense this and change faster, which is how they get elite. For lower-level players, one of the biggest barriers to their progress is that they don’t always attune to what the other team is doing, or notice that they are even having less success.
Training has to be fun, and the head coach for Canada MNT, Ben Josephson, is one of the best I’ve ever been around at keeping things light, even while pushing hard. My favorite for this has to be Party Your Hasselhoff aka PYH, a drill that we play once a week. The setup and scoring for this drill is pretty simple: standard volleyball with bonus point scoring based on what we want to emphasize.
But the key is to put David Hassselhoff’s best selling album: Party Your Hasselhoff on the practice speakers while we play the game. You didn’t know that you needed to hear Hasselhoff sing Sweet Caroline, but now you do.
I’ve been talking to our guys about Hesitation vs Patience. Hesitation is when you freeze because you don’t know what to do. Patience is when you know what to do, but you wait for the right time to do it. Defenders get in trouble when they hesitate, but they also get in trouble when they lack patience and they move before they have all the information. Finding the right balance is key.
In the Off-Season Training session with Luka Slabe, he talked about the idea of a Pre-Practice Appetizer: sending your team or specific players a couple of short clips or concepts that help set up the day’s practice. I’ve been really liking that idea. So much of our video feedback is review-based, but adding in some preview can make the teaching at practice a lot better. Highly recommended!