Sometimes Things Don't Fit
Aka don't be a purist if it's not worth it
We’ve been touching on the concept of Ecological Dynamics lately. It’s a topic that most coaches have never heard of but many of the ones who have feel very passionately about. I’ve been trying to avoid weighing in on the academic aspects because I’m not an expert in the academic side of motor learning. To the extent that I am an expert (for whatever that term is worth), it’s on the applied side. I’m pretty good at sifting through and learning the science enough to figure out a new tool to use in the gym.
There’s a certain type of coach out there. Many of you are this type of coach, and so am I, often. This type of coach is always trying to find some kind of edge. Maybe you don’t come from the highest-level playing background (I don’t) or maybe you got your coaching start in a small area (I did) or at a small school. There’s a certain underdog mentality that many coaches start out with and many of use never lose that mentality.
There’s good and bad to that approach to coaching. The advantage is that this sort of coach is never going to be content saying, “well that’s how we did it when I played, so that’s how I’m going to teach it to my team.” In fact, this sort of coach is going to reflexively push back against those feelings. This sort of coach is more likely to do things the exact opposite of how they were coached- in many ways that’s what I did as a young coach.
It’s good to want to seek out new things, to challenge your views, to think, “if I can just figure out some new system tweaks, that can be the two extra wins we need next year.”
But there’s some downsides as well. You can start only viewing things from a top-down, theoretical point of view. You tend to discard things that don’t fit into your theoretical framework.
I don’t know which side of the pendulum I’m currently swinging toward right now, but I’m doing my best to keep myself in some sort of middle. I try to seek out new ideas, to try to understand the science behind them, to try to organize things into a coherent system. But… I’m also trying to be comfortable saying, “I’m not entirely sure why this works, but I know it does, so I’m not throwing it out yet.”
I think you see where I’m going with this.
The Ecological Dynamics paradigm has been really valuable to me. When there’s a change I want to make with a player, my first reaction now is, “what environmental variable can I manipulate so that making this change feels like the obvious and uncontroversial thing to do?” I used to explain and explain why a player needed to approach and rotate straight through her jump float instead of fading off to the side. Now I often just stick a ballcart on each side of her approach pathway so she would run into one of them if she doesn’t stay straight.
But sometimes, things just don’t quite fit into that paradigm. I know that Setter-1 and Setter-4 are the weakest sideout rotations in high school level volleyball. And I know that part of that reason is that setters don’t take good releases and aren’t in good positions to set. So I prescribe very specific footwork. Take this many steps at this time and end up in this spot. If you don’t do it, I blow the whistle, stop the play, and have you do it again. I do that until that footwork is habitual.
Maybe I just haven’t thought of the right way to teach that in an indirect way. Maybe I don’t have the environment set up properly. In 3 years, maybe I’ll be making a SmarterVolley post about how I know a better way to do that. But for now, I know that almost every team I work with will see an upgrade if I explicitly teach setters a certain release footwork in Setter-1 and Setter-4. And you can’t not make an upgrade just because you’re not sure where it fits in theory.