The Return Of "Beach" "Week"

And "other" "reasons" to put "things" in "quotes"

It’s been a long time since there’s been a Beach Week on SmarterVolley. Typically, the way I structure this newsletter is that I use the first 3 weeks of the month for indoor volleyball and dedicate the 4th week of the month to beach volleyball. I’ve changed the format a bit this spring; for the last 14 weeks I’ve done something completely different and had less-analytical, more teaching-focused articles that could apply to either indoor or beach. Some of the most popular ones include:

Constrain To Break Through
Cueing Doubles
DDCDD

Check them out if you haven’t already.

For the rest of May, I’ll be writing more from the beach side of things. I’ll use some stats and video from the recent NCAA Beach National Championship Tournament to draw lessons and highlight concepts. I’ll do some case studies of interesting matches. One of my favorite parts of the NCAA Beach best-of-5-pairs format is how many duels tie at 2-2 and come down a final match. And usually, if that match is taking the longest, it’s also the closest. The drama as fans and teammates crowd around that last court is intense!

There were 5 deciding-match duels (duels that were tied 2-2 and came down to a final court) in the tournament:

Cal v Long Beach 4s
LSU v FAU 4s
Stanford v Grand Canyon 4s
USC v TCU 5s
USC v UCLA 3s

Assuming I can get my hands on all the video, I’ll profile each of these matches over the next 3 weeks and see what the Triangles look like. I’ll probably post up some of my favorite plays and other takeaways as well.

And finally, I put “Beach” in quotes at the top, because I don’t want the next 3 weeks to not be useful for coaches who are only or primarily indoor coaches. Sometimes coaching is specific, and sometimes coaching is just coaching. Any championship event has lessons for coaching in general. This was the third time I’ve traveled to Gulf Shores for NCAA Beach Nationals and I learn a lot every time I go. Due to NCAA rules, I’m limited to stat, video, and scouting work, and my interactions with the players are limited to more of a, “hey, how’s it going, good luck out there,” sort of deal.

But I love being courtside for the matches, observing the coaches and players from all the schools interacting, and seeing every team’s attempt at being their best when it matters most.

And speaking of scouting…

Never Go To Applebees

Antifragile is one of my all-time favorite books. In it, Taleb introduces the metaphor of The Barbell: something that is weighted on both ends without much in the middle. He starts by discussing The Barbell in investing: a portfolio constructed with a mix of very safe and very speculative investments, without much allocation to assets that are in and of themselves moderate-risk and moderate-growth.

But The Barbell can extend to other areas of life by recognizing that the apparently-safe middle is often just a recipe for mediocrity.

The Scouting Barbell

This is going to seem a bit truncated because I just clipped out about 3000 words of possibly-entertaining-possibly-informative-definitely-self-indulgent tangent involving The Barbell and how it intersects with my feelings toward Applebees. (This is how you can tell I’m writing in real-time rather than publishing my longer-arcing content that I’ve pre-written and chopped into neat chapters)

At some point I’ll polish that into a separate post of its own, and instead, without the back explanation, I’ll give you my conception of The Scouting Barbell. Here’s what I like for scouting:

One End Of The Barbell

One, two, maybe three very clear adjustments that I am comfortable with my players following mindlessly and robotically. Meaning: if I say, “block this girl line,” I must be willing for them to block her line every single time, even if the set takes her somewhere else. If I don’t feel that way, I don’t say it. We’re trying to avoid words like usually/mostly/probably here. So common instructions on this end might be:

Don’t help on the Quick when [Player X] is on the left; just step toward her.
Left-back: start on the 3m line when [this setter] is in the frontrow.
Never tip over the block against this team’s hard rotation defense.

If we’ve identified a team where they have a very dangerous outside hitter that they set with a fast-tempo, then I have comfortable with my right-side blocker leaving toward her every single team, even if it means their quicks are more open. I don’t want to mess around with, “they are probably going to go more to the left, but make sure you’re also ready to help on the quick.” Nope, I want to be firmly on one end of the barbell on this one.

(Because, if I’m kind of thinking in my head, “well, I kind of also do want to be able to help on the quick…” then that left-side is actually NOT that dangerous and then we can treat her like a normal hitter.)

The Other End

No instructions, just a curated 1-minute or so video clip of whatever I’m trying to show: server, setter, hitter, team defense, etc. I want to try to give the players as little explicit information as possible here. I don’t want to say, “his jump serve mostly cuts toward 1/6 but sometimes he goes into the 5/6 seam and sometimes he rolls it short.” I’d just like to show 10-20 clips and make sure that his overall tendencies are represented.

I DO want to say things like, “this guy has not hit the 4-seam in his last 80 serves, so left-back passer can take a step to the 5/6 seam.” That goes on the other end of the barbell. But I don’t want to give some explicit instruction that attempts to differentiate between, “he’ll probably go 1/6 but he might go 5/6.” I just don’t think our brains work that way and the cost of actively misreading a play is of a greater magnitude than the benefit of correctly reading a play a little faster.

And importantly, I also don’t want the players to add their own explicit instructions. In an ideal world, a passer preparing to face a top server would relax their body, enter as close to a meditative state as possible, and remain there for 5 minutes while they watch a 1-minute representative clip of serves 4 or 5 times. I want this soaking in at the intuitive level. I don’t want the conscious brain messing things up. Just soak it in and trust your body.

Okay, that’s my approach to scouting. I’ll write more about both Applebees and the 2023 NCAA Beach Nationals more later this week.