Training Troubleshooting
Sharing session notes
Quick one today. I recently did a consultation with a college program. It was a quick 30-minute call to talk over some best practices for getting more out of training. My goal was for each player to come away with one small-but-concrete takeaway that they could take into the practice the next day and upgrade her learning curve.
Here were some notes and takeaways from the players:
Goldilocks Method
I’ve talked about Goldilocks Method a few times on SmarterVolley. I talked about it with this group, but more from the player’s perspective and less from the coaching perspective. As a player, if you understand a little more about how to bump up against the boundaries of the skill, you accelerate your learning.
The main takeaway here was that sometimes you can make a change faster by just feeling the “mistakes” at the end of the boundary and letting your body naturally find the sweet spot in the middle than by relentlessly fixating on an ideal technique.
Related to this is the idea of “pivot points.” That is, get some reps where you keep basically everything “how you normally do it,” except for one aspect of the skill. For example, just changing the timing of when you connect your hands for passers. Or keeping setting footwork the same, but changing your contact point from rep-to-rep. This is a good method for exploring the space and finding what feels right.
Get Out Of The Groove
Related to Goldilocks Method is this idea to “Get Out Of The Groove.”
Players want to have repetitive success in practice, but competition creates a constantly changing environment. Helping players understand that they, “don’t want to hit the same serve twice,” for example can help them get more out of practice.
Self 1, Self 2
This concept is from Timothy Gallwey in his Inner Game series of books. I didn’t want to make this a sports psychology session, but we just touched on Self 1 and Self 2 in terms of cueing for motor learning. When cues are too much in the language of Self 1 (logical, rational, highly directive, etc), you limit the intuitive, reflexive power of Self 2. So we touched briefly on making cueing more external, talking the language of Self 2.
Could Get, Should Get
This concept seemed to connect with the players a lot and the coaches reported that this gave some structure to dispute resolution at practice. Is this something we need to get mad about and solve instantly? Or is this something we need to let roll off us and focus on the next play? As the coaches said to me in an email a few days after our session:
The other really important point you made was that when a miscommunication happens (which it will!) acknowledge it, figure out the ‘fix’ moving forward, “what’s going to happen next time to prevent the other team from scoring on that? Or to prevent that mistake?” - [we] found that VERY helpful because often the team just says “my bad” and move on without really acknowledging and LEARNING and changing to fix the problem.
Identifying “whose bad it was” isn’t about blame! It’s about identifying who is going to make the chance so that we (a) have trust the play will be made next time and (b) don’t have multiple players changing, which can create a different error the next time we encounter that situation.
Don’t Pass Two Balls At Once
The Could Get, Should Get also feeds into the “next play” mentality. Does this communication upgrade the next play? If not, save it for later. The way I described it to the players on the call was that passing a volleyball in serve receive is a really hard skill. It requires a lot of (mostly reflexive) brainpower. If you are still “fixing” the last play while the opponent is serving, it’s like you are still trying to pass the previous ball, while also passing another ball at the same time. Passing one ball is hard enough, passing two balls at once is just setting yourself up for failure.
My biggest takeaway was the idea that "you can't pass two balls at once" and just the general mindset that you have to move on after making a mistake otherwise it'll set you back and impact further plays.
Or, as another said in a complementary way:
We also really like the “you can’t pass 2 balls at once”. That was pure Joe “Volleyball Yoda” Trinsey.
Well, I certainly feel like Yoda when I am around these guys up here in Canada. Not because I’m wise, but because they are absolute monsters and I feel like a midget.
