Tuesday Toolbox: Coaching Eyework Pt1

What to watch for?

I’ve been getting so many good questions lately that my 3-part Mailbag…

Winter Wrap-Up Mailbag Pt1
Winter Wrap-Up Mailbag Pt2
Winter Wrap-Up Mailbag Pt3

… wasn’t even enough to include this great question.

I am wondering how to watch a match as an aspiring head coach? Assuming 1 assistant or maybe none at all. I’m just a couple years into this, have only been an assistant, but want to be a head coach at the high school varsity level and possibly the high school club level. I can talk to the team about mindset/motivational stuff, but feel like the game moves a bit fast for me right now so it’s tough to know what to watch for, and I feel like I lose credibility if I’m only talking about mindset.

I don’t want to say results-based things like “pass better” - I don’t think that’s usually helpful - but I want to be able to bring up SIMPLE tactical/technical changes that could help going forward in the match. What should I watch for? Should I watch our side of the net more, or the other side? (I also want to be able to watch a Nebraska match, for example, and be able to do some simple analysis to work on my coaching eye. I’ve started watching opposing middles to see if they’re often shadowing/committing to our middle, for example.)

Long way of saying: I want to be able to watch a match in real time and have something useful to say about the actual volleyball, in a way that can help the team, without giving them too much to think about.

It’s a great question and I separated it from the mailbag series, because it aligns with the content series I’m doing for spring. This winter I did some longer, less-frequent posts where I’ve gone deep into planning and strategy for juniors club coaches.

This spring I’ll put out ~3 articles per week that will be a little shorter, and have a little more topical variety. The 3 topics are:

Tuesday Toolbox
Friday Fitness
Sandy Sundays

I want a little something for everybody. I haven’t done a true Beach Week in a while, and I want to dedicate plenty of time to that as the NCAA and warm-weather-area beach seasons ramp up and even the cold-weather areas will be playing beach by the end of spring. Since the majority of readers here are either dual-surface or indoor-only coaches, I’ll also try to link some of the beach content to cross-training purposes. At the NCAA level, few players play both surfaces these days. But for juniors, I believe that beach and indoor are still the best way to cross-train for each other.

On Fridays I’m going to include some content on physical training. I’ll mix between the macro and micro levels and try not to get bogged down too deep in the weeds.

And Tuesdays will be reserved for a short, ultra-tactical piece on developing your coaching toolbox. My goal with these Tuesday pieces will be to give you something that will make you 1% better the next time you step in the gym.

And here’s where we get to the reader question, which I’m going to need more than one part to handle in order. What I’m going to talk about today is, “what do I look at while the play is happening?” And I’m even going to narrow that a little farther and just talk about how to do this at a practice.

This one never gets old…

Yeah, the reader specifically said, “I am wondering how to watch a match,” and here I am talkin bout practice.

Why?

Well, just as players train their skills in practice and try to transfer to competition, so must coaches. So if you don’t have good coaching eyework in practice, you sure won’t have it in a match.

Watch 1 Thing At A Time

If I could give aspiring coaches just one piece of advice for practice, it would be, “just watch one thing at a time.” When I shared my origin story in the early days of this Substack, I mention taking a trip to UW, sleeping on a couch, and watching spring practice. I had been into GMS for about a year, going to clinics, etc, so I was pumped to be at UW, one of the prize jewels of the GMS system.

But I quickly felt overwhelmed. Man, how could their coaches see everything? Here’s the answer: they couldn’t!

In a moment of kindness I’ll never be able to repay, Keno took me aside and said, “hey, just come stand next to me at the endline while I watch the blockers.” I realized he wasn’t just gazing over the court like a master of the volleyball universe, seeing everything. No, he would say things like, “this blocker has been working on her jab step, so I’m just looking to see what her feet do.”

So he wasn’t watching the whole play, he was just watching blocking.
And he wasn’t watching all the blockers, he was just watching one blocker.
And he wasn’t even watching everything that blocker did, he was just focusing on her footwork.

And you know what? I found that when I did that, I could actually see (almost) “everything” that he saw. Since I was already familiar with the GMS lingo (I had already been to a clinic and listened to him coach blocking), it was only a few minutes before I could think in almost the same exact phrases too.

What really hooked me was one particular play that I can remember this day. The middle blocker tried to block a ball to the left, came down and looked toward Keno at the end line. I had been watching and in my head, I thought the phrase, “jab step too big, crossover too small.” As she looked up at him, Keno shouted, “jab step too big, crossover too small!”

So let me get this straight… if I understand the terminology and intention of the movement, and I look at the right thing, I could literally give the same exact feedback as one of the best coaches in the country? Does that make me one of the best coaches in the country??

No… no it didn’t.

BUT!

Even New Coaches Can Give Great Feedback

There’s a lot more to coaching that giving the right feedback. But within a limited scope, it’s entirely possible for a beginning coach to give the same feedback as an expert coach. This is because expert coaching isn’t necessarily about seeing what nobody else can see. Think about it, if what you’re asking the player to do is so mysterious that only an expert can see it… how can you expect the player to understand it?

Now understand, that I’m speaking from a perspective that you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. If you don’t understand that a swing block move involves 3 steps with the first being a small jab step and the second being a big crossover step, then yeah, you’re not going to be able to give effective feedback on that particular thing, because you don’t know what you’re looking for.

But, in this instance, I had a reasonable idea of what a good swing block move. I could see the difference between a good first step and one that was too big. So, if I just looked at the right spot every time, I could see it pretty much every time.

I Don’t Know, I Was Watching The…

These 7 words have ended up being one of the most powerful phrases in my coaching toolbox.

I can remember being a younger coach and actually joking around with some other club coaches about what our go-to phrases were when a kid asked us something and we didn’t really see it but we felt like we needed to say something. Stuff like:

“Hey yeah, you just got to keep your elbow up.”
”Remember to keep that ball in front of you.”
”You have to give yourself a good toss.”

This moment in the UW gym was when that totally flipped for me. The power of looking at one specific thing and being able to coach with absolute conviction that your feedback was true hit me so hard that it also made me realize the converse must also be true: I resolved never to say something if I wasn’t sure that I saw it.

I came back to my club practices (I took a 3-week trip in the spring of club season to go watch UW women and Pepperdine men practice) a changed coach. I cannot stress how powerful this change was for me. I immediately started coaching differently. I looked at one thing, gave immediate and clear feedback on it, and I just stopped saying anything about anything else.

The results were immediate. I came back after our spring break and we had something like 3 or 4 weeks before our last qualifier. Like anything in coaching, there’s a lot of luck, and things are rarely attributable to just what you did in practice but… we had an awesome qualifier.¹ At our team dinner after the first day of play multiple parents came up to me and said something to the effect of, “your trip out west must have really energized you, all the girls have been talking about how good practice has been.”

And I really learned that when a player asked me something, and I didn’t see it, that it wasn’t a big deal to say to me, “I didn’t see, I was watching X.” Actually, scratch that, not only was it not a big deal, the players actually… kind of liked it! Because, very quickly, they saw that the flip side was that, if I said I was watching something, I was watching it every time. If I told them they needed to work on their transition footwork, they could look over at me after doing their transition footwork, and they could see my eyes were locked on what they were doing. If they wanted feedback they got it. (Actually, let’s be honest, at that stage in my coaching career, they were probably getting the feedback whether they wanted it or not.)

From Club To Elite

About a year and a half after this, I was at my first NCAA coaching job. Not long after that, I was on a National Team coaching staff.

And it turns out, the higher the level of player you coach, the more they can sniff the BS real quick. Don’t come with some vague, “umm yeah, get your elbow up,” if you didn’t see what happened. There’s a lot of that, even at the pro levels. Players sniff it out and there’s no faster way to lose credibility with players.

I tell aspiring coaches that my initial “coaching” of elite level players was less of a coach and more of a mirror. It wasn’t necessarily me saying, “make sure your left foot is here.” It was more that a player might say to me, “hey I’m really trying to get my left foot here every time, can you watch that for me?” And I’d say sure. I’d dutifully stand there and nothing else in the world existed for me except that left foot and that spot on the court. And guess what? I could see it pretty much every time. I could give limited but useful feedback even to the best players in the world.

And I never, ever tried to BS them.

Focus: The Superpower

I know I said my Toolbox Tuesdays were going to be short and ultra-tactical. And somehow that led to 1000+ words of backstory and tangent. My wife is totally unsurprised. So let’s circle back to a short summary of this:

Develop your eyework by watching one thing at a time.
Let your players know what you’re watching and what they can expect feedback on.
Say what you see.
Don’t say what you don’t see.

If you want to have the ability to see a match, it starts with the ability to see different pieces in practice. Next practice, pick one thing and get laser-focused on it for a 5-10 minute stretch of practice. I bet you’ll be surprised at how effective this makes you as a coach.

1. I’ve shared a story about this particular tournament a few times, because on the second day we were down to one middle: we knew one of our three would be missing because she was playing in the state tennis championship and the other rolled her ankle in warmups (warmups!!!) the first match. So I stuck my 2nd libero in at middle and had her not block and just roam for tips while we blocked with 2 in the front row. We won all 3 matches that day, all against teams that would end up qualifying for Nationals in one bracket or the other. That was the day that I learned that sideout was way more important than blocking.