Educational Theory and Coaching

Okay--this is actually from my book on coaching.  I think that the stuff here is applicable beyond volleyball--across all sports.  (But if you really like it...consider buying the book.  It's not a collection of magic drills--it's about the more important, less considered points of coaching)

 

* * *

There are a lot of misconceptions about coaching, from observers and

fans, as well as by coaches themselves. There’s the presumption that a

high-level athlete will automatically become a high-level coach. This is

not a volleyball-specific observation. With the NFL, I’ve never seen a

highlight with John Harbaugh or Bill Belichick playing, but they sure

seem to know how to coach the heck out of their sport. How many World

Series did Yogi Berra or Ted Williams win as managers? The answer:

a lot fewer than guys with limited ability to play like Tony LaRussa or

Tommy Lasorda. There is also the stereotype that coaches are just ‘dumb

jocks’ hoping to relive their glory days, but can you think of a successful

coach who fits this stereotype in sports now? It’s difficult whether you

are talking collegiate or professional coaches.

If you are going to come up with synonyms for ‘coaching’, what do you

think of? The ones that pop into my mind: teach, instruct, educate. Unfortunately,

many people don’t equate coaching with those other words.

They think of coaching … differently, as you can find out if you attend

your average boys high school basketball game on any given Friday

night. That’s too bad because coaching IS teaching. What goes on in a

gymnasium, when you are truly coaching, is no different than a classroom,

other than the fact that there aren’t desks in a gymnasium, track,

or soccer field. John Kessel, director of youth development for the US

National Program, asks coaches, “Where’s your white board?” driving

home the point that the gym is a classroom.

The catch is that most coaches are conditioned to think otherwise.

We buy into the belittling comments that ‘it’s just sports’ or ‘you’re just

a coach’ and lose sight of the bigger picture (don’t worry, it’s not like I

haven’t done the same thing; it happens all the time). Except I can see a

protest forming as you read this: “But, Jim, I’m not a teacher.”

That doesn’t matter. We teach and learn all the time, and we don’t

have to be a professional educator to do that (or a student on the other

end of things), but if we think about some basic elements of education,

we can improve our coaching. We should take what works in the classroom

and use it in the gym.

I’m not well-versed in educational theory, and a valid argument can

be made that a lot of educational theory is best left as theory because

it isn’t practical and doesn’t work with most groups of students. That

hasn’t stopped me from learning a few things and becoming dangerous

though. To start with, as a coach, I think there are three different methods

of teaching that work in a practice:

• Direct Instruction

• Inquiry-based Instruction

• Cooperative Learning

DIRECT INSTRUCTION:

Anyone who’s been in school is familiar with ‘direct instruction.’ A

professor stands at the front of a lecture hall, puts formulas and facts on

a board via a PowerPoint, and students sit and take notes on what he

says. When the hour is done, students close their notebooks and leave.

There’s little effective interaction taking place with direct instruction,

perhaps a question taken at the end of class. Otherwise, it’s up to the

student to reach the proper conclusions or fit the pieces together on her

own.

In the gym, how many times have you seen coaches stand and explain

a skill with players circled around, the players doing nothing but staring

at the coach? Or the other variation of this — the players stand,

hands on hips, as they watch the coach demonstrate the skill. In both

scenarios, the players are passive, and though there’s a time and place

for that, direct instruction doesn’t work as efficiently as other available

strategies though it does allow you to reach more people (the whole lecture

hall of 500 or a gym full of campers).

Think about your team and you as a coach. How many times have you

grumbled to yourself that your kids don’t have patience? Exactly! Don’t

worry — as coaches, we’ve all done it, but this is the big issue with direct

instruction. It is the least effective means of instruction for younger

students; they are still learning patience and have trouble focusing on

instructions for more than a few minutes at a time (if you are a parent,

you understand this as well!). Take it a different direction. Think back

to time in college. How many students were asleep during lectures? I’d

wager a lot more than were sleeping through their chemistry labs.

There’s another big problem with direct instruction, especially when

you are coaching younger players. Imagine you are in a math class and

the teacher is going over the Pythagorean Theorem. What if two students

have already completed Calculus II and three others just started

introductory multiplication and division? Direct instruction can’t deal

efficiently with widely varied levels of ability. In terms of volleyball,

how effective would it be to explain how to hit a quick set to a group of

players where two are collegiate all-Americans, others are high schoolers,

while several are starting their first day of volleyball ever? The collegiate

athletes have mastered the skill (relatively speaking), the high

schoolers understand and now need the requisite practice with it, while

the younger athletes will simply stare and go, “Bwah???”

So I think the question becomes — how much do I, the coach, rely on

direct instruction? Truthfully, I relied on it a ton when I started because

I was insecure and wanted to prove to my players that I knew what I

was talking about. Over the years, I’ve changed and I save the use of direct

instruction in practice for certain things like reviewing handouts on

team rules or our schedule, etc., but generally things that don’t require

critical thinking and where the players all are on a level playing field.

I’ll use it when we hold camps, too, but only for a few minutes until we

break campers into significantly smaller groups of kids. So when you’re

evaluating yourself, can you identify where you are using direct instruction?

Are you matching the good points of this style to what you need, or

are you using it out of habit?

INQUIRY-BASED INSTRUCTION:

This is one of the newer trends in education, and it’s one I liked using

when I was a high school teacher though I didn’t know it had a hoity-toity

name. With inquiry-based instruction, the emphasis is on problem solving

and critical thinking. It’s tougher than you realize; young people

are conditioned at a young age to shut up, pay attention, and memorize,

memorize, memorize, and that only stupid people ask questions. Emphasizing

standardized tests has not helped. It’s not a new issue — an

early ’80s Doonesbury cartoon addressing this very issue. When I taught

U.S. History, I preferred giving essay questions that required critical

thinking, something like:

“There are many reasons for the start of the Civil War. In your opinion,

which were the more important factors, the economic, political, or social

issues? Choose one and explain why it was more important.

Provide concrete examples for your assertion.”

This gave students a choice, and it forced them to think about their

answers, though I’m not naïve; I’m sure many students chose based on

what they knew the most about regardless of their belief, but that was

fine because that required thinking, too, a realization of their limits and

what would/wouldn’t work for them. In a science classroom, I suspect

this style of education is much more hands-on than in social studies

classrooms, just not always. In college, I took a class called “Simulations

in the Classroom” for Political Science that set up simulations based

on this style of instruction (though again, I’m not sure Dr. Rasmussen

knew the label for what he was doing), but went one step further. After

working through problems, the class returned to the beginning and

went through each step of the process, exploring how different individuals

and different groups reached their decisions. Those class discussions

provided fascinating insight into thoughts, not to mention how the

simulations were designed to manipulate particpants’ actions.

But can this work in a sports practice? Again, I was skeptical. After

all, when coaching, young people need focus, they need specific tasks

and goals assigned. How many drills have you pre-determined are lasting

for 100 tosses or 50 good passes or 20 kills? Look at basketball practices;

for the past 20 or 30 years, basketball coaches start the clock in

the gym and run drills for a predetermined amount of time and woe be

to God if they deviate from the schedule! Essentially, coaches have been

conditioned to believe practices must be regimented and organized down

to the last miniscule detail. We’ve been led to believe that the coach is

the center of practice and that without the coach in direct charge of

everything, practice falls apart. To steal from an old poem, “The center

cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Except it isn’t true. Oh, trust me, I spent years following the trend of

micro-managing practices and details,until a couple of years ago. That

was the point I realized — I’m an idiot. It started with a presentation I

attended at the American Volleyball Coaches Association’s annual convention.

The presentation was by John Kessel, USA Volleyball’s Director

of Sport Development. Kessel’s responsibility is improving coaching

at all levels of the game, 'grow the game', and finding ways to incorporate research from

other avenues into the sport for the betterment of the game. I went in

to his talk with the mindset that turning practice over to the players

and an inquiry-based strategy was silliness, especially since my job as

a college coach is to win (while developing better adults … the reality is

that few college coaches remain in their jobs if they lose more often than

win over the years), and I was equally certain that it was foolhardy with

younger players since they lacked the skills and knowledge to play the

game at a high level.

One hour later — and that’s all it took, one hour —I realized I

was missing out. Worse still, I should’ve known better from past experience

in a gym (more on that in a bit). Kessel’s presentation took place on

a demo court and for his demo players, he was coaching a dozen 12- and

13-year-old girls of various experience levels. Over the next hour, he

showed how inquiry-based theory works in a gym. He set up the basics

of a drill and told the players to begin, ‘ignoring’ the players as he talked

with the attending coaches. Behind him, some of the girls caught on

right away while others struggled. A-ha! It wasn’t working. But then

the kids started trying different ways to work things out, started talking

with one another, and within 5 or 10 minutes, they had the knack of

things and the drill proceeded smoothly. Once the drill was going well,

Kessel stopped it and explained a more complicated drill before backing

out again and allowing the players to figure it out themselves. If they

had a question, he answered it, but otherwise he let them work unimpeded.

The kids got it. Just as important — they liked it, you could see

it on their faces. Only one hour of court time and there was an obvious,

tangible look of accomplishment on many of the girls’ faces. I was gobsmacked.

Not only were those girls better on the court, he’d helped (if

only in a small amount) increase those athletes’ self-confidence and self-esteem,

which is exactly what we are supposed to be doing as coaches of

young people.

Just as important, afterward, John spent another 30 minutes helping

coaches work through various ways of implementing this sort of

approach into practices, applying inquiry-based instruction with the

coaches he spoke with, just in a different form. I appreciate what Kessel

did because it offered rudimentary mentoring, it created peer relationships

between coaches, and though it wasn’t part of his seminar requirement, he

remained to speak with those coaches above and beyond what was necessary. I

didn’t dwell on that at the time though. I was kicking myself because I’d

seen something similar years before when I was at Ohio State (though

again, I don’t think Jim Stone was thinking in terms of tangible

educational theory).

Jim Stone didn’t organize practice with a clock or with set times in

mind; instead, his practice plan was almost always written on the

front half of a 3x5 index card. His logic was simple — if the drill is going

well, why stop it? If the drill is going poorly, why continue? Instead,

move on to one you can succeed with. I’m simplifying it, obviously. There

are times as a coach you continue with a shaky drill to force players to

work through a specific issue; there’s value in that, but Stone understood

that it was more important to keep players’ minds in the game. This next

part should sound familiar. Many times in practice, Stone set the drill

up, asked if there were questions, and then when the players started, he

backed up and observed. In those drills, if a coach was involved, it was

only to start play with a freeball or down-ball, otherwise, it was the players

trying to beat the drill and figure out what would bring success.

Over those three seasons, Stone’s teams went 74-18 and in 1994, won the Big

Ten and made the Final Four. So why the heck did I blank that from my mind when

I became a coach? You imitate what you know and what works, yet I

blanked those memories from my mind until Kessel’s presentation.

Now I actively incorporate inquiry-based instruction into practice. I

set a drill up, put challenges into the drill for the players to get past,

then sit back and observe. Sometimes I’ll take it further, and ask the

players what they think we need to work on, what drills they think will

fix problems or improve our team. When I did that this year, I was surprised;

my team didn’t shy away from hard drills, whether physically

or mentally demanding. They enjoyed having input, and other than a

hiccup in September, the program enjoyed its best season ever. Indeed,

I’ve tried this approach with my club kids the past two seasons, and

used it to teach them different systems of offense and defense, and I’ve

been stunned at the results. We’re better physically — that comes with

practice, but their real improvement has been mental. The players have

a better understanding of what the opponents are doing, know what we

should be doing, and no longer require constant coach input to act —

they now show initiative. Better still, the athletes enjoy practice more

and I’ve relaxed because I don’t need to nag or carp constantly. I like it. I

just wish I would’ve remembered Stone’s practices sooner or seen Kessel

give that presentation a decade ago. My bad.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING:

You see this in schools regularly. Teachers break a classroom down

into small groups who then circle their desks and work together on a

project as the teacher supervises, overseeing the groups work. As a

teacher, this is more efficient as you only need to supervise a few groups

while the students do most of the work. Ideally within a group, the students

do equal work, but that’s theory; reality doesn’t work quite as

well. There will always be some who work harder than others. When

you choose small groups, you hope for one of two things. If the students

are of equal ability, they push one another to do quality work. If the

students are of mixed ability, the teacher hopes that the better students

help the weaker students, so that everyone is successful and can work

to their strengths (which will get discussed a little bit down the road).

When I taught, I used cooperative learning in two projects, one on

music and the other, “The Space Race” game. The music project involved

writing a paper, research for information, listening to the appropriate

style of music, and a group presentation with visual aids. This was done

so that students with different skill-sets could work together; some students

were whizzes with PowerPoint and technology while others enjoyed

public speaking, and still others were adept at regular research. I

never assigned people to the various sections of the project. The groups

did that on their own.

The Space Race went further. Using a simulation called “Race to the

Moon,” I modified it with my friend Dave for classroom purposes. We

then took it a step further and made the simulation a competition between

his classes (as the USA) and mine (in the role of the USSR), so that

the students were required to cooperate within their group and across

the other groups within their class (each represented a various government

agency or branch), so that at the end, success could be judged in

multiple ways and we could dissect the value of cooperation. Indeed, at

points in the simulation, the two opposing classes had to cooperate to

avoid disaster, but were limited to communicating via emails relayed by

the teachers. A decade later, many of our former students still remember

details that I’ve forgotten, so that when they mention them, I smile,

nod, and say “Oh, yeah, that was great.”

Without thinking of the theory behind it, you’ve seen this used in gyms

before and probably used it yourself. When you pair kids up to work on

a skill, you’re using cooperative learning. Three-person over-the-net

pepper — cooperative learning. It sounds silly, but even doing 6-on-6

freeball drills falls within the definition of cooperative learning. Isn’t that

the ultimate purpose of a youth team, to learn values like cooperation? The question

to consider is whether you should let the kids pick their own groups or if

you, the coach, should. There’s value in each method, just as in dividing

them by skill level.

The big issue I’ve had in the classroom or gym has been personality.

Some kids have dominating personalities and regardless of skill, that

will overwhelm a group. If the kid’s got a positive personality, it can be a good thing

that pushes her group to work harder which also means you probably

don’t need to supervise them much. Unfortunately, negative personalities

have the opposite effect and worse, left alone, they slowly wear

down other kids who have reasonable work ethics.

Obviously, the answer is to use all three of these methods. How you

do that is up to you and what you feel your strengths and weaknesses

are as a coach. Think of your role-models. Who are the best teachers you

remember from school (best, not necessarily the ones you liked)? Which

coach got the most effort from her players, regardless of skill level? Don’t

hesitate to talk to those coaches. Ask what their strategies were; the truly

great coaches are happy to teach whether it is a junior high athlete, an

All-American, or a fellow coach; they understand what USAV and the AVCA

are attempting to do—grow the game. We do that with players and coaches.

Fans, too.

There’s another part of education that’s important. I understood it

because of my mom and sister before I learned the psychology of it. For

me, school came easily. I never took notes. I sat, listened, and distilled

the essence of a lecture whether it was History, English, or Astronomy. I

don’t know why I have that ability — I just do. My mom didn’t have that

though. Neither did my step-father, so neither went on to school after

graduating high school.

But when I was in high school, my mom did start college. She got married

right out of high school and after a divorce, returned

to school. Because she hadn't worked hard in high school, Mom struggled with

taking notes during class and processing the information put on the blackboard.

Instead, she tape-recorded the lectures to play them back at home, listening to

them several times, stopping each time she didn’t understand something to

check her notes and the textbook. The process meant she put in 8 or 9 hours

daily to get her work done. Being young and cocky, I taunted her with how

easy classes came to me (something I regret now, but it was the callowness of

youth). I shouldn’t have. She found a strategy that worked for her. Four years

later, she graduated at the top of her nursing school class, earning her

BSN. My mom, the valedictorian.

My stepfather hated school, also, and after he died, I found two letters

from his high school principal talking about his poor behavior and attitude,

especially in English classes. Disliking school, he went straight to work

before owning his own automotive business. From the time he was five, he

loved taking apart machines. Like most kids, he was better taking them apart than

putting them together, but eventually, he got good at putting them together

again. Good enough that while I was off at college, he got tired

of his Bronco’s performance, so he took it completely apart, and I mean

completely. He cleaned each part, replaced worn-out ones, and put that

vehicle back together so that it looked and performed better than one

coming off the Ford assembly line, and never needed to consult a manual to do it.

Could you do that? I sure as heck couldn’t — that was the work of a mechanical

genius. That’s more family detail than you probably want, but it illustrates two

critical points:

• There are many different ways people learn and if we can combine those, we’re

more likely to be effective coaches and teachers.

• Success has many different definitions and we must always be

aware that how I define success as a coach may not be how a

player defines success (or happiness for that matter).

Again, I’m not an expert, but I have stayed at a Holiday Inn. I came

across the theory and explanation for all this while teaching Psychology

(I taught Psych because I admitted to taking two Psych classes in

college. That made me more qualified than anyone else apparently). The

textbook referred to it as VAT-K, an acronym referring to the three

primary means of learning used by people: Visual, Audio, and

Tactile/Kinesthetic.

How do you apply each of these in your practice?

VISUAL:

There are some simple things you can do with visual. Have you

watched video footage of your matches? Players are always intrigued to

watch matches from a different perspective, and with modern editing

technology, it is much easier to assemble footage relevant to players of

the same position or even for a single individual. Have you considered

filming practice? There is good software available for tablets of all types

that allows you to film 30-60 second snippets and then play it back in

slow-motion or with Madden-esque telestrator markings. Of course, you

also have the traditional use of video: watching an opponent’s match

and scouting them to figure out a strategy for an upcoming match.

The problem with these visual strategies is that they require time,

which is a precious commodity when you are teaching or have a regular

day-job, or else they require manpower. It isn’t efficient for the head

coach to focus on filming individuals during practice when you also have

to keep an eye on anywhere from 10 to 30 other players. Do you have a

team manager? Can players film one another? Do you have a parent you

trust who is willing to help all players equally?

Another less conventional alternative is visualization. Used by religion and

checked by science, there are tangible positive results that

come from visualization. Mike Hebert advocated this while at Illinois,

asking his players to picture key game situations and their actions at

those points in the match. In 2012, though I suspect my players don’t

remember us doing it, I asked them to think about the Region Championship

match and what they were going to do when we won. I emphasized

that I wanted them to have it planned out so that we celebrated

right. The catch with visualization though is whether the players take it

seriously. That’s your judgment, but at least visualization doesn’t require

significant resources and can be done in small doses, perhaps on a bus

before a match or at the end of a practice.

AUDIO:

There’s an old Greek saying, “We have one mouth and two ears, so

that we may listen twice as much as we speak.” There’s truth to that.

We learn a lot through our ears, whether it is listening to instructions

or other sounds. If two players set back and forth over a net, a coach can

tell if they are doing well or not from the sounds of the ball contacting

the players’ hands. You don’t need to see a home run hit; you can hear

the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd to know something has

happened. Listening is important, but how can you emphasize that other

than repeating its importance over and over (losing your temper and

the value of your words with each implored repetition to ‘LISTEN!!!’)?

With high school and college kids, you reach the point where you can’t

be all serious with them. They get tired, especially towards the end of

two-a-days in the fall, and when they tire, things like communication

are the first things to go. Consider changing drills to emphasize communication.

I like to do that in an absurd way when our communication

is on the fritz.

We play a game called “Oink, Moo, Woof.” It’s a normal 6-on-6 drill

where you keep score (you can do it however you want actually), except

there’s a catch. No one can talk or say anything, except for one of the

three animal sounds. Team A will say ‘oink’ if they are going to pass the

ball, ‘moo’ for a set, and ‘woof’ if they are hitting while Team B switches

it up, saying ‘oink’ for a hit instead. The two teams use the same words,

but for different purposes. If you don’t use your words or if you use words

other than oink/moo/woof, you lose the point. Pretty soon, you have hitters

trying to woof multiple times to signal what they want to hit and

passers will start mooing early if they know a freeball’s coming over the

net. We can’t play it past a game to 15 because we wind up laughing, but

it gets the point across concerning communication.

At a recent seminar, Jim Moore, Head Coach at the University of Oregon,

dealt with communication a different way. Because Oregon runs a fast offense,

communication is vital, so he limits his players to calling for a set with

a single word. Middles don’t yell, “One! One! One!” They say it once. You

can use that, too. Restrict what can be said and players learn to listen much

closer, communicating quickly and efficiently the relevant information.

Just as important for audio-learning, how loud are you in practice? If

you are giving instructions, can your players hear you on the other side

of the floor? What about on a second court? You can test this by setting

up a tape recorder. Listen to it after practice — can you hear yourself

clearly? If you can’t, chances are the players didn’t hear you either, creating

confusion during practice, maybe frustration, but also a definite

loss of efficiency. If volume is a problem, you can fix it easily — encourage

your players to say something if it wasn’t loud enough, and then

make a conscious effort to be louder. That’s right; you need to practice

being louder.

It also sounds boring, but ask your players to repeat instructions

back, forcing them to take what they’ve heard, process it, and

repeat it, a mini-game of Telephone. If they struggle to repeat the information,

you need to repeat it or consider a different way of teaching

the information, or consider the possibility that you must break the information

into smaller chunks.

Finally, when I coached high school, I liked taking players to college matches. Very few

top-level college teams struggle with communication (at least from the

perspective of high school coaches and athletes). If asked to watch the

communication between players (or players and coaches) beforehand,

high school athletes are shocked by the difference. I used to get feedback

such as “They all talk all the time;” “Did you hear how loud she called

for that?” or “They get together and huddle after every point, not just

celebrations.”

TACTILE-KINESTHETIC:

This is the most obvious. People learn through touching and doing,

not just watching and listening. Steve Kerr didn’t learn to hit treys by

watching the NBA on NBC and Peyton Manning didn’t become the best

quarterback of the past 20 years by playing Madden 2014. They excel

because they practiced their skills, hundreds and thousands of times.

The more kids touch the ball, the faster they get better.

This is a critical point and can help turn a team’s fortunes around

quickly. What do you do in practice? Are you scrimmaging with one ball

in play, 12 people playing and six standing on the sides? Are you hitting

balls at lines of diggers, so that one athlete is performing a skill while 17

stand waiting for their turn?

We’ll come back to the gym in a moment. For a second, think about

your experience in math classes throughout grade, junior high and high

school (sorry if this causes queasy stomachs or bad flashbacks). When

you had math homework, did you just do one problem on a page? Dear

God, no. Every day in math, Mrs. _______ sent you home with dozens of

math problems. Is there anything less thrilling for a 15-year-old than

taking home 14 geometry proofs for class the next day? But the reality

is, the more you practice a skill, the better you get. You don’t get good at

math doing one problem per day, and you don’t get proficient at reading

by ignoring your Lit book and only reading the day’s Far Side from a calendar.

You practice, you correct, you repeat, and eventually it becomes

ingrained—you get it right so that being correct becomes the norm, automatic.

Back to the gym. Sports are no different. If you can figure out how to

increase the number of times your athletes touch the ball, the better

they will get. Most volleyball coaches have used hitting lines in practice.

How can you improve that basic drill?

1. Why not use two lines—one setter pushing it to the OH and the

other setting quicks for the middle hitter or sets to the RS?

Now you have two hitters going at the same time and two working

on hitting while two are setting. This doubles the effective ball

contacts.

2. What if you had hitters toss the balls to themselves and set the ball

to the setters instead of just tossing the ball?

Now we’re getting two ball-control touches in addition to the swings

and sets. Without adding much time, we’ve added even more useful

contacts to the drill.

3. How about we move the lines of hitters to the other side of the net

and start the hitter at the net. As the first in line tosses the ball, the

hitter comes off the net and sets the ball after it comes over the net,

then hits the ball?

Now suddenly, we’ve got setting, we’ve got hitting, we’ve got transition

footwork, and we’re playing a ball after it comes over the net.

Without much extra delay, more contacts.

4. Put a back-row player deep behind the hitter. The toss over the net

goes to the passer, so the hitter must be ready for a potentially

worse pass. If you worry about too many bad passes, have the coach

toss directly to the setter if the ball is shanked.

Now we’ve added a passer to make it more serve-receive like. We

can rotate from tosser to passer to hitter and we now have a multitude

of appropriate volleyball contacts. We haven’t added much

time to the practice, but now we’ve got two lines of full volleyball

contacts going, simulating serve-receive under controlled circumstances.

Essentially, we’ve increased the number of contacts 50%

and made them more game appropriate, and if you have players

with enough skill, instead of tossing the ball over the net, they can

hit down-balls. Better still, they could hit them from balls set to

them by other players, yet again increasing the number of contacts.

We can do this with any number of drills — when serving, put passers

on the court and setters for the passers — because how often do you

serve at an empty court during a game? Working on blocking? Why not

use two blockers rather than one? Why not toss to a setter who possibly

sets to multiple hitters — thus giving you hitting practice, not to mention

a more ‘real’ sense of the timing and issues blockers will face during

a game? Think of your practice and where you can add touches to

the ball, footwork repetitions, anything, so that players are not standing

and watching unnecessarily.

John Kessel writes a blog with good ideas in it, and I’ll be honest, I

“steal” stuff from him on a regular basis. One of the great games he

explained at the 2012 AVCA Convention is “Speedball,” an improved

version of Queen of the Court. Queen of the Court has a winning side

and when the winners lose, you lose time standing around as players run

under the net to reach the winning-side. That’s lost time, not to mention

that running under the net during a volleyball match never happens.

Speedball puts multiple kids on both sides and requires that the losing

side serve immediately after a point is over. It saves (roughly) five seconds

between plays and players are constantly ready, aware that the ball

will come over immediately. Now you’ve got kids hustling, aware they’ll

lose if not ready, you’ve got a server who has to immediately get on the

court to play defense, and a dozen other little things — I won’t mention

them all because I think you get the point.

Once you start increasing the reps, the skill level will improve. You may

not notice it immediately; the change will be gradual, so keep it in mind

over the long haul and enjoy the comments you get from people who

watch your team because the praise from observers is as rewarding as that

huge paycheck you earn.

As a final observation regarding education, there’s an ongoing debate

regarding the importance (or lack thereof) of class size for teaching

young people. Some argue that there’s a link between academic success

and improvement with small class size while the opposition argues that

the link is far less important as issues such as teacher salary, location,

or the initial aptitude of students.

How does that hold for something like volleyball? Look at the education

methods discussed previously; how many of those are effective with

more than 12-15 athletes at a time? How many athletes can you fit onto

a court? And even then, if you can squeeze more kids onto a court, is that

conducive to their learning environment — have you tried to corral 25

excited 9-year-olds before? How many times can a player touch a ball?

This was discussed earlier in terms of high school programs, but doesn’t

this matter for club volleyball as well? How much playing time is there

if we put 12 players on a team rather than eight? With a roster of eight,

you’re increasing playing time by 50% over a roster of 12 (presuming you

are trying to do the right thing and give everyone who has joined your

team a chance to play). The excuse for a larger roster that I hear is, “The

value is in practice, and during matches those players are learning as

they watch.” Again, with eight instead of 12, you have more opportunity

to touch the ball in practice and the coach’s attention is better focused,

not to mention the argument that learning-by-doing is often a superior

method of improving physical skills. Is a club’s bottom line hurt? Sure,

because you now have four less players per team and you’ll need more

coaches, but isn’t the trade-off worth it? If the object is to provide the

best possible instruction, it is our obligation as coaches to do our best to

achieve that.