Volleyball Coaching Life-Resulting

How often have we caught ourselves saying: “The ball knows!” After the opponent serves into the net or hit the ball out of bounds after a bad ref call? How about when we were on the verge of correcting a player’s mechanics but stop in mid correction because the hit was a kill or the pass went to target?  We were resulting.

Resulting can be defined as our propensity to mistake the quality of our decisions with the outcome of the decision, that is, we let the result determine how we judge our decision.

We assume that we win because we make good decision, even though it is might be because of good luck. Conversely, we assume we lose because of bad luck or bad decisions.

In any competitive sport, coaching decisions are made with imperfect information with very little forethought due to the time constraints, the difficulty is magnified during live game action, but even when we do have the time to make the decision, there are hidden underlying factors that are not measurable nor are unidentifiable which affects our decision. Under those circumstances, we will resort to resulting because of the lack of other information.

The resulting habit is comforting to inexperienced coaches, but even the most seasoned coaches can find themselves resulting, because it is such an easy choice. Why bother looking for faults with a decision that resulted in your favor. In fact, many coaches are more likely to result when the decisions become more complicated.

One way of resulting is to come to a false conclusion regarding a decision after a positive outcome: the good guys won the point or the game or the match and the coach takes credit for the win attributing it to their own good decision making, even if it was because of sheer luck. This is a false positive: the outcome is positive but the reason for the outcome is false. This erroneous belief in the reason for the win will perpetuate in the coach’s decision making toolbox, and the same decision will be repeated again under the same situation.

The other possible outcome of resulting is the conjugate situation: the result was negative, and the team lost the point, game or match. The coach, being under the self-serving bias will opt to blame bad luck or bad decisions for the failure and move on rather than critically examine the decisions which led to the losing result. The unintended consequence of this bias is that possibly good decisions are dismissed as bad ones once the result is known. More insidiously, the coach blames the bad result on bad luck and won’t consider analyzing the decision. This is a false negative, where the bad outcome obscured the real reason for the bad outcome.

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke talks about decision making in high stakes poker, and the effect that resulting has on her ability to thrive in her profession as a poker player and how she dealt with honing her decision making skills. The book is about decision making and her examples dealt with decision-making processes for one person playing poker against the house and other players; their decisions are just one determining factor amongst many other decision-making processes. The game involves all the decision makers, the cards, and the randomness associated with the cards. As complicated as that is, the volleyball coach is dealing with even more interactions and decisions.

For the volleyball coach, the game outcome is due to the interaction between bench decisions from the coaching staff, how the six players interpret and execute those decisions, the reaction and decisions of the six opposing players, the reaction and decisions of the opposing coaching staff, the reaction and decisions of the four officials, as well as the ever-present uncertainty. Volleyball coaches are having to have their decisions interpreted by the players, an added filter to the process. This filtering effect from the players and the additional complexity from the number of moving parts in a volleyball match make it even more critical that volleyball coaches refrain from resulting and analyze their decision making honestly and critically.

Resulting gives us false readings on our decision making, either false positives or false negatives. A false positive fits nicely with a coach’s confirmation bias even though the reason may be due to luck rather than sound decision making, which may lead the coach to continuously repeat the bad decision. In the false negative case, the coach may avoid pursuing a good decision because of the bad outcome. Sadly, resulting ends up confusing the coach; both false positives and false negatives hinders coaching decision-making by hiding the real reason for the result.