Volleyball Coaching Life-Taking a Ride

As we wind through the NCAA tournament, we see a lot of the personalities of the players and coaches come through. Two stuck out in my mind for a thing that linked them. Many other coaches probably said or expressed the same sentiments, but I didn’t see all the press conferences.

Travis Hudson of Western Kentucky and Dave Shondell of Purdue were addressing the gathered press after losses in the tournament. Both are veteran coaches, and both are high caliber coaches and people. Both talked about the disappointment of getting beat and not moving on in the tournament. Both expressed appreciation for their players, coaching staff, administrators, and institutions. The thing that perked my ears up was when they talked about how their players took them on a long, extended, and joyous ride. Both thanked their players for giving them the gift of experiencing the successes of this season and this year’s tournament.

This stood out in my mind because usually coaches are buried in the details of administering to the team, thinking about the strategy and tactics of the game, boiling the details of the chess match over and over in their heads, and all the million and one details of being the leader of a team, an organization. Many coaches look at the successful season as a goal achieved, that point of view is similar to that of the project manager planning and making sure everything executes according to plan and reacting to each situation when it does not go according to plan, all the while hitting your marks as planned. A significant deviation from that mode of thinking is that a sports team is not a machine or a process, a sports team is a unique aggregation of many moving parts, fueled by passions, resiliency, desire, high level execution, both mentally and physically, and the all-important intangibles.

The intangibles are what makes life interesting, it is the reason that we play the game rather than decide wins and losses by simulation. This is what makes playing sports so exciting and enjoyable, that substantial chunk of uncertainty makes the emotions soar and dip and it makes the adrenaline ebb and flow.

The reason that I loved hearing Travis and Dave talk about being taken for a ride by their players is that they implicitly acknowledge that for every thing that they do, for everything that they had planned and implemented, taught, trained, and refined, the ball is in the hands of the players. It is through the generosity of the players’ spirit; the largess of their commitment to the coaches’ vision; their willingness to be in pain and uncomfortable; and their love of their team, teammates, and coaches, which is exemplified by the sacrifices they make in suppressing their selfish tendencies for the greater good of their team. Indeed, it is an amorphous and ambiguous spirit that can’t be described by mere words that creates the magic, that puts a team on a magic ride to greatness.

It takes experience, maturity, and self-awareness for someone to recognize that no matter how much influence a person has over a large organization such as a volleyball team, they are just along for the ride. While they contribute and affect all parts of what gets the ride going and moving successfully, in the end, the difference between the magical and the mundane is due to the players, the trust, the love, the discipline, the self-sacrifice, and of course, how one deals with the intangibles that turns good seasons into great seasons.

Much respect to Travis and Dave.