Volleyball Coaching Life-But can you coach?

But can you coach?
You have graduated with a degree in exercise science, you got you masters in exercise Bioenergetics and were a GA in the weight room at State U working with a leader in the field, Benjamin J. Bicep. You have done three internships with professional teams. You have every certification offered so that you have more letters after your name that letters in the alphabet. You know the Krebs cycle forward and backward, you can tell me the how the fascicle length changes with each exercise.

Now what? It begs the question can you coach? Have you ever done any real coaching? Have you ever gotten your hands dirty? This is not some old man’s fantasy; this is what I am seeing today. Young men and women with no idea of what coaching is. How to coach people not numbers. How to organize to teach effectively. Coaching is not an industry; it is a profession. Where are the professionals? All the theory is important, but it is trumped by practice. Can you apply it to make the athlete better and give the athlete a good competitive experience?

From Vern Gambetta

This is yet another great post from coach Vern Gambetta. It is great food for thought because it goes to the crux of our raison d’etre.

Many coaches approach coaching as a technical practice rather than human interactions involving communications, empathy, and human understanding. The tail is wagging the dog in many instances. At the extremely basic level of coaching, it is all about teaching: teaching technique, teaching tactics and strategies, teaching mental preparation: teaching life, in all of its ambiguities and frustrating details. This is the part of coaching that does not come from books or webinars; yet, as Vern pointed out, this is where the state of coaching resides presently.

I didn't come from a technical coaching background, I came as an avid fan of my sports and a former player, a very bad former player at that, but I love the game. My career education was in engineering and that is where my career stood and that is educational background.

The volleyball was my escape from my graduate schoolwork, it was my escape from the rigors of a math and science dominant life. As I said I was a horrible player: I was either the second setter on the third team or the third setter on the second team for my university club team, I can't remember which; basically I was not good enough to play on the best team. I took it upon myself to better myself. My road to coaching came from my wanting to make myself play better and in the process, I got sucked into coaching and I've been hooked ever since.

My playing knowledge when I started coaching was minimal because I’d never played at a high level, and I never had a coach. We all just played the game and figured it out on our own. Of course, it took me a dozen years to figure out all the techniques that would work for me, and I would not say that they were orthodox techniques.

My coaching experience followed along the usual path of all beginning coaches. Since I was never formally taught, I became connoisseur of drills. I collected drills. I did not care what the drills accomplished I just wanted drills because I felt like I needed a crutch to fill the space of an hour or 90 minutes with drills to keep the players busy and these drills needed to be somewhat connected to volleyball. It never occurred to me to think about how I was benefiting my players. I figured that if I gave them enough drills that they would get better eventually. Effective or efficient practices never occurred to me. 90 minutes seemed to be a really long time.

I changed my worldview eventually because my team wasn't winning very much. My players got better but not as good as I had expected. Being a competitive Type A engineer made me question my knowledge and coaching, I sought out coaches I respected, I bought books, I watched videos, I  stole drills in piecemeal attempts to augment my volleyball coaching without actually understanding why. I wanted the extrinsic rewards and I coached for the glories of the wins and the recognition. Of course, the recognition in club volleyball was as significant in the over scheme as nothing.

I expanded my repertory to studying sports movement, it was applied mechanics from engineering, so I had some familiarity with the nomenclature. I dove into motor learning and I got into physical training, trying to improve my player’s agility, flexibility, quickness, and strength. I dove into volleyball statistics in order to get the edge, even though I knew from my engineering training that the descriptive statistics made all kinds of sense in sports but the inferential statistics made little sense since there were too many confounding factors in the sporting arena. Yet I persisted in chasing the ghosts of inference.  

I experimented with anything that were even tangentially related to volleyball; all done to make my players better. I fell into the trap that Vern talks about, I was distracted by the bells and whistles, and I took my eyes off the ball. Coaching became a spinning plates act where I had to worry about keeping all the plates going without understanding which plate matters the most.

The epiphany came when I sat one day and realized that I am friends with most of my players from five, ten, twenty years ago. I watched them grow up, go play in college, or not play in college. I witnessed them getting married, having their own children, and then jumping into the vast coaching pool themselves for the love of their children. Then it dawned on me: Coaching is more than all the sports science, statistics, technical knowledge, kinesiology, movement training, motor learning combined. All that means nothing unless you knew how to coach, unless you knew how to communicate to people. Communication has a broad meaning in this case because coaching communication means being empathetic when you need to be empathetic, to be blunt when you need to be blunt, to be able to speak to all of the athletes who are your responsibilities under all emotional conditions, both theirs and yours. Coaching is all the technical stuff AND the communications. As Vern stated, there is no substitute for coaching because you have to pull the amalgam of skills out of you back pocket at the drop of a hat in order to be effective.

My thesis advisor once imparted on me sage piece of advice. He said that it does not matter if you know a piece of information forwards, backwards, and sideways. The trick is to know that piece of information so well that you can spin it, flip it, twirl it, make that piece of information dance and sing in your mind and then have that information flow out of your mouth in as many ways as there are students, because our job as coaches is to make sure that understanding occurs, under different psychological circumstances and different with every single person. This ability is coaching, it comes from having done it so many times that you are able deal with many different circumstances and situations as well as understand all the technical details that Vern cites.

The tail is now wagging the dog, but we had been there before, we can recover from it. I am an example of that recovery.