Volleyball Coaching Life-A Salute to Us, Volleyball Coaches

As the months become colder, the high school and college volleyball seasons are drawing to a close. This is the cycle of volleyball, dependable and inviolable. Except that it did not happen last season, this season happened but it happened through a combination of sheer will and serendipity.

I am writing this after our club tryouts had happened and our teams are being formed, the high school championships around the country have been mostly decided. All divisions of college volleyball are going into its traditional denouement phase.

What defined this and last season is the same thing that had thrown the world into a cataclysmic disruption: the COVID pandemic. The disruption is real and profound, we had hoped that the it would dampen after a year, and we could go back to our normal routines. For some, that had happened with varying degrees of the unexpected, while for others the disruptions continued unabated.

In our world of volleyball coaching, changes came at us fast and hard. It forced us to adjust quickly and drastically. Coaching staffs, administrators, players, and parents tried to react like the Marines: adapt, improvise, and overcome. We all had varying levels of successes in the many different aspects of administering a program, coaching a team, and playing a season.

The fact that we had a season at all the last two years is a tribute to the people I am writing about: the coaches. I have been reading and listening to some of my coaching friends in the club, high school, and college ranks describing their experience these two years. It was astounding to me that these people who I love and hold dearly have survived these events in the environment that was imposed on them.

COVID and its attendant protocols and the fog of the unknown plagued all sporting events. The ever-changing public health situation and the uncertainty associated with what the greater society does not know wreaked havoc with the determinacy and certainty that all coaches thrive on, turning us all into basket cases as we are pushed far beyond our comfort zones. Dealing with the possibility of positive tests for athletes and the implications of contact tracing  made any kind of regularity in lineup and practice cadence impossible to maintain. Sudden cancellations of matches and tournaments due to COVID became de rigueur. All of this carried over into how our teams reacted on and off the court to the sudden changes. What little predictability we felt we had in regard to our teams disintegrated. We adopted to the circumstances and tried mightily to teach our teams to do the same. Except that it is much more difficult to go with the flow when you are a teen than if you are an adult. Assuming that adults were able to go with the flow themselves, that is not always the case.

This was all stacked atop the usual team sport emotional roller coaster. Coaching during COVID is like hitting driver in golf: every weakness, every miniscule imperfection in the team and program became amplified. In this case, multiple magnitudes, as the mundane become gnawing problems, the manageable blows up into the unmanageable, and previously unknown situations become catastrophic.

It was the unanticipated and unintended that became the most challenging.

How do you deal with a middle school team whose teammate lost a parent to COVID? How do you get them to show respect and yet also be socially distanced? How do you handle this situation as a coach and a leader of the team, including the families of the players? People will always look to the coach for guidance. This is something they never taught us in coaching classes.

How do you deal with the players — who read and watch news — express fear of what might or might not happen when they see the increasing infection, hospitalization, and death rates?  As the vaccines become available to players, how do you reconcile the differences in beliefs amongst the heterogeneous people which make up a team? How do you organize productive team practices and meetings in according to the myriad of intrusive, confusing, and conflicting guidelines?

How do you deal with the situation of players whose usual demeanor and mien crack under the stress of living with uncertainty, their protective space that was provided through team sports violated by the intrusion of the unknown? Some will withdraw emotionally, while others will explode emotionally.  

Some will make the case that the team is a microcosm of society in general, that the reactions of all involved are just an example of what is going on with the rest of the world. Except that being on a team is different. The team experience is that of creating a safe environment for a select group of people to interact intensive within the framework of the team for the purpose of pursuing a common goal. For many, the team is the safety bubble that isolates them from the vagaries of everyday life, and that safety bubble has been pierced and have disappeared. To make matters worse, the intimate setting of a team makes the relationships between everyone associated with a team much more intense and personal. People are more likely to become more vulnerable with teammates and coaches than they are with anyone other than family; that is what makes a great team. But that intensity and vulnerability makes the relationships volatile, both positively and negatively. The crucible of COVID has created an unnatural dynamic within the already volatile team environment.

I can not say that there is an optimal way of dealing with all these challenges. Indeed, every team environment is unique and the potential response to any guidance from the coach is also unique. There is no roadmap. There is no how-to guide. There is no recipe. There is no formula,

All that we have available to us is our experience, our character, our integrity, our love of every single player on the team, and our reason to coach. Indeed, this is where the exercise of finding our philosophy of coaching helps, but that is not enough, there needs to be an inviolable love of the people that we are working with. So much love that we are willing to sacrifice our own well being for the good of our charges.

There was a meme that appeared recently that read: Coaches lose sleep over other people’s children. They do much more than that.

I know coaches who scramble to get any playdate scheduled, just so their players have that hour or two of respite from the realities of life.

I know coaches who juggle the needs of their entire team during road trips, at the expense of their own health and well-being, that’s just coaching. But to do so in the COVID environment means that the constraints and the consequences of their decisions are much more dire.

I know coaches who cry in private because they are frustrated by situations they can’t control, and injustices they can’t correct.

I know coaches who throw themselves into taking care of the players who have lost a parent, just to give the surviving parent a break.

So. This is a long-winded way of saying that I salute to all my coaching brethren for persevering and bettering the lives of their players; for sacrificing themselves for the greater good of their team; and for having the integrity to do the right thing most of the time, whether they know it or not. I am in awe of their ability to think laterally just to keep the train rolling and on track. I am touched by their love of humanity. I am inspired by their empathy. Indeed, I am proud for knowing people who are great coaches of people because they know and understand  that it is the people that matters.