Volleyball Coaching Life-Uncertainty and Coaching

There is nothing more illustrative of the uncertainties involved in life than sports.

Players and coaches understand that. A micro touch here, a close in or out call by mere millimeters can affect the outcome of the game. In fact, they could decide the game decisively and unconditionally. So it is with some wonder that I see people —coaches and players — at all levels who enjoy, the Games of chance. This is particularly noticeable in the professional level as their wins and losses are reported in the media.  I also wonder if these are trying to replicate the thrill of beating the odds in their gaming decisions much like they had on the field or court; whether they are reliving the thrill of winning an improbable game or making an improbable play.

I couldn’t do that;  I am a coward when it comes to games of chance because I learned about probability and statistics, and I understand the odds of winning in these games of chances.

On the other hand, as I observe the training and decision making habits of some fellow coaches, I see a contradiction.  This is especially prominent in the context of the team sports, where a large number of people, players on the field, coaches, bench players on both sides of the contest — as well as the officials  — they collectively inject an uncountably large amount of uncertainty into each sporting contest. We know that a single variation of a single variable could disrupt the ebb and flow of the game goes away because of all the interlocking moving parts.

There are coaches who explicitly understand the randomness that permeates sports, who understand the uncertainty that is intrinsically a part of the games who choose to plan their training and execute their decisions in the training gym as well as on game play as if they are operating within a deterministic model of sports. Unknowns are usually ignored, or their effects are minimized. Maybe they do not have a limiting a set of blinders as I imagine, but they sometimes act as if there is no room for the unknown.

I believe that most of us have a deeply held belief about uncertainties. We believe, as Michaelangelo once said of his sculpting, that there is a statue sitting under all those layers  of marble just waiting for the artist to remove the extraneous parts. We believe that there is a reality, a pure state of deterministic reality, buried under all the uncertainties: measurement errors, noise in the system, unexpected actions, and reactions, all those things that obscure the true nature of reality. We also believe that these layers can be successfully removed, filtered, and overcome through diligent understanding of the sources of uncertainties; that we can make the system, in this case, the games, more predictable, so predictable that we as players and coaches can actively create the outcome that we desire in an orderly and procedural way. In the case of mismatches of skills, abilities, and expertise, that is indeed true. Any top 20 college volleyball team can indeed thrash any middle school team handily, but in terms of closely contested games, there exists so many uncertainties that we are fooling ourselves into believing that we can predict the outcome. We are also missing the point of playing the game. The payoff moments of sports is to ultimately triumph despite our doubts about the outcome of the contest. This is the reason why we play the game. But this belief in being able to peel away the uncertainties keeps us from accepting uncertainties as a part of the greater scheme of sports, and as a part of life. We work instead, to remove uncertainties, which I believe is foolhardy.

Indeed, the nature of training involves the teacher to show the players, what they need to do in order to have technical success, this needs to be done without equivocation.  The major unknowns in the technical training of the players are the variability of the players abilities and their skill levels. Yet, there are not a lot of room in the training activity for the What ifs, especially during the initial learning phase for a low skill level, low experience player. Introducing uncertainties will confuse the delay the skill acquisition. But when highly skilled and highly experienced players are being trained, players who have an extensive database of knowledge and experience to call upon to improvise solutions, some coaches will still follow the list-making approach, creating a check list of contingencies of what might happen.  This is not to say that those contingency lists are ineffective, they just won’t allow the player to improvise and learn. By training the players to solve discrete problems in a list, they are missing the gaps in the list, and they become reliant on their list of experiences. This approach will frustrate everyone involved if the exact contingent situation does not manifest itself, the diligent coach will create yet more contingencies in order to cover all the situations. Except there is no end to the list.

Mike Hebert, in his book Insights and Strategies for Winning Volleyball, wrote about his realization that most teams’ proclivity to practice in system at the expense of practicing out of system, contrary to the rate of occurrence for those situations. While we all nod our heads in agreement, most are employing the same logic, that if we worked long and hard enough at removing the uncertainties, we can get to the underlying deterministic base reality; rather than working on going with the flow, training ourselves and our teams to accept uncertainties  while learning to improvise and react effectively to the uncertainties as it happens rather than identifying, categorizing, and systematically creating bailiwicks for an infinite number of possible situations that can happen in sports.

Even as we train out of system, we will also create order to tame the chaos, we create rules for situations: setter passes first ball, errant passes, etc. and we create rules of the teams to follow. Again, I am not saying this is a terrible practice, but there will always be circumstances when those rules won’t be productive. A better philosophy is to train a team to be able to act and react to the contingencies in a unified way; their movements are coordinated as one body, reacting as one mind. This is the goal of training a team, the holy grail of coaching. Something that happens rarely, but a noble goal. It all starts with understanding uncertainties are an integral part of what we are trying to do, that we need to integrate that recognition into our thoughts when it comes to planning, training, and game day coaching.

I often wonder if I could be more successful in the win/loss column if I had more skills and athleticism and had played at a much higher level; that I had the same belief as the best players in  my ability to turn the game to my will, maybe I would be more daring in my decision making because of my recognition and acceptance of the uncertainties in the sport. I usually ponder this in the context of my coaching. I see other coaches who dare to make decisions that I would never make, and I wonder about my own bias against taking chances, whether I am being overly cautious. I can change all of that, but it is different, because I am coming at it with a conscious effort whereas the coaches who were top players have that belief ingrained in their thought process. It is a mental struggle for me. On the other hand, their decision making is hampered by their own blind spots and biases, much different than mine, but at least I am doing something about it.