Volleyball Coaching Life-Watching the Women’s CBB Final 4

 I don't usually watch the NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four. I watched the Iowa Vs South Carolina game mainly because of the publicity that Caitlin Clark and the South Carolina Gamecocks have garnered for the tournament. Both have brought the game to an excellence that is remarkable; it was a well-played and hard-fought battle.

But it is what happened after the game that made me think. I first thought about the difference I observed because of the women centered leadership and the difference that it made how I perceived the game. Caitlin Clark had a 41 point night, and she had a hand in all of her team's points in the fourth quarter, whether as points scored or as an assist. Her play and the way her game flowed were eye opening and she certainly deserved all the accolades that she is getting and will get in the future. Yet, when she was interviewed by  Holly Rowe of ESPN, she happily deflected the attention that Rowe tried to focus on her individual accomplishments to her teammates. She framed the night in a way that any coach wants to hear from their players and she did it naturally; no false modesty and no pretentions. She emphasized that the success of the team came from her team; they seem like, first and foremost, a team that loved each other unconditionally and they lived and died as a team. Holly Rowe, to her great credit, did not pursue her original line of questions.

As for Dawn Staley, she was obviously disappointed. Her team was the defending national champion, and they had a 42 game-winning streak. She is a great coach and trains her team to play at a very high level. South Carolina also has a team ethos for success, they played  and sacrificed for each other. They just ran into a buzzsaw that's named Iowa. The remarkable thing about Coach Staley’s responses was that she did not flinch when faced with the questions, she did delve into what went wrong; reporters had to ask, because even with South Carolina’s body of work, the reporters had to ask what went wrong. Coach Staley answered those questions, but she also told the press that she had to get back into the locker room because she had to go take care of her team, talk to those individuals who will no longer for the South Carolina Gamecocks because their time with the team is has run out. This is something that we don't hear too much of in sports. Post game press conferences focus on what the teams did or did not do, and on their successes and mistakes. But her focus, even at the end of a loss, was on her players. It was vital to her  to rush away to address her player’s mental welfare post loss ahead of everything else.

I am very sure that most coaches do go through that process internally. I am sure that there are many great coaches who think line Coach Staley. Very few think in terms of these players who were just becoming adults and how they were handling what might be the biggest and most public failure in their lives up to this point. Even if it seems natural to only focus on the failure, is that the right thing to do? Should we not be more concerned about the human beings that we are coaching rather than the results? Collegiate sports are highly competitive, obviously, especially revenue generating sports. The reality is highly competitive and highly volatile for the coaches and their jobs. For a coach to say right now my main concern is my players, especially in that arena with that amount of attention, that is remarkable to me.

The two observations seem to align  with the trite saying: women bond to battle while men battle to bond; that the relationships between players and coaches plays a more significant role in the successes of the teams than we are led to believe. Although the reason I believe the saying is trite is because it is so true. The relationship between players and coaches is a large part of the bonding. It is a natural part of the team experience to build that symbiotic relationship for athletes and coaches. The process of creating a team ethos is an infinitely iterative process of using competition to build relationships and conversely, building relationships to foster competition. In the aftermath of Title IX, I believe that the divide employed by that saying has eroded away and the two conditional statements has become a single biconditional statement which affects everyone: people battle to bond and bond to battle.  

Returning to my original thought: were the two observations I perceived an example of the difference women leadership can make? I don’t know. In my experience with very limited data and considering my completely subjective observations, I believe there is something to it. Although I have no tangible proof.

Consider a broader scope of inquiry, is it possible that the difference in the team culture cultivated by the coaches is the reason for the successes of their teams? Is the difference due to the fact that we have coaches who are more empathetic?

Empathy, as the ability to actually feel what another person is feeling — literally “walk a mile in their shoes” — it goes beyond sympathy, which is  a simple expression of concern for another person’s misfortune.

Even though I have known empathetic men coaches and completely unempathetic women coaches; they are small samples which offers counterexamples to the generalization about men and women. Do those counterexamples completely negate the original hypothesis that women leadership is the difference in what I perceived? I don’t know. I do know that I want to believe in my original hypothesis.

Is empathy a salient characteristic of teams that are led by women, as the head coach of Iowa is also a woman? Is it that empathetic culture which explains how Caitlin Clark is so team oriented? Or is it that she was so empathetic that she thrives in a familiar and welcoming culture? Which raises another question: is the team culture a necessary part of winning? Or turning that question around: is winning a fortunate byproduct of building an empathetic human centered culture?

Winning and losing is the basis of all sporting activities. Coaches do all that they can to prepare the players, they teach and prepare them for the necessary requirements to win tactically, technically, strategically, and physically. Should they also do so personally? Coaches absolutely want to win, but should they put their personal relationship, their mutual trust with their players in the competitive context? Should the coach-player relationship be transactive? Is winning the driving force for their relationship with their players or their teams?

I have seen many coach-player relationships become something that is transactional: I will build a personal relationship with you, if and only if, you do as I say and help us win; with winning taking precedence over the personal relationship. This is my personal observation over years of coaching. I have seen that transactional relationship happen with junior club coaches, with high school coaches, and with college coaches. My caveat is that my perception is exactly that, perceptions; I am not privy to the behind-the-scenes relationships between players and coaches, I can only surmise through my own observations, all based on decisions made and without context.

I have observed coaches make decisions for the benefit of their team results rather than what is best for the player.  Is that the right approach? Is that the wrong approach? For the team? For the individuals?

In terms of my observations of Caitlin Clark and Dawn Staley, we are essentially asking the which came first, the chicken or the egg question: is winning a function of established culture? Or is culture a function of winning? In the short term, do you, as a coach, do what is best for your culture and your relationships with your players and expect success? Or do you lead the team to get the best results at that moment and hope the culture and relationships thrive?

Just some extemporaneous wanderings.

Volleyball Coaching Life-"Sandbagging"

 sand bagging

To deliberately perform at a lower level than you are capable of

A lot of discussions have been started and proposals made on how we can stop “Sandbagging” in the large tournaments. This seems to crop up every year around the same time when teams are trying to qualify for Junior National Championships. The accusations are that teams are maliciously playing below their potential, in an attempt to qualify for Nationals by hook or by crook. Their playing in a lower competitive level indicates that they are:

1.     Depriving a more worthy team who is playing in the correct level of competition of that chance at the bid.

2.     These teams are maliciously and deliberately cheating to get into the Nationals.

The first point smacks of entitlement while the second point is based on subjective and biased judgements.

Those who accuse teams of sandbagging often act as if they are the aggrieved team; more often than not, they are the team that gets knocked out of contention by a stronger team through competition, other times they are on the sideline looking thinking that if it wasn’t for that team, or all the other teams who are sandbagging we would be qualifying for nationals. That belief is false.

Remember, the divisions are structural not factual: The divisions are a convenience not a definition. It is a means of giving the USAV a means of organizing the large numbers of team participating. It is NOT a definition to be assigned to teams. Using the division definition is the tail wagging the dog. The teams play into the division definition by the body of their work AFTER having played the season, not before the season, not during the season. The determination can be made a posteriori, even that assignment to a division is dodgy.

The intent of dividing the field into divisions is both logistical and practical.

·       An unlimited division would entail many more matches in pool play to so that the field can be winnowed down to manageable brackets.

·       Bracket play would be untenable and last well beyond a weekend, and detrimental to the health of the players.

The tacit assumption is made by those who cry sandbagging that each team, as they are formed each season, have an identity ascribed to them. They are an Open team, we are a USA team. How can you tell?

To follow the logic of the complainants about “sandbagging”,  a clear definition of what each division means, and most important to them, a way of identifying these teams. These arguments are usually made to determine the definition in their minds.

·       The Eye Test. They look good: they are big and athletic.  What is meant: They are at least bigger and more athletic than my team, therefore they are “sandbagging” when they play in my division.

·       Competition Test. They have won matches in the higher division, they are therefore playing below their level now. Which is to discount the following:

o   The players they have available: There may be players on the roster that are missing from the tournament on the weekend that they play in a lower division.

o   The level of competition at each tournament is not homogeneous: The tournament on the weekend where the team played at a higher division is composed of generally weaker teams, ergo, they played better.

o   The path to bracket play is different for each tournament, subject to chance. Even though the tournaments are structured identically and all the rules are the same, each tournament is an independent event. The teams may find that they match up better against the opponents along their path in one tournament than the other tournaments. The components: teams, pools, and brackets change with each tournament. It is anything but predictable.

One proposed solution is the sliding qualification argument: if your team performed “well” playing at a higher division, you should stay in that division and not be allowed to move down.

Which leads to the idea that those teams who did well in a preceding qualifying tournament at a higher division will dominate in in a lower division for the next qualifying tournament This deploys a well-known fallacy: post hoc, er·​go propter hoc: after this, therefore because of this: because an event occurred first, it must have caused this later event—used to describe a fallacious argument. Each tournament is an independent event, if that team performed well at a higher division previously, it does not automatically mean they will dominate the following tournament at a lower division, all the arguments stated previously still holds. One would expect them to, but it is not guaranteed.

Examining the reason for “Sandbagging”, and I know there are teams that try to qualify at a lower division after having played and not succeeding to qualify at a higher division.

·       Maybe they aren’t good enough to compete at that level?

·       Maybe their coach and club misjudged their potential at the formation of the team?

·       Maybe they were better off playing in the lower division in the first place? A bitter dose of reality.

Now examining the reason for those who are upset at “sandbaggers”.

·       Maybe the adults making the decisions are not aware of the quality or the numbers of teams that play in their chosen division. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.

·       Maybe their coach and club misjudged their potential at the formation of the team?

·       Maybe those teams who are upset just aren’t good enough to compete with those teams at their self-identified division? A case of the Dunning Kruger effect.

·       Maybe they were better off playing in the lower division in the first place? Again not knowing what they didn’t know.

·       A bitter dose of reality, which turned into bitterness which turned into an exercise in the  sunken cost fallacy: we have committed the season to a selected division, but because we misjudged, our solution is to ignore our initial error and instead blame the “sandbaggers” for our team not being able to qualify.

The purpose of club sports is to have an opportunity to compete against all kinds of teams. You learn more from losing than from winning. I do agree that getting thumped mercilessly is not enjoyable, but that is part of the lessons of competition. Coaches pontificate brilliantly about resilience and grit. They are consulting with experts, reading books, and listening to podcasts to look for the magic potion that will make our players grittier and more resilient; yet, when our teams face any kind of headwinds, like a strong opponent in a competition, we balk and accuse others of malice. It can’t never be because our team are not performing or that we, the coaches, are mistaken.

Sometimes we coaches need to learn how to do what we constantly teach: suck it up Buttercup and play ball. As my friend always tells his teams before playing a tough match, strap on your crash helmets, this is a rough ride.

Although there is always the Patriot division if you want to go to nationals that badly.

 

 

Curiosity and Resistance

Steven Pressfield, who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, also wrote a book about how artists, particularly writers, sabotage themselves by giving in to what he terms: resistance. The book is titled The War of Art. Resistance being defined as:

“There is a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What is hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

Anything that keeps a writer from putting butt down on seat and writing seriously is termed resistance, which is a broad definition by design. The book identifies the source of the problem, it is us. We, by giving in to our reaction to the myriad of reasons and excuses for not doing what we were born to do, create our own resistance. Resistance is NOT the reason for our procrastination, the reason is our emotional reaction to the resistance.

I turned Pressfield’s  resistance idea into an explanation for my lifelong resistance to pursuing my Curiosity.

The first resistance that I confronted set the tone for my lifetime of resistance. It germinated into a lifelong excuse for deferring the urge to ask question elicited by my curious nature.

The first resistance came from the social stigma of being a precocious only child. I was always curious and as an only child, I was afforded opportunities to ask questions and express opinions in front of adults because those were the people that I interacted most with as I didn't have any siblings or have ready access to peers my age. I asked childhood types of questions: Why is this happening? What if this happened? How do you do this? Fully exercising my curiosity. I drove the adults around me crazy with questions because I was unaware of society’s feelings about the expectations of children’s behavior. Most answered my questions as best as they could.

I was with a group of kids going on a weekend outing when I was young. One of the adults said, in a teasing way: “Why are you asking so many questions”. I doubt anyone else took notice, but it made me self-conscious of being identified because of my curiosity, I remember that was the  point where I learned that maybe I shouldn't ask so many questions which would show my curiosity in front of adults; that was the turning point in how I forced myself to behave.

Even as I was chastened, it didn't quell my curiosity, rather than fight the curiosity, my natural reaction turned my questionings inwards; I asked questions of myself, as I learned to do research on my own. In many ways the great inward turn made me more self-reliant about answering my curiosities. I am an introvert, perhaps due to being an only child, but that self-administered early  rebuke as a reaction to an innocent comment accelerated my proclivity to turning my curiosity inward and remaining silent.

My inward turn continued and became a habit even as I progressed through junior high, high school, and college. I did not ask questions of others, in class or out,  because the social stigma lingered on the surface, even as I  continued to be curious. Curiosity is far too powerful an emotion, so my search to quench that curiosity was sidetracked as I spent my time digging rather than asking. One unintended consequence of my inward turn was that the deliberate mind turn evolved into a fiercely independent autodidactic habit. Even though I am grateful for the inward turn, as autodidacticism helps me remember and retain knowledge, the process was anything but easy, efficient, or effective. One key byproduct was that I was often unsure of the answers. I did not know whether my sources were reliable. I was always fearful of being wrong or expecting to be contradicted. Which, mixed with being risk averse became a greater drag on my curiosity; the fear of being wrong ironically led to incuriosity: if I don’t know something then I can’t be held responsible for being wrong, i.e. being ignorant is less embarrassing than being wrong.

This modus operandi followed me throughout most of my working life, even as I was going through university and for my PhD. I entered the most challenging endeavor of my young life with two negatives: an unwillingness to open myself up to ask questions, combined with the fear of being wrong.

My advisor called me out once, he had recognized that I was someone who would rather find answers on my own. He told me: you don't have to answer everything by yourself, you need to take advantage of the people who are around you, people who know more than you, people who are fluent in  different knowledge. Of course, that had the opposite effect, I was unwilling and unable to change my deeply ingrained habits. Indeed, I reacted in the worst possible way, I assiduously held my ground on the first two resistances and added a third: I faced the world as the mythological stereotype of the rugged individual. I blame it on all the John Wayne movies I watched.

Maturity wasn’t a strong suit at that time.

The dire combination diminished my curiosity as I was too busy treading water, but it couldn’t snuff out my curiosity, although it shrank considerably, as my curiosity was limited to what I can learn my myself, which ignores the vast area of unknown that can be described as things that I don’t know I don’t know.

The most enjoyable aspect of the gradual school experience is the extemporaneous bull sessions with fellow gradual students, taking place anywhere, lasting deep into the night, fueled by caffein or alcohol, it is one of the great luxuries of being around curious and likeminded people. Yet  I misused those opportunities because of my inability to fully engage in the intellectual stimulations afforded because of my self-imposed limits on my curiosity.

More insidiously, being in gradual school concatenated another resistance atop all the others: the imposter syndrome. The imposter syndrome is an oft reported mental hurdle amongst the general population, it seems to be especially prevalent amongst those who are enrolled in post-graduate degree programs. In my case, the imposter syndrome intricately wove itself  into my already ingrained other resistances as it frolicked with the rugged individual myth. The resulting resistance was a finely tuned fear of being found out that I have been faking it all along, that if I couldn’t speak with authority on any topic, I would be discovered as a fraud. It never occurred to me that I was not supposed to be a perfectly formed product of the academic factory, well versed in every and all things in my topic, or any topic. I was afraid of being found out, even in the informal confines of a bull session with brilliant people who are doing what I wanted to do: seeking, extrapolating, forming hypotheses, and venturing into the wonderment of creating ideas. Yet I let the accumulated resistance dominate my now flickering curiosity.

I completely missed the point of gradual school; the point is the process of satisfying curiosity rather than just having the answers.

Self-knowledge and self-awareness could have done me a lot of good.

Being the autodidact was not a complete failure, I learned to be efficient and effective in conducting research which satisfied my curiosity. My curiosity made me adept at researching, although in hindsight, I ponder the tradeoff between the self-sufficient autodidact versus having  a broader perspective because of his unfettered access to the hivemind due to the lack of resistance.

My PhD was going slowly because of resistance: I could not identify open areas to make  my own niche in the space of my research area; a critical and necessary milestone in any researcher’s process. I believe it was something that curiosity could resolve if  unencumbered by resistance. If I had asked, collaborated, been honest about my blind spots, took advantage of the collective wisdom, abandoned my rugged individualism, opened my mind to the deeper granularities and broader perspectives much earlier, and had clearer vision of the broader scope, I would have identified my thesis topic sooner. The main point is that if I had been brave in freely asking questions of others, I would have realized that not only did I not  have all the answers, I also didn't have all the questions, a tragic fate for one who is supposed to be curious.

Somehow, by the grace of my advisor and other mentors, I finished. To this day I cannot read my thesis all the way through, for I know it was less than perfect; yet at the same time  I am at peace with it. This is a common theme amongst gradual students: we all think that a thesis is supposed be the pinnacle of our intellectual capacity. What I now realize is that it should be the pinnacle of my intellectual capacity at that point in time. I realized that fact many years after the fact: I am just a little bit slow.

Resistance continued, if not exacerbated, after I entered industry. This time the resistance comes from the expectations that a newly minted “expert” elicits from those who are already working. The attitude in the working world takes two connected but contradictory forms. On the one hand an “experts” should know everything; on the other hand, the “expert” is only good at theory, they know nothing about the real world. It was a double-edged sword that reinforced my perfectionist habits while at the same time hampered my curiosity.

I worked harder to be the expert that I was expected to be while trying to demonstrate my prowess at being practical. The resistance here is unrealistic expectations, something that was obvious to everyone, except I was blind to it because I just assumed what was expected. I tried to meet those expectations by becoming everything to everyone, an impossibility. But in so doing, I siloed off from those who could have rekindled the  curiosities, those who knew more about what I did not know.  I subconsciously could not admit that there are  gaps in my knowledge. This untenable mindset combined with all the other resistances made my natural curiosity nearly disappear: I stopped looking to answer my curiosity, I just looked for answers.

A position in industry is an ideal position to pursue curiosity, yet I became Sisyphus, rolling that rock up the hill, never realizing that I could never stop and kept my focus on what was expected rather than asking the questions which stems from being curious.

Being curious became a burden rather than a joy.

What changed between then and now?  How did I overcome my resistance to my curiosity?

The first step came from taking Richard Feynman’s book title as my mantra: What Do You Care What Other People Think? As soon as I stopped caring, except for those who I respect, the stress melted away and my curiosity returned. A large part of not caring anymore was unburdening myself of my coupling to the resistances. If I did not care about the resistances, my reactions to the resistance would no longer have a hold on my curiosity. I became emancipated from the worry of answering to the resistances.

As I became an academic while also coaching, my focus went away from being centered on what my “managers” thought of me, my focus was on how I thought of my students and players. The focus went away from myself and away from my façade, something I have no control over, to shining on how I can best reach the students and players, something I have control over.

I don’t want to make it sound like I am being oh-so-noble and altruistic. On the contrary, turning the focus on the needs of others brings me more joy than keeping the focus on the swrod of Damocles which was in the form of the expectations of others.

There has always been a pedagogical trait in me. I coached because those needs were not met in my work: designing better commodity motors did nothing to quench my need to teach. Teaching drives my curiosity. How do I make these humans better students and players? How can I get through to them? How can I get them to acquire and make permanent this knowledge that I want to relay to them? How can I overcome their resistance, resistance which was born of their own reactions to how they were taught to learn? What is it that inherently powers their ability to learn and make permanent what we are taught?

Coaching was a big part of the revelation. Coaching youngsters who are guileless and possessors of a proverbial clean slate is an ennobling life experience. Teaching at a collegiate level gave me that same ennobling life experience but in different ways.  

I have been coaching for nearly thirty years and have become addicted. What I did not realize, beyond satisfying my need to teach, is that this addiction has make me more curious: about the nature of the sport, about how I can coach better, both individually and collectively, and how I can coach the intangible and the nuanced.  Carrying that curiosity to the university classroom was a natural result. My curiosity was challenged because I cared about the Quality of my teaching skills, just as I cared about the Quality of my coaching skills.

I would not say that I am completely free of resistance to curiosity. I feel, however, that I am greatly liberated from my self-imposed mental prison that is my reaction to resistance. The turning point was when I stopped caring about how others judged me as peers and supervisors, and started to care about how I can develop those who I am teaching with what I know and how well I can transmit that knowledge. The resistance is still there, it will peek out from under its hiding place to taunt me, but I know what it looks like now and I am better prepared to deal with it. As Monty Python  says in The Life of Brian: I got better.