Volleyball Coaching Life-To Be Competitive or To Compete

Having a team that competes have always been a blessing for coaches. Players who know how to compete makes our jobs much easier because we do not have to work hard to motivate, they will do it themselves.

Unfortunately, many people mistake the word “compete” with the word “competitiveness”. Here are the differences:

·       Compete is an intransitive verb and is defined as: to strive consciously or unconsciously for an objective.

·       Competitive is an adjective and is defined as: inclined, desiring, or suited to compete.

·       To Compete is an action that cannot be described or captured statically.

·       To Be Competitive is a description of someone who is competing as seen through the prism of another individual.

·       To Compete is an internal state of being.

·       To Seem Competitive is an external manifestation of someone competing as seen through their words, body language, and emotions.

·       Learning how to compete is hard.

·       Faking being competitive is relatively easy.

In short, to be described as being competitive can only come after the person has been seen competing, there is a time lag involved, however short that time lag is.

This may seem to be just an exercise in semantics, but the framing of the competing versus being competitive captures the framework that people view their players.

Since the act of competing is internal and unobservable to everyone, it is difficult to judge whether the team is competing at a moment in time. This is a major concern for coaches because we need to know our team’s state of mind, whether a boost is warranted or whether to bring their overwrought emotions down so that they can compete effectively. It is a black art, more times than not, our coaches are wrong in their guesses. Therefore, the question of competitiveness exists.

A darker and more malignant interpretation is that the idea of having players looking competitive   exposes the unspoken and unconscious coaching ego. The coaching ego wants everyone: the parents, the opposing coaches, the opponents, and every observer who sees “our” players play to have the  impression that the players are competitive because the coach’s ego revels in the perception that the coach is the reason for the team being competitive.

The real question is do we want to teach our players to be competitive or do we want to teach our players to compete. Should we be satisfied with just teaching our players how to behave competitively? Or does competing matter more than seeming competitive?

But what does competitive even look like? There is a preponderance of mythology of what competitive should look like. I would hazard to say that the external behavior of an individual has little or no correlation to how they compete.

My pessimism is partly based on what we perceive to be competitiveness, whether it is visual, emotional, or physical manifestations of competitiveness. Our perception of competitiveness has a legacy based on some old school stereotypes steeped in testosterone fueled mythology from martial fantasies. We perceive, consciously or unconsciously, that competitiveness is swathed in emotional, unsportsmanlike, and many times counter productive behavior. Our sporting society not only condones this behavior but also celebrate it as being “competitive” because we mistake extrinsic expressions of emotions as an accurate reflection of intrinsic ability to compete.  This isn’t to say that our extrinsic expressions are complete devoid of honest emotions, I believe that they are not accurate indicators of how much we strive to compete.

By seeking to teach players to be competitive, we are unconsciously asking for, and teaching the players to act and react according to what our culture dictates to be competitive behavior. Recall that behavior comes behind the act of competing. The players will follow the lead of the coaches and parents, they will willingly mime the accepted competitive behavior so that they can receive the attention, approval, and praises, but does the exhibition of accepted competitive behavior infer that they know how to compete? Is there correlation? Does attitude transfer to acuity in solving problems quickly and making the best decisions under the worst of contexts? I don’t believe so. Indeed, if we were to observe some of the best competitors, their behavior is one of unperturbable equanimity, their disruptive emotions held in check because they know that their working memory is limited, they don’t need extraneous emotional thoughts to clutter up their working memory.

The questions are: how do we know whether our players know how to compete and how do we teach them?

The first answer might seem circular: we know that they know how to compete when we see them competing, but that is not and should not be a steady state of being, it is only true for that level of competition with their level of  experience at that moment.

As they face new situations, play against better or different opponents, deal with unknown uncertainties, play in unfamiliar situations, their ability to compete will diminish; that is our cue to upgrade the stimulus to give them new experiences to store in their long-term memory, to create neural pathways for them to recall and reuse. Note that I said, “to allow the team to discover how to compete”, this is intentional, because we are leading them to water, they need to drink from that water. Each team and player’s thirst for the water is unique.

Some guidelines that I try to use to allow the team to discover how to compete, I will admit that it is difficult to be consistent with these heuristics, but I try.

·       Use the game as the framework because the specifics of the game are necessary scaffoldings to create usable experiences.

·       At the same time, don’t be afraid to break the decision-making sequence down into progressions. This completely depends on the experience and skill levels of the players. Novice players get more progressions, but the fallacy is to keep doing the same progressions until they are completely comfortable before moving on.

·       Use skewed scoring, overspeed the competition, and tweak the rules and structures of the game to place constraints to insert desired difficulties in the competition to create opportunities for the working memory to learn and resolve and to add new experiences into the working memory.

·       Don’t be afraid of stopping the action to give rapid and timely feedback. They will usually not remember that play that you are trying to recreate after a certain number of plays have already occurred.

·       Approach the competition as opportunities to problem solve and make decisions, whether it is in a scrimmage, a drill or in a competition.

o   Give players a chance to problem solve.

o   Give players a chance to reflect and remember.

o   Give the players a chance to make decisions and think without the coach telling them how and without scaffolding.

o   Learn as a coach to frame the language:

§  What did you see that made you make that decision? Rather than: did you see such and such.

§  Was that the right decision for the situation? Rather than: you made the wrong decision.

§  Clearly differentiate between decision making error and execution error.

·       Avoid adding contrived difficulties unrelated to the game into the competition. Adding difficulties that distracts the players attention from competing clutters up the working memory and the learning become limited because the working memory is having to deal with the distractions. The key is determining what constitutes Desired Difficulties for your team, at your level, with their level of experience.

·       Always keep the player’s level of skills and experience in mind. Just because the National Team have a way to do something does not mean that it will work with a middle school team. The coach needs to improvise, adapt, and overcome so that the players can learn to also improvise, adapt, and overcome.