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.

Engineering Life-Machine Design

Steve Williamson once said that there are analysts and then there are synthesysts. The analysts are the ones who model and simulate physical systems and the synthesysts are the ones who take all the various engineering knowledge needed and design things.

Machine design is an applied engineering skill, it is a synthesis of many skills. Machine designers are different than machine theorists. There are people who comfortably occupy both spaces; but by and large, the analysts reside in academia while the synthesysts, the designers, reside in industry. There are a number of good reasons for that.

The people who are analysts think and teach in terms of equations, physics, and mathematics. The people who are synthesists think in those terms as well, except they think about them in different ways. The best practice for the university setting does not align itself with the best practice necessary for design, the pedagogy that we adopt for the universities is that the knowledge is presented in a very logical linear progression, based upon what we know about the subject. We start at the basics and we slowly move into the more complex subjects as the student develops more ability and knowledge. 

The problem with machine design specifically is that not only is it multidisciplinary, but the design problem involves many coupled systems happening at the same time. Mechanical system design, thermal design, drive design, manufacturing system constraints, cost constraints, performance constraints, and the interaction between them all affect each part of the design, so there is a never-ending iteration loops amongst all of them. This is not to say that motor design  is unique in that aspect; this is why many complex applied engineering problem solving skills are not taught in the universities: the linear pedagogy does not lend itself to the kind of procedures that we need to apply in engineering. Machine design is the fellow who is keeping all the plates spinning at the same time, you need to have and eye on everything. Of course, that is assuming that the designer has the overall picture of what they're trying to do. Therefore, it is called the synthesis part of engineering: you are synthesizing all the divergent and diverse knowledge.

To answer the question of why the universities don’t have people teaching machine design, the best teachers are in industry, practicing their art. In order to effectively teach machine design, the teachers, are themselves well versed with the problem and are well versed in the holistic vision of the design problem. The normal academic pedagogy is not well aligned with the synthesis of the many knowledges inherent in the design problem. The usual academic pedagogy is much more aligned with the analysis portion of the puzzle, that is the crux of why we cannot just throw anyone to the wolves and have them have them teach a holistic mind frame of design with sequential reasoning and procedures. There was a time when people used the linear pedagogy to teach machine design, go to some older references in machines from the 1940’s and 1950’s and you will find design sheets, where the designer has to fill in the sheets sequentially. This is to keep the designers from forgetting all the variables they need to calculate for their design. The design equations are mostly algebraic and assumes linearity. The procedure deals with the nonlinearity by assuming linear performance, in addition, these are in the days before variable frequencies, so the designs are assumed to be operating at one operating point. Fortunately, computational power has increased exponentially, and we are able to calculate the design variables through numerical simulation, which gives us the ability to make design decisions quicker and with greater precision. In so doing, however, it allows us to incorporate more of the constraints from the other coupled systems into consideration at a much earlier point in the design process than we have been able to before the computational power, which means that the up front design is much more completely able to meet the designs and constraints.

Teaching machine design is not just teaching the science of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other academic subjects. It is also the passing on of experiential knowledge, there aren’t that many people around who can do justice to the task.