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.

 

Ruminations-Armistice Day 2021

Today is November 11. Armistice Day to many countries around the world.

Armistice Day is so named to celebrate the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. Many Western countries have changed the name of the holiday from Armistice Day, with member states of the Commonwealth of Nations adopting Remembrance Day, and Veterans Day in the US. Changing the name of the day subtly changes the intended meaning of the day. Armistice Day is about remembering the end of the war to end all wars — an optimistic mis-foreshadowing if there ever was one. Remembrance Day evokes those who lost their lives in defense of their beliefs. In putting the names of the days in context, the first great war dealt an extensive blow to the psyche of the European continent. A hundred plus years later, the effect of the war is still affecting the way Europeans think, react, and feel whenever large human conflicts are the subject of discussion. It affects the way they memorialize the day, with the subtle pinning of the red poppy flower on the lapels of the general populace and remembrances of the war dead in the battlefields.

In the US, the turning of the day into Veteran’s Day changes the focus of the day to the living veterans, even though the remembrance of those who died are never far from the surface: such activities as the many ceremonies placing flags on the graves of those who died fighting the war and the remembrances at the war memorials and tombs of unknown soldiers — the focus is clearly on honoring the living veterans; a chance to give thanks to those who had survived.

This is a clear illustration of the pragmatic bent of the American culture. My thought is that by culture, we Americans as a people are not so inclined to be elegiac. We are a culture of action, doing what is practical and immediate. Hence the turn towards honoring the living is a far more practical thing to do on this day of remembrance than contemplating the past. This is not an indictment; indeed, it is very natural for our cultural personality. Afterall, pragmatism is an American philosophy.

As I think about this, I think about the inadvertent omissions in our thoughts when we changed the name of the day. By changing the name of the day, we unintentionally change our internal conversations with ourselves about the meaning of sacrifice, or the altruistic nature of responsibility and commitment. We miss the necessary discussions about the meaning of  altruism and the psychic demands placed on those who willingly sacrifice their most precious possession, their lives, in the service of a greater good, fully knowing and understanding the role that they will play in the future of civilization. Sometimes I think about those who have passed as they are observing our present in which we are living and wondering whether they think if it was worth their altruism.

On a greater stage, I think about the role of the armed conflict in our society. Of the role that our organized fighting forces play in our own geopolitical chess match. We make noble the cause by waxing poetic about those who willingly give their all, sacrificing their individual good for the benefit of our greater good — fully knowing that their lives may be the price they pay. What very few contemplate in times of geopolitical conflict is the role and responsibility of the leaders; their need to critically self-question, to contemplate the need  to minimize the call upon those who are willing because every life is valuable, every loss of life is too costly. I would hazard to guess that the best of our leaders, both military and civilian, are kept awake at night, contemplating the intricate calculus of making their decisions in the widest and narrowest contexts possible. Yet, I also know that there are blackhearts who does not even think of the sacrifices of the altruistic and haphazardously commit the lives of other humans in the service of their own vainglorious self-serving purposes.

Another thought that crops up is the formalism that we place on the day and on our responses on the day. All around the world, we honor the war dead on November 11, which leads to many other questions. Why don’t we honor the war dead on the other 364 days of the year? Who are we memorializing? Unless the person who had passed is a relative or a friend, there is actually very little or no remembrances of their person or their deeds. Are we going through these exercises to assuage our own guilt for living rather than give remembrance to the dead? What if we took that emotion and exercise in remembrance and turned the attention to the lessons that we ought to have learned and propagated to the future regarding the meaning of the self-sacrifice that the headstones concretely exemplify? Are we deriving the lessons that we should be deriving from the lessons of altruism we are observing?

One thing that has bothered me throughout the years is the obligation that we have imbued our interactions with living veterans. Many are sincere when they say” “Thank you for your service.” While I have no arguments with the sentiment, I wonder if we are commoditizing that sentiment by making it an obligation to say the phrase to anyone that has been identified as a veteran. Once again, are we parroting the phrase for our own benefit because we feel it is our obligation? No doubt there is ample sincerity in the spoken gesture, but how much of it is due to the obligation that we feel?

In my mind, parroting the phrase reactively is a conversation stopper. It pre-emptively arrests any further discussions into the war experience, the horrors and negativity associated with armed conflicts are stopped cold in their tracks because the speaker has met their obligation to laud the veteran for their service. Indeed, it stops all kinds of conversations, conversations about how many veterans with PTSD are living in the streets because we —the people who make up the government — are unwilling to face the realities of the aftermath of war, we would rather sweep it under the national rug. Conversations about the suicide rates of veterans. Conversations about how we are taking care of the veterans for the rest of their lives.

It is worth saying that the idea of the volunteer army is that those who are willing are depending on those who are unwilling or unable, to meet needs of the willing after the war. Needs that are a result of the decision to commit the willing to the conflict; the after-effect imposed upon those who are willing. This is not a partisan issue, both sides of the wide political divide have failed abysmally in this regard. Those on both sides of the political chasm have taken every chance to make a cape of the flag and performing in their own self-directed political drama while running away from the responsibilities of their positions.

To conclude, I am not saying that calling November 11 Remembrance Day assures that the general populace will naturally conform to contemplating the greater meanings of personal altruism that motivates the willing to give up their lives. I am also not saying that everyone who says: “Thank You for Your Service” are disingenuous in their intent. I am not a veteran, so I can not speak for their emotions as they hear that phrase. I am speaking to my own skepticism of the intent of some when I sense that they are parroting the phrase as an obligation. 

I am, however, serious about using the day as a day of reflection on the meaning of altruism, service to the greater good of society rather than to the self as a regular habit on this day, once a year. I don’t think it is too much to ask.